NewsforDev | News for Development News - Reason magazine

Submit Source

New User

Dossiers

ACP-EU

CTA

ICT

ICT4D

S&T

S&T4D

Trade

World News

Select News

Home > All Sources > Reason magazine | Science

Reason magazine / Science



	1-21

Reason Writers Around Town: Ron Bailey on Hyping Health Risks
20 08 2008 At The Wall Street Journal, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks at how activists, regulators, and scientists distort or magnify minuscule environmental risks. Read all about it here.

Why I Am So Clever
15 08 2008

Humans are "strange" and smart animals, and according to a new study out in this month's issue of Genome Biology, it may be because we're such good cooks. The authors compared apes and humans and found that the biggest, most important differences weren't in brain size, but in metabolism. We had huge heads, but were still making "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years." It wasn't until we started throwing mastodon onto the BBQ that things really got rolling:

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.... The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.

One interesting upshot: Raw food diets may not be a very good idea. The study's author blamed raw foodism for causing "very severe health problems."

Open ANWR Already!
14 08 2008 The media constantly repeat the claim that it would take a decade to get the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into oil production and about as long for offshore continental oil to start flowing. Most accounts promote the views of extreme environmentalists to make the issue appear so hopeless that we must instead "change our way of life" rather than tap into proven oil reserves. In July, CNN repeatedly reported that offshore drilling would take "seven to 10 years" to get into production. Yet Brazil's Petrobras expects its new finds in extraordinarily deep waters to already be producing 100,000 barrels per day in just two years. What is wrong with American oil companies that they would take so long?

In fact, the world oil shortage is political, not geological. In the U.S., the government prohibits drilling offshore. In Nigeria, civil strife has shut down major production. In Libya and Iran, Washington effectively blockaded and isolated the nations for years to inhibit new production. In Iraq, of course, the U.S. destroyed much of the infrastructure since the first Gulf war in 1991 and then blockaded reconstruction. In nations such as Russia and Mexico nationalism and corruption curtail increased production. Outside of developed Western countries, the single largest reason for oil "shortages" is government incompetence and ownership of the subsoil rights so that landowners don't benefit from oil discoveries. In Patagonia, Argentina (a nation with abundant oil), I was told how it was common for landowners to try to hide any evidence of oil seepages from underground, lest the government oil company come in and ruin their lands with no benefit to themselves. Private mineral rights ownership is the reason some 90 percent of all oil wells drilled have been in the U.S. Scientific advances and innovative engineers keep coming up with ways to both discover new fields and keep old ones in production almost indefinitely.

ANWR could become the fastest way to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of new oil. But laws need to be changed to fast track the leasing (there are 11 litigation choke points) and to create special courts to expedite environmental issues, as recently proposed by Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minn.). Under current laws, it could indeed take 10 years to produce oil, compared to two or three years for the actual drilling and pumping. Additionally, leasing is done slowly, thanks to laws written when oil was plentiful. Such laws were designed to gain maximum upfront money for the government, not for speed. For example, BP recently paid $1.2 billion for a new offshore lease, some 400 miles East of ~~Canada's~~ Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. The cost and distance gives some idea of industry expectations as to the extent of oil reserves.

In Anchorage last month, Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil & Gas Association, explained to me the following time frame for ANWR drilling: Expect 12 months or more for an Environmental Impact Statement after Congress approves drilling. And this is working fast. It would likely take much longer. Expect 12 months to 18 months for the Department of Interior to draw up and bid out the lease-sale process. Plan on two years for oil companies to do test drilling and analysis. Drilling and transport of heavy equipment can only be done in the winter months when the permafrost ground is solidly frozen, from December through April. Concurrently with oil drilling, a 75-mile pipeline spur needs be built to connect to the main Alyeska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the Southern shipping port.

However, this time frame does not allow for environmental lawsuits "every step of the way," as Crockett warned. The rest of the 10-year time frame is to allow for lawsuits trying to prevent or harass production in one way or another. For example, a single judge in California's 9th circuit has failed to issue a decision on a Shell Oil project that already had $200 million of investment before it was ordered to stop. It will produce 30,000 barrels per day, about $1 billion per year of oil.

There has already been a test well drilled in ANWR and the oil drilling could be done from a concentrated small area, about the size of Dulles Airport. Compare this to the total size of ANWR, which is roughly equivalent to the size of South Carolina. Its reserves are estimated at 10 billion barrels by the U.S. Geological Survey, compared to 32 billion nationwide, almost a 33 percent increase. At full production, ANWR would add a million barrels per day to U.S. production. At $100 per barrel, this would equal over $36 billion per year that would not need to be spent on foreign oil. It would also create some 700,000 well-paying jobs, according to a Wharton Econometrics study [pdf].

Some accurate pictures are finally beginning to circulate. Previously, ANWR was typically portrayed as if it was like the Rockies, with happy goats jumping around. But the land is actually flat and desolate for most of the year, feeding birds and caribou in the summertime. I have personally seen such land with its untold numbers of shallow, frigid little lakes on the Arctic Circle in Northern Russia. It reminded me of what the first French explorer called such lands in Canada's northern extremes: "The Land God Gave to Cain." I was in Alaska hiking last July; the quantity and variety of animal life is astounding. Grizzly bears roam within the city limits of Anchorage and moose die of starvation every winter all over the state. Nearly a million caribou (reindeer) roam. The whole western half of the state is without roads. Hundreds of streams are filled with salmon. I saw a bowhead whale breaching and little sea otters (once nearly extinct) in Seward Harbour during one afternoon boat trip out into the bay. Drilling, in other words, will not spoil the richness and abundance of Alaska's wildlife.

Here are some other interesting facts about Alaskan oil:

• Drilling is permitted in the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's north coast. On the west coast, it is not allowed under the general prohibition against offshore drilling. • Wells at Prudhoe Bay and nearby ANWR, if allowed, are very shallow, mostly 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet deep, which allows for fast drilling. • New technology now also allows long distance slant and horizontal drilling from a single drill site. BP is now planning such an eight-mile drill. • The Beaufort Sea off shore is very shallow and production is done from man-made islands. A single platform allows for many slant wells. • The Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia is only some 2,000 feet to 3,000 feet deep. • Estimates of recoverable oil are based on a $40 barrel price—they should be much higher with oil at $100-plus per barrel. The higher price justifies more costly drilling and secondary recovery engineering. • Alyeska Pipeline once pumped 2.1 million barrels of oil per day, It's now at 700,000 and declining 7 percent annually. Roughly 400,000 of these barrels come from many new, smaller fields discovered after Prudhoe Bay started production. • The Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a very large area west of Prudhoe Bay, may also have large new oil reserves. However, most of the area has not yet been leased by the Federal government's very slow plan, nor explored, nor litigated.

The amounts of natural gas are just as astounding as the quantities of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated years ago that there were 150 trillion cubic feet of conventional gas, 590 trillion cubic feet of gas hydrates (an as-yet-unexploited form of methane trapped in water molecules underground). The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that to be "twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth." Also, there is an uncalculated amount of drillable coal-bed methane in an estimated 13.7 billion tons of indicated coal resources.

The state government of Alaska is now proposing a new pipeline to transport already discovered gas through Canada to connect with pipelines reaching the American Midwest and the east. It will cost around $30 billion, be underground, and transport quantities equal to some 6 percent to 8 percent of all current U.S. consumption.

Meanwhile, Washington has become paralyzed by dysfunctional government. France and China can build nuclear electric plants in just years; in the U.S. it takes a decade. Brazil will bring offshore oil online in 24 months, while for U.S. companies it takes 10 years. New refineries are virtually illegal to build. New electricity-generating plants using coal are now unable to obtain financing because of environment constraints.

This is destroying the value of the dollar and wrecking our balance of trade, making oil prohibitively expensive, and sending hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign lands—many of whom are no friends of America. No wonder 80 percent of Americans think their nation is on the wrong track. Washington needs to declare a national emergency program to produce energy. The reasons we don't are political, not technical. Indeed, new natural gas discoveries have knocked U.S. prices down by about 30 percent.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and a former foreign correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers. He has decades of experience in the oil business, including as the owner and operator of a small oil drilling partnership.

The System is Broken
13 08 2008 ...

Fighting Big Solar
13 08 2008 Last month, former Vice President Al Gore proposed a crash program that would require all electricity in the United States to be produced using renewable fuels such as solar, wind, and geothermal by 2018. The presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is aiming for a more modest goal—a national mandate that 25 percent of the country's electricity come from renewable fuels by 2025. And already 30 states are mandating that some portion of the electricity their residents buy be produced from renewable energy sources. For example, renewable energy mandates in the sunny Southwest include Nevada at 20 percent renewables by 2015; New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah at 20 percent by 2020; and Arizona at 15 percent by 2025. California ambitiously decreed that 20 percent of its electricity will come from renewable sources by 2010. Given their abundance of sun-drenched deserts, thermal solar power is the most promising form of renewable energy for these states. Most solar thermal plants generate electricity using mirrors to focus the sun's rays on liquid filled tubes, producing steam that drives turbines. The once killer objection that solar power cannot supply round-the-clock base load power because it only works when the sun shines is now being finessed. Engineers have devised ways to store heat—molten salt or ionic liquids—that can be used to produce steam to drive turbines through the night and on cloudy days. So, base load solar power now seems technically feasible, but what about cost? Current solar thermal plants produce electricity at 15 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour, but many believe it will eventually fall to below 10 cents per kilowatt hour. By contrast, electricity from coal-fired plants costs around 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. The push for switching from cheap coal to expensive solar is being justified on the grounds that humanity needs to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that contribute to man-made global warming. However, Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, favors simply setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Because as he correctly observes: ''In essence, renewable standards, subsidies and other mandates assume that the government has all the answers, rather than letting the market figure out the best way to produce energy at the lowest possible cost." But let's set that quibble aside and make the safe assumption that our politicians and regulators will continue to believe that they do have all the answers. In other words, these so-called renewable portfolio standards are not going to go away. These mandates are driving a land rush in the Southwest as would-be renewable energy producers vie for the best spots, especially for locations suitable for producing solar energy. As a result, a conflict is brewing between the energy and conservation wings of the environmentalist movement. Why? Because solar plants take up a lot of space. In addition, new power lines will have to be built to transmit the renewable power to growing desert and coastal cities. This means trade-offs. Some desert acreage will have to be sacrificed in order to produce energy. So far the federal Bureau of Land Management has received applications for more than 130 projects in the desert Southwest that could occupy more than 1 million acres of land. A million acres is more than 1,500 square miles. On the other hand, the Mojave Desert measures over 50,000 square miles. According to one estimate, if all these projects were built they could supply enough electricity to fuel 20 million homes. While some national environmental groups recognize that such trade-offs are necessary, some local groups are fiercely fighting the development of utility-scale solar power generation in the desert. The California-based Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy argues that the push for Big Solar promotes the "permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine public lands designated for multi-purpose use that belong to the people." The Alliance also accuses the development of solar power in the desert of "wilderness killing, unacceptable groundwater depletion and the erosion of hard fought protections of public lands and private rights." The San Diego-based Desert Protective Council also opposes the construction of a high voltage power line that San Diego Gas & Electric says it needs to transmit renewable power from a solar generation project planned for California's Imperial Valley. The power line would run through an existing right-of-way in a state park, but each of its 141 new towers would average 130 feet in height. "Our take has been from day one, 'Here we go again,'" said Terry Weiner, Imperial County conservation coordinator for the Desert Protective Council to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Here is where we can do everything out in the desert that we don't want to do in our own backyards in the city,'" The Desert Protective Council has allies in this fight. "The idea that we're going to sacrifice critical pieces of our environment to protect other pieces of our environment seems a little ironic," said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the nonprofit California Parks Foundation in the Los Angeles Times. "That's an irony I cannot accept. We have to find a way to do both." In other words, no trade-offs. These groups want renewable power to be generated locally, preferably by placing solar photovoltaic arrays on roofs. "It's not just businesses that have slowed things down, it's not just Republicans that have slowed things down, it's also Democrats and also environmental activists sometimes that slow things down," declared a frustrated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) during a speech at Yale University this past spring. "They say that we want renewable energy but we don't want you to put it anywhere, we don't want you to use it." Schwarzenegger added, "I don't know whether this is ironic or absurd. But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it." Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Does Disease Cause Religion?
02 08 2008 University of New Mexico biologists Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill are proposing the idea that religions proliferate as a way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. As the Telegraph reports:

Religions thrived to protect our ancestors against the ravages of disease, according to a radical new evolutionary theory of the genesis of faith.... [The researchers] come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas. "Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask. The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests. Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus. Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time. " If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

So can we conclude that as we control more infectious diseases, secularization will spread? Or does correlation necessarily mean cause in this case?
Whole Telegraph article here.

Penalty Strokes
01 08 2008 Rumors that a certain athlete was cheating were flying thick earlier this month at the United States Olympic swimming trials. She was too fast, too good. She simply turned in much better times than anyone thought she was capable of. She might make the team for the trip to Beijing, commenters said, but her steak wouldn't last. Sure enough, last week a member of the U.S. women's swim team tested positive for a banned substance. When one test came back positive, Jessica Hardy stayed in California while the rest of team headed for Singapore to train. Hardy says she is innocent and has filed an appeal. Meanwhile, the rumors about Dara Torres continue unabated. The Dara Torres drama has been unfolding over the past year. Her bid for a fifth trip to the Olympics was jump-started with a win in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. nationals last August. Almost immediately began speculation that the 41-year-old recent mother had to be cheating. But then the sporting world's obsession with rooting out performance enhancing drugs took a weird turn. Taking and passing drug tests did not clear Torres of the allegations. Nor did her volunteering to participate in a pilot program which tests both blood and urine for signs of doping matter. Her performance was simply decreed too good not to have been the product of cheating. This is not even guilty until proven innocent; this is guilty with no hope of parole. ESPN columnist Pat Forde recently gave form and substance to the widespread belief in the sporting press that Torres just had to be cheating. Forde wrote that Torres' performance "made me wonder whether too good to be true is the same thing as too good to be clean." Incredibly, Forde said that baseball's various drug scandals make him suspicious of Torres's late-career boost. The next time a 40-year-old mom gets a strikeout in a MLB game, I'll perhaps see Forde's point. But there is a bigger fiction at work. There is much less certitude about how the human body works than those who are busy defining the limits of human potential assume. This is especially true at the relatively novel intersection of sports science, top female athletes, and pregnancy. The massive natural doses of hormones Torres received during pregnancy, ones intended to loosen the pelvic girdle and make the delivery of a child easier for every mother, may have also had the effect of leaving Torres more flexible in all of her joints. The advantages of motherhood might be all psychological, yet very real nonetheless. Certainly the sports comeback meme routinely features a mental and emotional component. Besides, the Official Feel Good Story of MLB this year has been the resurrection of Josh Hamilton. The former number one overall draft pick, who spent a couple years digging ditches after blowing almost $4 million on a cocaine addiction, was an All-Star just a couple weeks ago. Hamilton's sober status is confirmed with regular urine tests, the negative results of which are taken at face-value. At every opportunity, Hamilton credits his religious faith and his wife with turning his life and career around. With that, Hamilton joins former NFL and Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner, who came from absolutely nowhere to guide the St. Louis Rams' Greatest Show on Turf to a title. His absurd fairy-tale story was not doubted as the likely product of cheating. Athletes like Hamilton and Warner routinely tout a change in personal outlook or relationships as having a profoundly positive impact on their performance. With these examples in mind, it seems totally plausible that Dara Torres, happy mother of a two-year-old girl, has found a focus and sense of well-being that she might not have previously. Here is where it becomes clear why Forde and other Torres doubters like to portray swimming as primarily a function of lung capacity. Admitting that the ability to focus and maintain a peace of mind might boost performance undermines the case against Torres. Fortunately for her, swimming is not just about lungs. Body control and consistency of stroke matter. Think of all the things that can go wrong with a golf swing. Now imagine aiming to take the perfect swing several times a second. In short, perhaps the 41-year-old Torres is finally the swimmer she was always capable of being. The Pat Forde camp flatly rejects this possibility. Of Torres beating swimmers half her age, "It shouldn't even be possible for a woman in her 40s." Exactly. Catching a glimpse of the impossible is precisely what the ancient Greeks sought out in sport. Good luck in Beijing, Dara. Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

Penalty Strokes
31 07 2008 Rumors that a certain athlete was cheating were flying thick earlier this month at the United States Olympic swimming trials. She was too fast, too good. She simply turned in much better times than anyone thought she was capable of. She might make the team for the trip to Beijing, commenters said, but her steak wouldn't last. Sure enough, last week a member of the U.S. women's swim team tested positive for a banned substance. When one test came back positive, Jessica Hardy stayed in California while the rest of team headed for Singapore to train. Hardy says she is innocent and has filed an appeal. Meanwhile, the rumors about Dana Torres continue unabated. The Dana Torres drama has been unfolding over the past year. Her bid for a fifth trip to the Olympics was jump-started with a win in the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. nationals last August. Almost immediately began speculation that the 41-year-old recent mother had to be cheating. But then the sporting world's obsession with rooting out performance enhancing drugs took a weird turn. Taking and passing drug tests did not clear Torres of the allegations. Nor did her volunteering to participate in a pilot program which tests both blood and urine for signs of doping matter. Her performance was simply decreed too good not to have been the product of cheating. This is not even guilty until proven innocent; this is guilty with no hope of parole. ESPN columnist Pat Forde recently gave form and substance to the widespread belief in the sporting press that Torres just had to be cheating. Forde wrote that Torres' performance "made me wonder whether too good to be true is the same thing as too good to be clean." Incredibly, Forde said that baseball's various drug scandals make him suspicious of Torres's late-career boost. The next time a 40-year-old mom gets a strikeout in a MLB game, I'll perhaps see Forde's point. But there is a bigger fiction at work. There is much less certitude about how the human body works than those who are busy defining the limits of human potential assume. This is especially true at the relatively novel intersection of sports science, top female athletes, and pregnancy. The massive natural doses of hormones Torres received during pregnancy, ones intended to loosen the pelvic girdle and make the delivery of a child easier for every mother, may have also had the effect of leaving Torres more flexible in all of her joints. The advantages of motherhood might be all psychological, yet very real nonetheless. Certainly the sports comeback meme routinely features a mental and emotional component. Besides, The Official Feel Good Story of MLB this year has been the resurrection of Josh Hamilton. The former number one overall draft pick, who spent a couple years digging ditches after blowing almost $4 million on a cocaine addiction, was an All-Star just a couple weeks ago. Hamilton's sober status is confirmed with regular urine tests, the negative results of which are taken at face-value. At every opportunity, Hamilton credits his religious faith and his wife with turning his life and career around. With that, Hamilton joins former NFL and Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner, who came from absolutely nowhere to guide the St. Louis Rams' Greatest Show on Turf to a title. His absurd fairy-tale story was not doubted as the likely product of cheating. Athletes like Hamilton and Warner routinely tout a change in personal outlook or relationships as having a profoundly positive impact on their performance. With these examples in mind, it seems totally plausible that Dana Torres, happy mother of a two-year-old girl, has found a focus and sense of well-being that she might not have previously. Here is where it becomes clear why Forde and other Torres doubters like to portray swimming as primarily a function of lung capacity. Admitting that the ability to focus and maintain a peace of mind might boost performance undermines the case against Torres. Fortunately for her, swimming is not just about lungs. Body control and consistency of stroke matter. Think of all the things that can go wrong with a golf swing. Now imagine aiming to take the perfect swing several times a second. In short, perhaps the 41-year-old Torres is finally the swimmer she was always capable of being. The Pat Forde camp flatly rejects this possibility. Of Torres beating swimmers half her age, "It shouldn't even be possible for a woman in her 40s." Exactly. Catching a glimpse of the impossible is precisely what the ancient Greeks sought out in sport. Good luck in Beijing, Dana. Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

Al Gore's Curiously Cost-Free Plan to Re-Power America
30 07 2008 On July 17, Nobelist and Academy Award winner Al Gore issued a stirring challenge to our nation to produce 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and carbon-free sources within 10 years. Gore asserted, "The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses." This massive push for no-carbon electricity production would help prevent climate change and cut our dependence on foreign oil. Of course, great-souled visionaries such as Gore do not concern themselves with piddling and mundane issues such as who will pay for this marvelous no-carbon energy future and how much it will cost. Not being burdened with a great soul, I decided to don my green eyeshade and make a preliminary stab at figuring out how much Gore's scheme might cost us. According to the Energy Information Administration, the existing capacity of U.S. coal, gas, and oil generating plants totals around 850,000 megawatts. So how much would it cost to replace those facilities with solar electric power? Let's use the recent announcement of a 280-megawatt thermal solar power plant in Arizona for $1 billion as the starting point for an admittedly rough calculation. Combined with a molten salt heat storage systems, solar thermal might be able to provide base load power. Crunching the numbers (850,000 megawatts/280 megawatts x $1 billion) produces a total capital cost of just over $3 trillion over the next ten years. What about wind power? Oilman T. Boone Pickens is building the world's biggest wind energy project with an installed capacity of 4,000 megawatts at a cost of $10 billion, or about $2.5 billion per 1,000 megawatts. For purposes of illustration, this implies a total cost of around $2.1 trillion over the next ten years to replace current carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity with wind power. That's assuming that the wind projects generate electricity at their rated capacity at or near 100 percent of the time. Making the heroic assumption that in fact wind projects will generate power at about one-third of their rated capacity (due to wind variability), this would imply tripling the number of wind power generators. This boosts the total overall cost to more than $6 trillion over the next ten years. What's the potential for geothermal electricity generation? Geothermal power taps the heat of the Earth itself to make steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. For instance, superhot water erupting from the Geysers in northern California fuel power plants with a generation capacity of 725 megawatts. But such geothermal sites are relatively rare. However, an unconventional geothermal source—hot dry rocks—might supply us with no-carbon electricity. In lots of places, rocks several kilometers down are quite hot. To get at this heat, engineers drill at least two boreholes and inject cool water in one. The injected water flows around fractured hot rocks and rises through the other borehole as steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Some very preliminary figures suggest that it would cost around $3 billion for build a 1000 megawatt geothermal plant. Replacing 850 gigawatts of carbon-emitting power generation capacity with geothermal electricity would cost around $2.5 trillion over ten years. Curiously, nowhere does the "N-word"—nuclear—appear in Gore's speech. Currently, 104 nuclear power plants generate about 20 percent of America's electricity. Once a nuclear plant is up and running, it is essentially carbon-free. Westinghouse claims that it can build a third generation 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant for around $1.4 billion. Assuming this estimate is right, all U.S. carbon-emitting electricity generation plants could be replaced with nuclear power at a cost of about $1.2 trillion by 2018. One other issue: Just how does using renewable sources of energy to generate electricity free us from dependence on foreign oil when only a tiny bit of crude is burned to produce electricity? The vast majority of petroleum is turned into transportation fuels, while home heating accounts for around two percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. The answer, evidently, is a vehicle fleet powered by electricity. Although Gore doesn't dwell on it, he does mention that we should help "our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars." In 2006, a U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that if 84 percent of all cars and light trucks were plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), fueling them would not require any additional electric generation capacity. The study assumes that the PHEVs would travel an average of 33 miles per day solely on electric power and could be charged using off-peak power at night. PHEVs would cost between $6,000 and $10,000 more than conventional cars. Such a PHEV fleet could reduce oil consumption by 6.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 52 percent of our oil imports. While the capital costs for current versions of renewable no-carbon electricity generation are high, one big advantage is that their fuel costs are low to non-existent. Gore is also probably right that the prices for renewable energy production technologies will fall in the future. However, his proposed crash program would put an immediate steep upward price pressure on the commodities—steel, concrete, silicon, copper—that go into building energy infrastructure. All of the rough calculations above are for generating capacity alone and do not include the costs of a $1 trillion smart grid upgrade for our creaky electric power distribution system. And does Gore plan to compensate the shareholders of conventional power generation companies when their assets are forcibly scrapped? As a very rough low estimate, Gore's 10-year no-carbon energy plan would cost about $300 billion per year for the next ten years. According to the Brattle Group consultancy, "new and replacement generating plants will cost about $560 billon through 2030, absent a significant expansion of energy efficiency programs or new climate initiatives." That comes to an average of about $25 billion per year over the next 22 years. Gore's proposal is a "new climate initiative" that aims to spend twelve times more than the utility industry would otherwise annually invest in new and replacement generating capacity. Gore explicitly likens his scheme to NASA's Apollo program, but reaching the moon cost only $150 billion (in current dollars) spent over eight years. In other words, getting to the moon cost half of what Gore wants to spend annually to realize his no-carbon energy vision. "Of course there are those who will tell us this can't be done," warned Gore. I am not one of those people. I am sure it can be done. But before embarking on his "generational challenge to re-power America," I would like the former vice-president to sketch out a few more details on how it's going to be paid for and who's going to be stuck with the bill. Without those answers, Gore's bold challenge amounts to little more than hot air. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

The End of Humanity: Nukes, Nanotech, or God-Like Artificial Intelligences?
22 07 2008 Oxford, England—The Global Catastrophic Risks conference sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute concluded on Sunday. Participants were treated to a series of presentations describing how billions of people could potentially bite the dust over the next century. The possible megadeath tolls of both natural and biotech pandemics were considered. The chances that asteroids, comets, or gamma ray bursts from a nearby supernova could wipe out humanity were calculated. The old neo-Malthusian threats of overpopulation, resource depletion, and famine were trotted out. But these risks to future human well-being paled in comparison to one main menace—malicious human ingenuity. Human ingenuity forged the still massive arsenals of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia. And as the conference participants made an argument that human ingenuity is on track to craft nanotech fabricators that can make essentially any product, including weapons of mass destruction, at essentially no cost, not to mention a self-improving artificial intelligence possessing god-like powers to pursue its own goals. First, let's consider the nuclear threat. Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund pointed out the good news that the world's nuclear arsenals have been cut in half-down from 65,000 to 26,000 since the height of the Cold War. However, the U.S. retains 10,685 nuclear bombs and Russia is estimated to have around 14,000. Of those, 4,275 in the U.S. and 5,192 in Russia are active. Both countries maintain 2,000 weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready for launching in 15 minutes or so. Cirincione offered a couple of scary scenarios, including one in which there is an unauthorized launch of all 12 missiles from a Russian submarine containing 48 warheads with about 5 megatons total destructive power. Such an attack would kill 7 million Americans immediately. A retaliatory American attack aimed at several hundred Russian military assets would kill between 8 and 12 million Russians. With regard to the possibility of an accidental nuclear war, Cirincione pointed to the near miss that occurred in 1995 when Norway launched a weather satellite and Russian military officials mistook it as a submarine launched ballistic missile aimed at producing an electro-magnetic pulse to disable a Russian military response. Russian nuclear defense officials opened the Russian "football" in front of President Boris Yeltsin, urging him to order an immediate strike against the West. Fortunately, Yeltsin held off, arguing that it must be a mistake. A global nuclear war scenario in which most of both Russian and American arsenals were fired off would result in 105 to 230 million immediate American deaths and 28 to 56 million immediate Russian deaths. One of the effects of such an attack would be a rapid cooling of global temperatures as sunlight was blocked by dust and smoke. Cirincione argued that even a nuclear war limited just to bitter enemies India and Pakistan could produce enough dust and smoke to lower global temperatures by one half to two degrees Celsius, plunging the world back to the Little Ice Age. The good news is that Cirincione sees an opening for negotiations to totally eliminate nuclear weapons. He pointed to an initiative by the "Four Horsemen of the Un-Apocalypse"; that is, by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), and former Secretary of Defense William Perry that aim to eliminate nuclear weapons completely. In fact, both of the presumptive major party presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), have explicitly endorsed the idea of global nuclear disarmament. Cirincione argued that a commitment by the declared nuclear powers would have the effect of persuading countries like Iran that they did not need to become nuclear powers themselves. Cirincione danced around the question of what to about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, pointing out that its nuclear facilities are hardened, dispersed, and defended. Cirincione asserted that the U.S. has 5-day and 10-day plans for taking out Iran's nuclear facilities, but he noted that such plans don't end the matter. Iran has moves too, including trying to block oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz, revving up terrorist attacks in Iraq, and even aiding terrorist attacks in the U.S. Cirincione claimed that that the Iranians are still five to ten years away from making a nuclear bomb. On a side note, Cirincione admitted that he initially did not believe that the Syrians had constructed a nuclear weapons facility, but is now convinced that they did. The Syrians hid it away in a desert gully, disguising it as an ancient Byzantine building. Terrorism expert Gary Ackerman from the University of Maryland and William Potter from the Monterey Institute of International Studies evaluated the risks from two types of nuclear terrorism—the theft of nuclear material and the construction of a crude bomb and the theft of an intact nuclear weapon. They set aside two lower consequence attacks: the dispersal of radiological material by means of a conventional explosion and sabotage of nuclear facilities. Could non-state actors, a.k.a., a terrorist group, actually build a nuclear bomb? Potter cited an article by Peter Zimmerman in which he estimated that a team of 19 terrorists (the same number that pulled off the September 11 atrocities) could build such a bomb for around $6 million. Their most challenging task would be to acquire 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU). There are 1700 tons of HEU in the world, including 50 tons stored at civilian sites. Potter acknowledged that intact weapons are probably more secure than fissile material. Ackerman noted that only a small subset of terrorists has the motivation to use nuclear terrorism. "So far as we know only Jihadists want these weapons," said Ackerman. Specifically, Al Qaeda has made ten different efforts to get hold of fissile material. Ackerman told me that Al Qaeda had been defrauded several times by would-be vendors of nuclear materials. Just before the September 11 atrocities, two Pakistani nuclear experts visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, apparently to advise Al Qaeda on nuclear matters. One possibility is that if Pakistan becomes more unstable intact weapons could fall into terrorist hands. Still, the good news is that intercepted fissile material smugglers have actually been carrying very small amounts. Less reassuringly, Potter did note that prison sentences for smugglers dealing in weapons grade nuclear material have been less than those meted out for drunk driving. One cautionary case: Two groups invaded and seized the control room of the Pelindaba nuclear facility in South Africa in November, 2007. They were briefly arrested and then released without further consequence. Both Ackerman and Potter agreed that it is in no state's interest to supply terrorists with nuclear bombs or fissile material. It could be easily traced back to them and they would suffer the consequences. Ackerman cited one expert estimate that there is a 50 percent chance of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years. While nuclear war and nuclear terrorism would be catastrophic, the presenters acknowledged that neither constituted existential risks; that is, a risk that they could cause the extinction of humanity. But the next two risks, self-improving artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, would. The artificial intelligence explosion? Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky began his presentation with a diagram of the space of possible minds. Among the vast space of possible minds, a small dot represented human minds. His point is that two artificial intelligences (AIs) could be far more different from one another than we are from chimpanzees. Yudkowsky then described the relatively slow processing speeds of human brains, the difficulty in reprogramming ourselves, and other limitations. An AI could run 1 million times faster, meaning that it could get a year's worth of thinking done in 31 seconds. An "intelligence explosion" would result because an AI would have access to its source code and could rapidly modify and optimize itself. It would be hard to make an AI that didn't want to improve itself in order to better achieve its goals. Can an intelligence explosion be avoided? No. A unique feature of AI is that it can be a "global catastrophic opportunity." Success in creating a friendly AI would give humanity access to vast intelligence that could be used to mitigate other risks. But picking a friendly AI out of the space of all possible minds is a hard and unsolved problem. According to Yudkowsky, the unique features of a superintelligent AI as a global catastrophic risk are: There is no final battle, or an unfriendly AI just kills off humanity. And there is nowhere to hide because the AI can find you wherever you are. There is no learning curve since we get only one chance to produce a friendly AI. But will it happen? Yudkowsky pointed out that there is no way to control the proliferation of "raw materials," e.g., computers, so the creation of an AI is essentially inevitable. In fact, Yudkowsky believes that current computers are sufficient to instantiate an AI, but researchers just don't know how to do it yet. What can we do? "You cannot throw money or regulations at this problem for an easy solution," insisted Yudkowsky. His chief (and somewhat self-serving) recommendation is to support a lot of mathematical research on how to create a friendly AI. Of course, former Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy proposed another solution: relinquishment. That is, humanity has to agree to some kind of compact to never try to build an AI. "Success mitigates lots of risks," said Yudkowsky. "Failure kills you immediately." As a side note, bioethicist James Hughes, head of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, mused about how much longer it would be before we would see Sarah Connor Brigades gunning down AI researchers to prevent the Terminator future. (Note to self: perhaps reconsider covering future Singularity Institute conferences.) The menace of molecular manufacturing? Next up was Michael Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. They cannily opened with a series of quotations claiming that science will never be able to solve this or that problem. Two of my favorites were: "Pasteur's theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction" by Pierre Pachet in 1872, and "Space travel is utter bilge," by Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley in 1956. Of course, the point is that arguments that molecular manufacturing is impossible are likely to suffer the same predictive failures. Their vision of molecular manufacturing involves using trillions of very small machines to make something larger. They envision desktop nanofactories into which people feed simple raw inputs and get out nearly any product they desire. The proliferation of such nanofactories would end scarcity forever. "We can't expect to have only positive outcomes without mitigating negative outcomes," cautioned Treder. What kind of negative outcomes? Nanofactories could produce not only hugely beneficial products such as water filters, solar cells, and houses, but also weapons of any sort. Such nanofabricated weapons would be vastly more powerful than today's. Since these weapons are so powerful, there is a strong incentive for a first strike. In addition, an age of nanotech abundance would eliminate the majority of jobs, possibly leading to massive social disruptions. Social disruption creates the opportunity for a charismatic personality to take hold. "Nanotechnology could lead to some form of world dictatorship," said Treder. "There is a global catastrophic risk that we could all be enslaved." On the other hand, individuals with access to nanofactories could wield great destructive power. Phoenix and Treder's chief advice is more research into how to handle nanotech when it becomes a reality in the next couple of decades. In particular, Phoenix thinks that it's urgent to study whether offense or defense would be the best response. To Phoenix, offense looks a lot easier—there are a lot more ways to destroy things than to defend them. If that's true, we should narrow our future policy options. This concluion left me musing on British historian Arnold Toynbee's observation: "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves." I don't think that's right, but it's worth thinking about. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators
18 07 2008 Below is a slightly cleaned up version of my remarks this past Saturday during the FreedomFest 2008 debate: “Is There Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design in Nature?” The debate took place between Discovery Institute intelligent design proponents Stephen Meyer and George Gilder and evolutionary biology proponents Michael Shermer, the executive director of the Skeptic Society, and me. Let me begin by acknowledging that the Discovery Institute website states: "Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text." So far so good. Near the end of the silly new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—in which fellow panelist Steve Meyer appeared—host Ben Stein asks Richard Dawkins, who is arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this is a great "gotcha," like it's the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence has repeatedly created life on earth. So, since our esteemed opponents are agnostic with regard to the "source of design," and because intelligent design cannot rule out the hypothesis that super-intelligent purple space squids are not the "source of design" of life on earth, I will provisionally accept that hypothesis for the remainder of my talk. As I understand it, intelligent design proponents—such as our distinguished Discovery Institute panelists here—fully accept the fact that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that some form of life has existed on earth for about 3 billion or so years. If that is the case, it would seem the record shows that the intelligent designers—which I am hypothesizing are super-intelligent purple space squids—evidently spent more than 2 billion years tinkering with single-cell algae and bacteria before they got around to creating multi-cellular species. Do intelligent design proponents have a theory to explain that? Were the space squid creators just lazy? In addition, the record clearly shows that when more complex forms of life were created by super-intelligent purple space squids, they apparently arranged their creations in a specific order. Why did the purple space squids arrange the fossils in a sequence in which fish appear before amphibians which appear before reptiles which appear before mammals? And why did the purple space squids arrange 390 million years ago for the first amphibians to resemble Crossopterygian fish that were also alive at that time? These first amphibians had such characteristics as internal gills, fish-like skull bones, and—interestingly—eight digits just as the Crossopterygian fish did. Apparently our intelligent purple space squid creators (or whoever) found eight digits displeasing, and simply eliminated the extra three digits after they killed off the early amphibians and individually created thousands of later species of amphibians with only the now standard five digits. Interestingly, the fossils of early reptiles—which the purple space aliens apparently created around 300 million years ago—were still rather amphibian-like in their overall structure. Their legs were splayed out sideways, bellies just barely lifted from the ground, tails dragging behind—in short, a salamander-like gait. Eventually, the creator aliens chose to produce tens of thousands of new reptile species which differed considerably from the old sticks-in-the-mud amphibians. Among their creations were much grander reptiles such as the impressively armor-plated stegosaurus (145 million years ago), and the massive apatosaurus (formerly brontosaurus), which measured 75 feet long and weighed 25 tons, and of course the largest land predator ever known, the 7-ton, 43-foot-long tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago). Another puzzle—why is it that the super-intelligent purple space squid creators made the earliest mammals share so many characteristics with the therapsid reptile species that lived alongside them? Interestingly, researchers have now pieced together how the purple space squid created the mammalian inner ear over a period of 70 million years from reptilian jaw bones. Starting with the mammal-like reptile Sphenacodon 270 million years, ago, purple space squid creators evidently spent the next 70 million years tinkering with the hinged reptilian jawbones. The squids shrank the bones, moving them back toward the ear holes in the skulls of some of the thousands of increasingly mammal-like species that squids were busy individually creating. Eventually the purple space squid creators ended up after 70 million years making a tiny mammalian-type critter called Hadrocodium which had a single jawbone (like mammals do today) and three middle-ear bones (like mammals do today). I am sure that intelligent design proponents will shortly explain why apparently intelligent purple space squid creators (or whatever creators they prefer) used this pathway for creating inner ear bones. Since, by definition, the purple space squids are intelligent and should know what they want in advance—what ID proponents call "complex specified information"—why did they piddle around so long and why not instead just create species with inner ear bones without generating a series of creatures through slow intermediate steps? Which brings me to an even bigger puzzle—why, after going to all the trouble to finally populate the earth with millions of magnificent species, did the purple space squid creators (or whichever creator design proponents prefer) apparently allow either a five-mile wide asteroid to hit the Earth, or a huge outbreak of volcanic eruptions, or both, to wipe out at least 50 percent of the species—including the dinosaurs—living 65 million years ago? In fact, something worse occurred 250 million years ago when some event, possibly also an asteroid strike, destroyed 95 percent of all living species. Of course, there is an alternative hypothesis that intelligent design proponents—such as the distinguished representatives from the Discovery Institute on the panel here—might fruitfully want to explore. That hypothesis is that the purple space alien squid creators actually caused asteroids to strike the earth in order to wipe the biological and ecological slate clean so that they could start over. Perhaps like a thrifty artist who whites out an earlier painting on a canvas in order to create a masterpiece, the purple space squids destroyed most of life on earth in order to make room for new creations. Interestingly, the creator squids seem subject to a strange kind of creative conservatism. Their new, post-extinction, individually created species looked very much like earlier created species that apparently survived the massive extinction events. What hypothesis do intelligent design proponents offer to explain this interesting observation of creative conservatism? Purple space squids appear to be progressive creationists: They bring species into existence over and over again, forming each species so that it bears a striking resemblance to a species that has just gone extinct. I have been using the phrase individually created species throughout my talk. Why? Because intelligent design proponents—such as Steve Meyer and George Gilder here on the panel—insist that micro-evolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change below the level of species, cannot lead to macroevolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change at or above the level of species—which means at least the splitting of a species into two new species. Since micro-evolution, according to ID proponents such as Steve and George, cannot lead to the creation of new species, then the purple space squid creators (or whomever) must create each new species individually. Trying to figure out how super-intelligent space alien creators go about creating individual species would be a fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to look into. Do the squid creators somehow tweak genes while embryos are developing in their eggs or in their mother's wombs? Or do they work at the level of sperm and eggs before conception? Would the space squid creators use radiation to do this? Or chemical mutations? Or errors in genetic transcription? What's their favorite method for producing new species? And most crucially, how would whatever processes the purple space squid have used to create tens of millions of new species over billions of years differ from the natural processes suggested by evolutionary biology? And there is yet another puzzle. Conservative super-intelligent purple space squid creators apparently recycle genes over and over again in new species. Biologists have found that many genes are like Animal Kingdom cassettes or Lego blocks: They can be mixed and matched across vastly different species. For example, biologists have shown that a gene crucial to building a fruit fly's eye—the Pax-6 gene—will trigger eye development in a frog and a mouse. In addition, now that both the human and mouse genomes have been sequenced, researchers know that 99 percent of mouse genes are similar to those found in humans. Even more amazingly, 96 percent of the genes in both mice and men are present in the same order on their different genomes. Why would this be? A fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to answer is what constrains the super-intelligent purple space squid creators (or any other intelligent creator) to use the same genes over and over again in millions of species? And here's another minor curiosity: Why did the purple space squids design humans so that we need to eat foods like oranges that provide us with vitamin C? Without vitamin C people die of the deficiency disease scurvy. It turns out that the super-intelligent squids created nearly all other mammals so that they have genes—including the GLO gene—that synthesize this vitamin in their livers. Biologists have discovered that when the purple space squids created us, they for some reason left a broken remnant of the GLO gene in our genomes. There is one group of mammals that share our inability to make vitamin C —orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and macques all have broken GLO genes. Even more interestingly, biologists have found that gorillas and chimpanzees have exactly the same errors in their GLO genes that people do. So why did the purple space squids create those species along with us with exactly the same errors so that they and we could not produce vitamin C? One other consideration: Are the intelligent designers—the super-intelligent purple space squids—finished creating new species? Are they resting from their creative labors for now? What evidence would show that intelligent designers are still at work creating new species around us? And how would we know? The point of the foregoing is that intelligent design proponents do not have good answers to the questions I have posed. But evolutionary biologists do. In his new book, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Brown University biologist Kenenth Miller argues, "Design rests ultimately on the claim of ignorance, upon the hope that science cannot show evolution to be capable of producing complex organs, assemblies of molecules, or novel biological information. If evolution cannot achieve that, the argument goes, then design must be the answer. "Since any field of biology, including evolution, is filled with unsolved problems, intelligent design can be invoked as the default explanation for any one of them," adds Miller. "The hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues of research." Ultimately, the intelligent design hypothesis just leaves everything up to the ineffable whims of the moral equivalent of super-intelligent purple space squids or whoever else is the alleged "source of design." One addendum: During his presentations, Gilder claimed several times that evolutionary biology somehow undermined the notions of freedom and economics. He just couldn't seem to get his head around the concept of bottom-up order. This so frustrated me that I eventually quipped, "Intelligent design is to evolutionary biology what socialism is to free-market economics." Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. Disclosure: I want to gratefully confess that I took many of the arguments I used in the debate from Kenneth Miller's interesting new book.

TEOTWAWKI!
18 07 2008 Oxford, England—People have long been fascinated by the end of the world. Some interpretations of Hindu scripture suggest that the world will end with the imminent conclusion of the current Kali Yuga cycle. Some New Agers believe that the world will undergo apocalyptic changes as the Maya Long Count calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012. Some Christian End Timers believe that the period preceding the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation is now upon us. Religious believers are not alone in their fascination with doomsday. Secular catastrophists predict environmental doom or worry about calamity raining down on us from outer space. This week the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, headed by bioprogressive philosopher Nick Bostrom, is convening a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. The Institute's work focuses on how radical technological developments such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and life-extension treatments will affect the human condition. One of the Institute's research programs is global catastrophic risks which mulls questions like: What are the biggest threats to global civilization and human well-being? Will the human species survive the 21st century? The savants gathered here in Oxford will consider a wide variety of potentially apocalyptic risks. For example, Michelangelo Mangano from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will explore the possibility that certain scientific research—e.g., the Brookhaven Lab's high energy experiments that might produce a black hole—could inadvertently destroy the world. Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology will discuss how the advent of molecular manufacturing could lead to massive economic and social disruptions, including a new arms race, the spread of tyranny, and dangerous environmental degradation. At the cosmic level, the Technion Institute's Arnon Dar will look at the devastation that a nearby supernova could wreak, and astronomer and author William Napier will evaluate the chances that the earth might soon suffer an asteroid strike. Whether future advanced artificial intelligences will think of us as pets or pests will be pondered by Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky. In addition to the more exotic risks noted above, the conferees will also be discussing the prospects for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. More reassuringly, Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security fellow Ali Nouri is apparently set to argue that trends in biotechnology are making it less likely that bad guys could unleash a man-made plague. On an even happier note, technoprogressive bioethicist James Hughes will discuss how to avoid cognitive biases toward over-pessimism and over-optimism. And Steve Rayner, director of Oxford's James Martin Institute (which is co-sponsoring the conference), will point out that much contemporary doomsaying shares cultural characteristics with earlier superstitious predictions of imminent catastrophe. The whole cheery conference kicks off this evening with a talk by Sir Crispin Tickell entitled, "Humans: Past, Present and Future." Apparently Tickell buys into the whole litany of environmentalist doom. However, he thinks that doom can be avoided if we "radically change our thinking on global governance" and pursue some "interesting" technological options. This is the first dispatch from the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. Since the conference runs through the weekend, future dispatches will report various gloomy presentations chiefly as blog posts at reason online. I will finish up coverage of the conference with my science column next Tuesday. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?
18 07 2008 Oxford, England—"The good news is that no existential catastrophe has happened," declared Nick Bostrom. "Not one. Yet." Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute opened what he thinks might be the first ever conference to comprehensively consider the gamut of Global Catastrophic Risks. By existential catastrophes Bostrom means that humanity has survived extinction so far. However, he quickly pointed out 99.9 percent of all species are extinct. Bostrom cited the Toba super-eruption 73,000 years ago which may have produced a global winter that reduced the population of human ancestors to fewer than 500 fertile women (though some disagree). Our Neanderthal relatives died out between 33,000 and 24,000 years ago. In Our Final Hour, Lord Martin Rees predicted that there was only a 50 percent chance that our civilization would survive to 2100. Bostrom justified the broad topic of global catastrophic risks by pointing to common causal links, e.g., super-volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and nuclear wars all have the potential to produce disastrous global cooling. Catastrophic scenarios also present common methodological, analytical, and cultural challenges. And, argues Bostrom, a wider view of potential catastrophes is necessary for the adoption of proper policies and informed prioritization. To assist in this effort, the conference is launching the eponymous volume, Global Catastrophic Risks. Bostrom did note that people today are safer from small to medium threats than ever before. As evidence he cites increased life expectancy from 18 years in the Bronze Age to 64 years today (the World Health Organizations thinks it's 66 years). And he urged the audience not to let future existential risks occlude our view of current disasters, such as 15 million people dying of infectious diseases every year, 3 million from HIV/AIDS, 18 million from cardiovascular diseases, and 8 million per year from cancer. Bostrom did note that, "All of the biggest risks, the existential risks are seen to be anthropogenic, that is, they originate from human beings." The biggest risks include nuclear war, biotech plagues, and nanotechnology arms races. The good news is that the biggest existential risks are probably decades away, which means we have time to analyze them and develop countermeasures. A small, and rather dapper audience gathered in the Rhodes Trust Lecture theatre at the Said Business School in Oxford to listen to Bostrom and keynote speaker, Sir Crispin Tickell, expound on the end of the world. Tickell, it turns out, is mostly an old-fashioned Green catastrophist. The main problems he sees are overpopulation and dwindling resources, with climate change thrown in for good measure. As far as I could tell, Tickell thinks that everything started going downhill with the invention of farming, and forget about the horror of the Industrial Revolution! Doom lurks in six big issues for Tickell: overpopulation, land degradation, freshwater shortages, climate change, fossil fuel energy generation, and biodevastation of species. He later mentioned a seventh factor, the curse of dangerous new technologies. I won't deal here with all of Tickell's challenges, but it is interesting that he did admit that fertility rates are falling around the world. In addition, he claimed that since we are "close to running out of freshwater," that water wars could dominate the 21st century. Thus Tickell propagated the stale water wars meme that most empirical evidence has shown to be false. Transboundary water cooperation rather than conflict is the norm. "The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," Aaron Wolf, the Oregon State University professor who heads up the Program in Water Conflict Management, told Reuters. While a massive reduction in biodiversity would be a tragedy, at least some researchers don't believe that biodiversity losses pose an existential threat to humanity. For example, Martin Jenkins from the United Nations Environment Program argues that even if the dire projections of extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct, they "will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." He adds, "In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms].... Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local." Tickell indulged in the conceit of looking back 100 years to see how the world got to its happy state in 2100. By then, he foresees a more globalized world linked by instantaneous communications networks, where human numbers in cities will be reduced, not least because human population will have fallen to 2.5 billion. Communities will be more dispersed, agriculture will be more local, energy and transport will be decentralized. Quite idyllic. Except for the communications networks, Tickell's world in 2100 sounds a lot like 1950 when world population was 2.5 billion and Sir Crispin was a green youth of twenty. Nostalgia? During the question period, Tickell owned up to being something of a neo-Malthusian and was eagerly looking forward to reading Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new book, The Dominant Animal. Tickell reported that he had heard that Ehrlich writes in this new book that he got his timing wrong on when the "population bomb" would finally explode. Later over a glass of wine, I pointed out to Tickell that this is exactly what Ehrlich told me when I interviewed for him for an article in Forbes magazine back 1990. I'm sure that he was sincere when he said that he was sorry, but he had suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere. About Ehrlich's new book, Crispin admitted, "I thought to myself, 'Ho, ho, the Neo-Malthusians rise again.'" Alas, they always do. Tomorrow, the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks will have more edifying (and frightening?) presentations on proposals for recovering from social collapses occasioned by catastrophes; how to rationally consider the end of the world; how to avoid Millennialist cognitive biases; how to insure against catastrophes; how ecological diversity could affect human prospects; and the tragedy of the uncommons. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators
16 07 2008 Below is a slightly cleaned up version of my remarks this past Saturday during the FreedomFest 2008 debate: “Is There Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design in Nature?” The debate took place between Discovery Institute intelligent design proponents Stephen Meyer and George Gilder and evolutionary biology proponents Michael Shermer, the executive director of the Skeptic Society, and me. Let me begin by acknowledging that the Discovery Institute website states: "Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text." So far so good. Near the end of the silly new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—in which fellow panelist Steve Meyer appeared—host Ben Stein asks Richard Dawkins, who is arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this is a great "gotcha," like it's the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence has repeatedly created life on earth. So, since our esteemed opponents are agnostic with regard to the "source of design," and because intelligent design cannot rule out the hypothesis that super-intelligent purple space squids are not the "source of design" of life on earth, I will provisionally accept that hypothesis for the remainder of my talk. As I understand it, intelligent design proponents—such as our distinguished Discovery Institute panelists here—fully accept the fact that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that some form of life has existed on earth for about 3 billion or so years. If that is the case, it would seem the record shows that the intelligent designers—which I am hypothesizing are super-intelligent purple space squids—evidently spent more than 2 billion years tinkering with single-cell algae and bacteria before they got around to creating multi-cellular species. Do intelligent design proponents have a theory to explain that? Were the space squid creators just lazy? In addition, the record clearly shows that when more complex forms of life were created by super-intelligent purple space squids, they apparently arranged their creations in a specific order. Why did the purple space squids arrange the fossils in a sequence in which fish appear before amphibians which appear before reptiles which appear before mammals? And why did the purple space squids arrange 390 million years ago for the first amphibians to resemble Crossopterygian fish that were also alive at that time? These first amphibians had such characteristics as internal gills, fish-like skull bones, and—interestingly—eight digits just as the Crossopterygian fish did. Apparently our intelligent purple space squid creators (or whoever) found eight digits displeasing, and simply eliminated the extra three digits after they killed off the early amphibians and individually created thousands of later species of amphibians with only the now standard five digits. Interestingly, the fossils of early reptiles—which the purple space aliens apparently created around 300 million years ago—were still rather amphibian-like in their overall structure. Their legs were splayed out sideways, bellies just barely lifted from the ground, tails dragging behind—in short, a salamander-like gait. Eventually, the creator aliens chose to produce tens of thousands of new reptile species which differed considerably from the old sticks-in-the-mud amphibians. Among their creations were much grander reptiles such as the impressively armor-plated stegosaurus (145 million years ago), and the massive apatosaurus (formerly brontosaurus), which measured 75 feet long and weighed 25 tons, and of course the largest land predator ever known, the 7-ton, 43-foot-long tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago). Another puzzle—why is it that the super-intelligent purple space squid creators made the earliest mammals share so many characteristics with the therapsid reptile species that lived alongside them? Interestingly, researchers have now pieced together how the purple space squid created the mammalian inner ear over a period of 70 million years from reptilian jaw bones. Starting with the mammal-like reptile Sphenacodon 270 million years, ago, purple space squid creators evidently spent the next 70 million years tinkering with the hinged reptilian jawbones. The squids shrank the bones, moving them back toward the ear holes in the skulls of some of the thousands of increasingly mammal-like species that squids were busy individually creating. Eventually the purple space squid creators ended up after 70 million years making a tiny mammalian-type critter called Hadrocodium which had a single jawbone (like mammals do today) and three middle-ear bones (like mammals do today). I am sure that intelligent design proponents will shortly explain why apparently intelligent purple space squid creators (or whatever creators they prefer) used this pathway for creating inner ear bones. Since, by definition, the purple space squids are intelligent and should know what they want in advance—what ID proponents call "complex specified information"—why did they piddle around so long and why not instead just create species with inner ear bones without generating a series of creatures through slow intermediate steps? Which brings me to an even bigger puzzle—why, after going to all the trouble to finally populate the earth with millions of magnificent species, did the purple space squid creators (or whichever creator design proponents prefer) apparently allow either a five-mile wide asteroid to hit the Earth, or a huge outbreak of volcanic eruptions, or both, to wipe out at least 50 percent of the species—including the dinosaurs—living 65 million years ago? In fact, something worse occurred 250 million years ago when some event, possibly also an asteroid strike, destroyed 95 percent of all living species. Of course, there is an alternative hypothesis that intelligent design proponents—such as the distinguished representatives from the Discovery Institute on the panel here—might fruitfully want to explore. That hypothesis is that the purple space alien squid creators actually caused asteroids to strike the earth in order to wipe the biological and ecological slate clean so that they could start over. Perhaps like a thrifty artist who whites out an earlier painting on a canvas in order to create a masterpiece, the purple space squids destroyed most of life on earth in order to make room for new creations. Interestingly, the creator squids seem subject to a strange kind of creative conservatism. Their new, post-extinction, individually created species looked very much like earlier created species that apparently survived the massive extinction events. What hypothesis do intelligent design proponents offer to explain this interesting observation of creative conservatism? Purple space squids appear to be progressive creationists: They bring species into existence over and over again, forming each species so that it bears a striking resemblance to a species that has just gone extinct. I have been using the phrase individually created species throughout my talk. Why? Because intelligent design proponents—such as Steve Meyer and George Gilder here on the panel—insist that micro-evolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change below the level of species, cannot lead to macroevolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change at or above the level of species—which means at least the splitting of a species into two new species. Since micro-evolution, according to ID proponents such as Steve and George, cannot lead to the creation of new species, then the purple space squid creators (or whomever) must create each new species individually. Trying to figure out how super-intelligent space alien creators go about creating individual species would be a fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to look into. Do the squid creators somehow tweak genes while embryos are developing in their eggs or in their mother's wombs? Or do they work at the level of sperm and eggs before conception? Would the space squid creators use radiation to do this? Or chemical mutations? Or errors in genetic transcription? What's their favorite method for producing new species? And most crucially, how would whatever processes the purple space squid have used to create tens of millions of new species over billions of years differ from the natural processes suggested by evolutionary biology? And there is yet another puzzle. Conservative super-intelligent purple space squid creators apparently recycle genes over and over again in new species. Biologists have found that many genes are like Animal Kingdom cassettes or Lego blocks: They can be mixed and matched across vastly different species. For example, biologists have shown that a gene crucial to building a fruit fly's eye—the Pax-6 gene—will trigger eye development in a frog and a mouse. In addition, now that both the human and mouse genomes have been sequenced, researchers know that 99 percent of mouse genes are similar to those found in humans. Even more amazingly, 96 percent of the genes in both mice and men are present in the same order on their different genomes. Why would this be? A fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to answer is what constrains the super-intelligent purple space squid creators (or any other intelligent creator) to use the same genes over and over again in millions of species? And here's another minor curiosity: Why did the purple space squids design humans so that we need to eat foods like oranges that provide us with vitamin C? Without vitamin C people die of the deficiency disease scurvy. It turns out that the super-intelligent squids created nearly all other mammals so that they have genes—including the GLO gene—that synthesize this vitamin in their livers. Biologists have discovered that when the purple space squids created us, they for some reason left a broken remnant of the GLO gene in our genomes. There is one group of mammals that share our inability to make vitamin C —orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and macques all have broken GLO genes. Even more interestingly, biologists have found that gorillas and chimpanzees have exactly the same errors in their GLO genes that people do. So why did the purple space squids create those species along with us with exactly the same errors so that they and we could not produce vitamin C? One other consideration: Are the intelligent designers—the super-intelligent purple space squids—finished creating new species? Are they resting from their creative labors for now? What evidence would show that intelligent designers are still at work creating new species around us? And how would we know? The point of the foregoing is that intelligent design proponents do not have good answers to the questions I have posed. But evolutionary biologists do. In his new book, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Brown University biologist Kenenth Miller argues, "Design rests ultimately on the claim of ignorance, upon the hope that science cannot show evolution to be capable of producing complex organs, assemblies of molecules, or novel biological information. If evolution cannot achieve that, the argument goes, then design must be the answer. "Since any field of biology, including evolution, is filled with unsolved problems, intelligent design can be invoked as the default explanation for any one of them," adds Brown. "The hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues of research." Ultimately, the intelligent design hypothesis just leaves everything up to the ineffable whims of the moral equivalent of super-intelligent purple space squids or whoever else is th