Neil Stevenson: Hunger of Innovation, Big Projects and Science Fiction

“A gray-haired NASA veteran once told me that landing an Apollo ship on the moon was the greatest achievement of communism.”

“It's you, you loosened your hold!” Announced Michael Crow, president of the University of Arizona. Of course, he appealed to science fiction writers. He seems to be saying that scientists and engineers are on alert and are looking for something to occupy themselves with. It's time for the NF writers to start doing their part of the work and feed us with big dreams, full of meaning.

I managed to catch the period when the United States of America had the opportunity to send people into space. I have the earliest memories of sitting on a wicker rug in front of a giant black and white TV and watching the first launches of the Gemini series ships. This summer, at the age of 51 (not translated as an article from 2011), I was not even very old at all; I was watching on a flat-screen TV as the last Cospic ship, the Shuttle, left the launch pad. Seeing how the space exploration program declined, I was overcome by sadness and bitterness. Where is my toroidal space station? Where is my ticket to mars? Although, until recently, I kept my feelings with me. The space exploration program has always had its opponents, but complaints about the decline in activity in this area mean putting themselves at risk, which will immediately take advantage of those who have no compassion for a wealthy, middle-aged white American whose childhood dreams have not been realized.

Nevertheless, I am concerned that our inability to comply with the achievements of the space exploration program of the 60s may be a symptom of the general failure of our society to bring to mind major projects. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of an airplane, a car, nuclear energy, and a computer — just a few examples.

Neil Stevenson is the author of the techno-thriller Virus REAMDE, published in September, the three-volume book Baroque Cycle, which includes such works as Mercury, Smeshenie and System of the World, as well as the novels Anathema and Kryptonomicon , "Diamond Age", "Avalanche" and "Zodiac". He is also the founder of the Hieroglyph project, which includes NF writers, where they combine their efforts to create the worlds of the future, in which large projects are implemented (BSGD - Big Stuff Gets Done).

Scientists and engineers who reached maturity in the first half of the twentieth century looked forward to the time when they could create things that could solve old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for a developing middle class that was the foundation of our stable democracy.
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The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in 2010 reinforced my sense that we had lost the ability to do important things. The oil crisis occurred in 1973, almost 40 years ago. It is obvious that the fate of the economic hostage of oil-producing countries was unacceptable for the United States. All this led to Jimmy Carter proposing a bill to develop a huge industry for the production of artificial fuels within the country. Whatever one thinks about the positive moments during Carter’s presidential term or specifically this draft law, at least this was a serious achievement in the field of awareness of the problem.

Since then, almost nothing is heard about this. We have been talking about wind farms, tidal energy and the sun for 10 years now. There is some progress in these areas, but oil is still the main source of energy. In my city, Siettle, the 35-year plan to launch a line for urban rail public transport across Lake Washington is now hampered by civic initiative. Attempts to implement the project are faced with obstacles or are constantly being postponed, and the city is slowly advancing with a road marking project for cyclists on the sidewalks of busy streets.

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called “Future Tense” (“Future Tense”), where I lamented that the space exploration program had fallen into decay, then turned to energy issues, indicating that the real problem not covered in rockets. This problem with our inability as a society to work on large projects is much broader. By luck, I touched on a sore subject. The conference audience even more than me was convinced that science fiction (NF) is important, and even useful, to solve this problem. There are two theories describing why this is so:

1. Theory of inspiration and stimulus. NF inspires people to do science and engineering. Undoubtedly, this is the case, which is pretty obvious.
2. Theory of hieroglyph as a graphic metaphor. A good NF presents a believable, fully thought out picture of an alternate reality in which a kind of exciting innovations are implemented. The universe is a good NF has the validity and internal logic that matters to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Carcanias of Microsoft Research noted, such images play the role of hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable characters whose meaning is clear to everyone.

As science and technology became more complex, researchers and engineers found themselves in a situation where they had to concentrate their forces in ever narrower areas. A large tech company or laboratory could employ hundreds or thousands of people, each of whom can cope with only a small part of the full spectrum of the task. Their communication will turn into a tangled tangle of emails and presentations. The love that many such people have towards NF partially reflects the usefulness of an all-encompassing plot, which gives them and their colleagues a common vision. Coordinating their efforts through a control system based on orders and control is a bit like trying to manage a modern economy from the Politburo. To allow them to direct their efforts towards a common, coordinated goal is something more like a free, and largely self-coordinating market of ideas.

After centuries

The NF has changed over time, namely: from 1950 (the era of the development of nuclear energy, jets, space race and computer) until now. In general, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of NF gave impetus to the development of fiction, written, as a rule, in darker, more skeptical and ambiguous colors. I myself have tried many times to write about hackers, the archetype of deceivers using the secret capabilities of complex systems developed by some faceless characters.

And here in our arsenal there are all possible technologies that we will ever need. And we are trying to draw attention to their devastating side effects. Now, when we are under the weight of technology as if it were shabby, the 60th year of production, the Japanese reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it all seems silly, because on the horizon the possibilities of pure nuclear fusion loom on the horizon. The order to develop new technologies and introduce them everywhere does not seem to be such a child activity for several nerds with slide rules. This is the only way for humanity to get out of a predicament. It is a pity, we forgot how it is done.

“It's you, you loosened your hold!” Announced Michael Crow, president of the University of Arizona (and one of the speakers at the Future Tense conference). Of course, he appealed to the writers of the NF. He seems to be saying that scientists and engineers are on alert and are looking for something to occupy themselves with. It's time for the NF writers to start doing their part of the work and feed us with big dreams, full of meaning. Therefore, the “Hieroglyph” project emerged as an attempt to create an anthology of a new NF, which will be, in some way, a conscious step backwards towards the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.

Civilizations aboard the spacecraft

China is often spoken of as a country working on large projects. And there is no doubt about that: they construct dams, high-speed rail systems, and rockets at a fairly fast pace. But all this is not something fundamentally new. Their space program, as in all other countries (including ours), is just a pitifully similar to what was done 50 years ago by the Soviet Union and America. In a truly innovative program, they take risks (and make mistakes) in order to take the first steps in the field of alternative technologies for launching into space, where researchers from around the world have already made significant progress over the decades of rocket dominance in this area.

Imagine a factory where small vehicles are massively manufactured, somewhere about the size of a refrigerator and comparable in complexity. They leave the conveyor with a limited size of cargo, and are equipped with environmentally friendly liquid hydrogen fuel. Further, they are subjected to intense heating from a ground-based laser system or microwave antennas. Hydrogen heated to a temperature higher than that which can be obtained through a chemical reaction is released from the nozzle at the base of the device, and it soars up. The entire flight of the device is tracked using lasers or microwaves. Then it goes into orbit, and for its size has a greater capacity than ever to be achieved on a rocket, but the complexity, high cost and the desire to save jobs do not give room for maneuver. That’s how, over the decades, such researchers as physicists Jordin Ker and Kevin Parkin presented themselves to everyone. A similar idea was proposed by Arthur Kantrovits, Freeman Dyson and other outstanding physicists in the early 60s. Only they have in order to get the rocket fuel energy out of the back of the spacecraft, using a ground-based pulsed laser machine.

If this sounds too complicated, then let's consider the proposal of Jeffrey Landis and Vincent Denis from 2003 to build a twenty-kilometer tower using simple steel frames. Traditional missiles launched from its roof could double their payload compared to those launched from the ground. It was even conducted a detailed study, which began Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding father of astronautics ( approx. As well as astronautics and taikonautics), at the end of the nineteenth century, to show that a simple halyard, a long rope, constantly rotating back and forth, until the ship goes into Earth orbit, it can be used to improve the maneuverability of the vehicle in the upper atmosphere, as well as to put it into orbit without the need for any engines. Energy would enter the system through electrodynamic processes, without moving parts.

All these ideas were promising, as were all those from which the early generation of scientists and engineers had their eyes lit up in anticipation of something to construct.

But in order to understand how far our current level of thinking is from being able to try something new on this scale, I suggest recalling the fate of external fuel tanks (hereinafter referred to as “VTB”, eng. External tanks - ETs) for the “space shuttle”. Preventing the increase in the size of the shuttle itself, VTB was the largest and most protruding part of the ship at the start. He maintained a grip with the ship, or perhaps it would be better to say that this shuttle was attached to it, even long after the two outboard accelerators fell away. All the way from the atmosphere to outer space, VTB and the shuttle were connected. Only after the ship reached orbital speed, the tank was dropped and fell into the atmosphere, where, in consequence, it collapsed.

VTB could be kept in orbit for an unlimited time with minimal cost. The weight of the VTB at the time of disconnection, including fuel residues, was almost twice the largest capacity of the shuttle from all possible. If they were not destroyed, it would approximately three times increase the total mass with which the ship goes into orbit. VTB could be connected to each other, so combining them into sections, which at the time would lower the rank of the current International Space Station. The remains of oxygen and hydrogen splashing inside them could be used to generate electricity and produce large amounts of water, i.e. the fact that everyone in space is eager to receive, but which is quite expensive to implement. But, despite the hard work and active propaganda of experts in space, who wanted to see how these tanks put into action, NASA, both for technical and political reasons, each sent them to a fiery death in the atmosphere of the Earth. If you consider all this allegorically, then you can understand a lot about the difficulties of innovations in other areas.

Performing major projects

The new cannot arise without the awareness of the possibility of making a mistake. Significant and radical scientific discoveries in the mid-twentieth century occurred in the world, which, looking back into the past, was insanely dangerous and unstable. The possible outcome, perceived by the modern mind as a serious risk, would not be taken seriously if people who had gone through the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War, in those times when there were no seat belts or antibiotics, would take it seriously. nor many vaccines. The rivalry between the Western democrats and the Communists forced the former to force scientists and engineers to expand their imagination, and provided a kind of insurance in the event that their initial efforts were not justified. A gray-haired NASA veteran once told me that landing the Apollo ship on the moon was the greatest achievement of communism.

In his latest book, Through Loss to Victory, Tim Harford described the discovery by Charles Darwin of an enormous number of different types of Galapagos Islands, i.e. a fact that runs counter to the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments seem to be moving towards some environmental coherence through interbreeding. “Galapagos Isolation” versus the “Nervous Corporate Hierarchy” is the contrast Harford points out when he assesses the ability of organizations to innovate.

Most people working in the corporate environment or in the scientific community observed the following picture: a number of engineers are sitting in a room, and offer to discuss certain ideas. In the course of the discussion, a new concept arises, giving great promise. Then, some guy in the corner who skillfully implements a laptop, after conducting a quick search on Google, announces that this “new” idea, in fact, is no longer new, well, or at least quite similar, and it has already been tried. use. She either failed or was successful. If the first, then none of the managers who want to retain their position will not approve of spending budget funds on trying to breathe a second life into it. If the venture was crowned with success, then it is already patented, and it is assumed that access to the market is no longer available, because the explorers will have an “advantage of the first move”, and they will establish “barriers to entry”. The number of promising at first glance ideas, which were thus destroyed, must have already reached a million.

What if that person in the corner couldn't do a Google search? It might take weeks to study the literature in order to prove that the idea is not entirely new, even after a long and tedious rewinding of all this pile of books, looking through each item from a list of sources that are not very important. When the precedent was finally found, it could not look so clear at all. There must be reasons why it is worthwhile to take up this idea again, and perhaps cross it with new discoveries from other areas. That is the merits of Galapagos isolation.

The analogue of Galapagos isolation is the struggle for survival on large continents, where rigidly established ecosystems tend to blur the boundaries of new types of adaptation. Jaron Lanier, a data visualization and biometric technology scientist, composer, artist, and author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, has his own guesses about the unintended points of influence of the Internet, the information equivalent of a large continent, on our ability to take risks. In the pre-Internet era, managers were forced to make decisions based on incomplete information. Now the opposite is true: from an infinite number of sources, data flows to them in real time. A couple of generations ago, this could not even be imagined. Powerful computers process, systematize and show this data in a form far surpassing my children's graphics drawn by hand on graph paper that is like comparing modern video games with tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision-makers are so close to omniscience, it is easy to imagine risk as a bizarre artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

The illusion of reducing uncertainty in the corporate decision-making sector is not just a matter of management style or personal preferences. In the legal sphere, developed within open joint-stock companies, managers are strongly discouraged from taking any risks, including those they know about, or, as some future jurors believe, should have known, even if they guessed that in the long run the game is worth the candle. In areas under the yoke of the next quarterly report, there is no such thing as a “long-term perspective”. The likelihood that some kind of innovation will help earn, it’s just a chance, which will not have enough time to be realized before the summons from minority shareholders comes.

The current unshakable faith in certainty can truly kill in the bud any innovations of our time. In such an environment, the best that a courageous manager can do is to implement small improvements in existing systems, i.e. climbing the mountain, so to speak, to a local maximum point, getting rid of ballast and intercepting rare tiny innovations, just like urban designers who put markings for cyclists, thus indicating the solution to our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing an open area, i.e. accounting for losses in the short term on the way to a higher mountain in the distance, will soon be interrupted by the demand of a system that seeks gains in the short term and patiently endures stagnation stages, but perceives everything else as a failure. In short, this is the path to a world in which no major project will be implemented.

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Who wants to join (with money, competences, ideas, etc.) to the project to create a crowdsourcing jet pack (personal turbojet jet LA vertical takeoff), write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016@yandex.ru