Reason Magazine - Contributors

No Small Matter

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 01:39:00 EST

Endangered Evolutionists

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 13:00:00 EDT

Volatile Stardust

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST

The First Eugenicist

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Are We Just Really Smart Robots?

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST

Is God in the Details?

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 EDT

Victor J. Stenger ha href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195126645/reasonmagazineA/">The Life of the Cosmos. In this theory, our universe emerged from a black hole in a previous universe; moreover, each black hole in our universe (and other universes) generates yet another universe. Universes that produce lots of black holes therefore have more "progeny" than universes that don't. The laws of physics are reshuffled slightly with each black hole, and increasingly the multiverse is dominated by universes whose laws are "fine-tuned" to produce black holes.

So what? Well, black holes are formed when massive stars collapse. Stars are massive if they contain heavy elements--elements such as carbon. The selection process thus gives rise to universes such as our own, where carbon and other heavy elements are available as the building material for life.

In God: The Evidence, Glynn dismisses all multiple-universe theories, including Smolin's. These, he argues, are contrivances produced by "secular-minded scientists" to explain away the evidence for design. Glynn writes that "some scientists have speculated that there may exist billions of `parallel' universes--which, mind you, we will never be able to detect --of which ours just happens to be one. If there were billions of invisible universes, then the series of miraculous coincidences that produced life in this one might not seem so unlikely." Such theories, according to Glynn, are "reminiscent of medieval theologians' speculations about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin."

But is the multiverse so far-fetched? The Big Bang seems to have occurred under conditions of extremely high density; similar conditions occur throughout our universe--in black holes. Similarly, Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde argues that the fast inflation of the early cosmos--which requires merely a small region of curved space, or "false vacuum," to get started--implies a "self-reproducing" universe. The assumption that there are not multiple universes seems unwarranted by current evidence. Says Stenger: "There's no law of any kind that we know that says this could only have happened once. In fact, you'd have to invent a law of nature to explain why there was only one universe."

Moreover, while we may "never be able to detect" other universes, there are indirect ways to assess whether they exist. If Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection is correct, then our universe should be "optimized" for black-hole production. This can be tested; for instance, a particle known as the kaon, which can be created in particle accelerators, should have a mass in the "correct" range to ensure that neutron stars eventually become black holes. So far, the theory has held up under such testing, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, Smolin is hoping that the theory as stated in his book is false. He's not particularly fond of its multiple universes. "I would be very, very happy if in the final picture we got rid of it," he says in an interview. "That it was just a kind of way station." A way station to what? To a similar theory in which the laws of physics undergo "natural selection" entirely within our universe. In such a theory, different regions of the early universe "compete for dominance," some expanding faster than others. That is what he is working on now, and he is trying to make it testable.

Politics By Design

Has physics found God? The evidence is, at best, highly ambiguous. Some of it points in an opposite direction--toward a universe that can appear marvelously fine-tuned even if there is no Fine Tuner. Certainly, not many physicists are prepared to announce that a cosmic plan has been unveiled. The few cosmologists who favor the "strong" anthropic principle usually defend it as plausible speculation, not established fact. (And even the "strong" principle has versions that seem unrelated to religion.)

How then did this arcane scientific discussion get converted into popular articles and books touting evidence of the divine? The answer no doubt lies partly in the exigencies of media sensationalism. Had Newsweek proclaimed on its cover "Science Still Not Sure About God," then newsstand sales would have slumped that week. Had The New Republic headlined its cover story "Science Sees a Blurry Picture That May Have Something to Do With God but Mainly Just Shows the Universe Is an Interesting Place," it would have lacked the pungency of "Science Sees the Light" (though it would have more accurately reflected Easterbrook's article).

But what about the conservatives who have embraced the "anthropic" design argument? They seem to have more serious priorities than merely titillating readers. Glynn points to "the mischievous consequences of atheistically inspired social policy and social experimentation." These consequences, in his telling, range from Soviet atrocities to America's sexual revolution, with its "explosion in teenage pregnancies" and "epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases." Now, however, "the anthropic principle" is replacing "the random universe," and the scientific basis for atheism is crumbling. Bork, for his part, welcomes evidence for design in nature because it lends support to religious belief, and "such belief is probably essential to a civilized future."

Clearly, these conservatives have found an interpretation of cosmology that is congruent with their political beliefs. Yet that doesn't mean the interpretation is presented insincerely. Ronald Bailey has speculated in REASON that conservative opponents of Darwinism might be following a tenet of philosopher Leo Strauss: that religious belief is unfounded but still required by society. (See "Origin of the Specious," July 1997.) But in God: The Evidence, Glynn denounces the Straussian position; moreover, he traces his own spiritual crisis and recovery of religious belief with considerable emotion. He clearly means what he says about both God and the anthropic principle.

Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Bork, Will, or other conservatives who have discovered evidence of design in the laws of physics. In many cases, however, there is plenty of reason to doubt their knowledge. Bork and Will make sweeping statements about the universe based on a cursory reading of popular accounts. The Wall Street Journal's and The Washington Times' reviewers of Glynn's book accept at face value his misleading definition of the anthropic principle. Glynn devotes four pages to a puerile analogy about monkeys with typewriters. (Yes, if the monkeys are assumed to be unchanging beings with limited capacities, they would never type Shakespeare. It does not follow that the universe is subject to similar constraints.)

It is hard to believe that the "anthropic" conservatives have contemplated the full implications of their position. There is, to begin with, a theological puzzle. Why would an omnipotent or highly powerful deity need to fine-tune physical laws? Such tinkering seems to set limits on what the Fine Tuner can do. Did this entity have no choice but to produce carbon-based life--or would other physical laws have generated other types of life? (If the latter, then the fine-tuning argument collapses.) If the laws of physics were not compatible with our type of life--and yet we were here--wouldn't that be evidence for God?

Moreover, if there is now evidence for God's existence, what happens if the evidence doesn't hold up under scrutiny? Religious faith need never be damaged by a scientific advance; one can always believe that a powerful deity intervenes in the universe while erasing all proof of such intervention. But evidence can be overturned or reinterpreted any time (as appears to have already happened with the "fine-tuning" of omega). Won't society be harmed if the strength of gravity or the mass of the proton turn out not to have the religious implications that conservatives have publicized?

Finally, what does the apparent fine-tuning in physics imply for biology? Glynn claims that the fossil record shows that "natural selection is not the magic bullet biologists once thought it was." Bork states that the complexity of organisms could not have evolved unaided. But if the cosmos is precisely fine-tuned for the development of life, then why is further tinkering required? The traditional argument for design is that nature is too inhospitable for life to have evolved. The "anthropic" design argument is that nature is eerily hospitable to life. If both are true, it's a strange universe indeed.

Sperm Wars

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 EST

Here's some good news from the frontiers of science: Sperm counts are not declining. Then again, what's good news for most people is bad news for environmentalists who want to scare people out of their wits.

In recent years, Greenpeace and other groups have pointed to an apparent decline in sperm counts in America and elsewhere as evidence of the dangers posed by man-made chemicals. Citing the threat of hormonal problems and infertility, activists have called for sweeping bans on entire classes of pesticides, plastics, detergents, and other products. Products that contain chlorine have been singled out as particularly dangerous.

When it was pointed out that no clear link had been established between sperm counts and consumer products, environmentalists countered with the "Precautionary Principle"--the idea that possibly harmful products should be banned even before the evidence is in, just to be on the safe side. (See "Precautionary Tale," page 36.) To drive home the point, environmentalists conjured up nightmare scenarios of the human race becoming unable to reproduce in the 21st century.

Dubious though such arguments were, there did seem to be at least some reason for concern: Sperm counts had apparently dropped from the late 1930s to the mid-1990s. But in the February issue of the Journal of Urology, researchers at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center document that the decline was only a statistical illusion.

The confusion arose from an intriguing fact: Sperm counts vary from one city to another. The reasons for such geographic variation are not yet understood--they may have to do with climate and seasons, or with factors such as demography and nutrition. They may be partly due to different methods used to select volunteers in different times and places. In any event, it so happens that most men studied in the early decades came from a single city, the one that has the highest measured sperm counts in America: New York.

To be precise, 87 percent of those studied before 1970 were from New York. After 1970, as more wide-ranging research was conducted, New York's share of the studied population shrank to 25 percent. On average, New York-based studies showed sperm levels about a third higher than non-New York studies (the New York effect skewed international statistics as well). After correcting for the disproportionate emphasis on New York in the early data, the downward trend disappears. As the Columbia-Presbyterian researchers put it, "there appears to be no significant change in sperm counts in the U.S. during the last 60 years."

New York's high rank in sperm counts may boost a few egos or lead to some jokes (at the very least, we can expect Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to take most of the credit). But the findings are no laughing matter. Neither is the answer to the serious question raised by them: Will environmental groups retract their unsupported claims that man-made chemicals are wreaking hormonal havoc?

Gaseous Menace

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 EST

Not since the original Psycho has there has been such intense concern about the dangers of showering. The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to set limits on the presence of radon in household water to keep people from inhaling the radioactive gas as it evaporates from showers, washing machines, and dishwashers. This move could cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually in order to...well, actually, it's not clear if it would accomplish anything.

Welcome to the latest phase in the crusade against radon, an invisible, odorless, naturally occurring gas produced by the breakdown of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, which are found in rocks and soil. Radon has stirred the anxieties of regulators and the public for much of the past two decades, especially because of accumulations of the gas in basements and other confined spaces. Millions of homeowners have had their houses tested for the substance, and many have installed vent pipes or taken other measures to reduce radon levels.

Not coincidentally, radon seeped into public awareness at much the same time that the nuclear power industry encountered serious opposition. By the mid-1980s, defenders of nuclear energy were asserting--quite correctly--that the public is exposed to much higher radiation levels from radon than from power plants. This argument did not have its intended effect. The industry "managed to get people afraid of radon rather than less concerned about nuclear power," says University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park.

Radon is a known human carcinogen--that is, it is known to cause lung cancer among underground uranium miners who routinely inhale huge quantities of the stuff. Whether radon poses a danger to anyone else is unknown. Studies have failed to find any correlation between lung cancer and radon exposure in quantities encountered by the general public; to the contrary, lung cancer rates are relatively low in New England and the Rocky Mountain states--regions with notably high levels of radon. Some scientists have even speculated that, by stimulating the body's defense mechanisms, radon can help prevent lung cancer.

Nonetheless, the EPA and the federally funded National Academy of Sciences have produced some grim estimates about radon's impact on public health. (The EPA is required by law to consider NAS estimates in formulating its radon policies.) According to an NAS study released in February 1998, radon causes as many as 21,800 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States. This estimate, however, was not based on any actual cases of people getting cancer from radon in their homes; rather, it was produced by taking information on the group facing the highest risk from exposure to radon--uranium miners--and plugging it into a linear, no-threshold model of radiation's effects.

Such a model is "linear" because it assumes that radiation which is harmful to health at high concentrations must be proportionately harmful at lowest levels of exposure. It also assumes there is no level ("threshold") at which radiation is harmless. Those assumptions have been called into question, due in part to epidemiological data showing that groups exposed to low levels of radiation (such as Navy shipyard workers) have cancer rates no higher than the general public. A growing understanding of molecular biology helps explain such resilience: While radiation can damage DNA (and thus cause cancer), various enzymes are constantly working to repair DNA.

There is, then, plenty of reason to doubt that radon kills tens of thousands of people each year, or indeed that it kills anyone other than uranium miners (and even there, the statistics are complicated by the fact that many miners are smokers). Yet the EPA is embarking on a costly expansion of its war against radon, which is hard to justify even if radon is as dangerous as the agency contends.

Under the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is authorized to establish a "maximum contaminant level" for waterborne radon, even though water--whether ingested directly or inhaled after evaporation--is a marginal source of radon.

This provision, backed by environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, is reminiscent of the proverbial drunk who searches for his keys under a lamp rather than in the darkness where he lost them. Water--whether ingested directly or inhaled through evaporation--is a marginal source of radon; but it is a source that lends itself to control by regulations imposed on utilities. "The predominant risk from radon is from inhalation," says Dan W. Pedersen, a regulatory engineer at the American Water Works Association, an industry group that includes some 4,000 utilities. "The predominant source of radon for inhalation is actually air seeping from the ground into the house."

A 1994 EPA report estimated that waterborne radon causes 192 deaths per year, or almost 1 percent of radon's alleged death toll. In September 1998, the NAS placed the figure at 180, of which only 20 are stomach cancer cases attributed to drinking radon; the remainder result from inhaling evaporated water, particularly in showers and other areas where water is heated or agitated. (Ingesting radon is acknowledged to be less dangerous than inhaling it. Radon's radioactivity consists of alpha particles, which are generally unable to pass through the stomach's lining but may lodge in the lungs.)

Of course, the above estimates could be wrong. If the linear, no-threshold hypothesis is mistaken, then the death toll from waterborne radon might be zero (or even a negative number, if radon exposure actually prevents some fatalities).

But if waterborne radon does kill nearly 200 people a year, what should be done? Water purification plants can remove radon by spraying their water through the air before sending it to customers. Unfortunately, such aeration is an expensive and potentially risky process. Sprayed water is more likely to come into contact with airborne viruses and bacteria and then must be disinfected with chlorine. The water also must be pretreated to prevent impurities from oxidation that can damage pipes and equipment.

In its 1994 report, the EPA estimated that preventing 84 of the putative 192 annual cancer deaths caused by waterborne radon would cost $272 million per year. The American Water Works Association put the annual cost at $2.5 billion. The industry group says the EPA did not adequately account for the cost of additional water treatment.

Moreover, all these figures were based on a never-enacted 1991 EPA proposal to limit waterborne radon. Even though there is no limit on waterborne radon, the Safe Drinking Water Act may empower the EPA to set an even more-stringent standard than the one proposed in 1991. (The level will not be announced until mid-1999.) In any event, the costs will be borne mainly by smaller communities: Gas evaporates more slowly from wells than from rivers or reservoirs, and the high fixed cost of filtration makes water treatment an expensive process for utilities that serve a small number of customers.

Despite its name, the Safe Drinking Water Act is not only about water. Under a complicated provision, if the EPA sets its waterborne radon maximum below a certain level, then the states are allowed to propose "multimedia radon mitigation programs" that address air quality and household water; new regulations may be placed on airborne radon even if the gas didn't originate from evaporated water. This approach may seem sensible, since it's often cheaper to install ventilation systems than it is to treat water. But the result would give regulators more control over radon reduction measures that have until now been mostly voluntary. For instance, many homeowners conduct radon testing or remediation in accordance with EPA guidelines; increasingly, they may be taking such measures because of EPA rules.

This is where things stand in the war against radon: To combat minor or nonexistent health risks, the federal government will impose a set of costly, extensive, and possibly dangerous new regulations on the water you drink and the air you breathe. Taking a shower may never again be such a relaxing experience.

A Little Piece of Heaven

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Sun, 01 Nov 1998 00:00:00 EST

Jim Benson plans to declare ownership of an asteroid orbiting between Earth and Mars. And he doesn't much care what the United Nations has to say about it. "If the U.N. doesn't like it, they can send a tank up to my asteroid, which of course they can't," he told the San Francisco Examiner this past February. In an interview with REASON, the 53-year-old entrepreneur is in a less belligerent mood, but the gist of his message remains the same. "There's really no entity to which such a claim of ownership can be made," he explains. "Therefore I believe it just needs to be made to the public in general."

Benson is the founder and CEO of SpaceDev, a Colorado-based company that is planning the first commercial mission beyond Earth orbit. The firm's Near Earth Asteroid Prospector, which it hopes to launch by mid-2001, is a desk-sized probe that will move into orbit around one of the hundreds of known near-Earth asteroids, collecting and transmitting scientific data, which will be sold to NASA, universities, or other clients. The probe then will land on the asteroid itself, which will be the basis for SpaceDev's property claim--including the right to mine what could be a wealth of natural resources.

SpaceDev is a publicly traded company, a fact that Benson expects will bolster the claim's legitimacy; the stockholders will "help strengthen the cause of property rights in space through sheer numbers," he says. He emphasizes that SpaceDev will not be accepting any government subsidies, since these might weaken the firm's assertion of asteroid ownership. Benson realizes that the Near Earth Asteroid Prospector will be navigating not only the depths of space but also a realm that is in some ways even more forbidding: the uncharted legal territory, and unpredictable politics, of owning property out there.

Benson is right to be wary of the United Nations. International law regarding space property rights is murky at best, downright hostile at worst. In particular, there are two international agreements, written under U.N. auspices, that are relevant to the question of owning territory or resources on celestial bodies such as the moon, the asteroids, and the planets. These are the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Moon Treaty of 1979.

The Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by over 50 nations, including the United States, prohibits any claim of national sovereignty on an extraterrestrial body. The treaty makes no mention of private property, but it undercuts the ability of any government to recognize or enforce a private claim. Negotiated at the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race, the pact was a creation of Cold War politics; it assuaged each superpower's fear that the other might claim the moon or place nuclear missiles there. (The treaty bans military bases, weapons testing, and military maneuvers on celestial bodies.) The economic potential of space--the first commercial satellites had just been deployed in the mid-1960s--was a secondary consideration at most.

The Moon Treaty, too, reflects the international political climate of its era, in this case the 1970s emphasis on wealth transfer from the West to the Third World. The treaty (which applies to all celestial bodies, not just the moon) prohibits the ownership of territory by any government, "non-governmental entity," or "natural person"; space resources are defined as "the common heritage of mankind" and placed under the governance of an ill-defined "international regime."

The Moon Treaty, however, was not ratified by the United States, and it has dubious international standing; its signatories include Austria, Pakistan, and a half dozen other nations, none of them major space powers. Nonetheless, the treaty is nominally in force and could serve as a precedent for future attempts to collectivize the solar system.

The upshot of these treaties, and of the general silence of na-tional and international law on extraterrestrial property rights, is that no entity can lay claim to celestial territory with any assurance that the claim will be generally recognized. No one knows what would constitute a valid claim, or whether there is any such thing. No asteroid mining firm or similar enterprise can be certain that its "No Trespassing" signs will be respected, or that its revenues will not be confiscated by a national authority or "international regime." Four decades into the space age, the moon, the planets, and the solar system's numerous minor bodies are devoid of economic activity and trapped in legal and political limbo.

Since no one is yet mining any asteroids or otherwise employing celestial real estate, worrying about property rights might seem premature or even absurd. But the issue of extraterrestrial property rights deserves to be taken seriously. The technologies required for the first private sector forays into interplanetary space are not the stuff of some far-off future. SpaceDev's planned asteroid probe, for instance, is essentially a smaller (and cheaper) version of a NASA spacecraft already en route to a near-Earth asteroid. A telling display of the space industry's current capabilities occurred earlier this year, when the Hughes Space and Communications Company corrected the orbit of one of its satellites by sending it for a quick loop around the moon.

Meanwhile, the vast resources and potential economic uses of extraterrestrial bodies have begun to come into focus. Frozen water on the moon (as well as in the cores of numerous near-Earth asteroids) may someday serve as a propellant or means of life support. Lunar helium-3 or Martian deuterium might provide the fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Asteroidal titanium, copper, and other metals might be used as construction materials for satellites or space stations; even ordinary rock could prove valuable, as a radiation shield for spacecraft.

And natural resources may compose only one sector of the extraterrestrial economy. Already, ideas abound for entertainment, tourism, and other industries. Virginia-based LunaCorp seeks to place a remote-controlled rover with a camera on the moon, to be operated by paying customers. Looking further ahead, Hilton International has toyed with the idea of a lunar hotel.

Some proposals for extraterrestrial enterprise may turn out to be fanciful; others may succeed beyond anyone's dreams. These are matters for the market to decide, in an ongoing process of trial and error. But that process is distorted, or even preempted, by the current legal ambiguity concerning property rights. Because of the uncertainty about who can own what, enterprises that would make use of celestial territory may find it difficult or impossible to obtain capital. High startup costs are hard to justify, and long-term planning is thrown into doubt; the few proposals that gain credibility do so by identifying short-term revenue sources that don't depend on a property claim (such as SpaceDev's planned sales of asteroid data). The crucial role of expectations in giving value to land or other resources before they are used is gravely weakened by the insecurity of ownership.

The lack of property rights not only makes it harder for the private sector to reach extraterrestrial bodies; it also creates perverse incentives for how to behave once there. Lawrence D. Roberts, an expert on space law at Seton Hall University, notes the possibility of a celestial "tragedy of the commons": companies rushing to grab communal space resources (before anyone else does) without regard to environmental consequences. Mining companies might create an atmosphere of dust around the moon, for instance, or overexploit the known sources of lunar ice (located in craters near the satellite's north and south poles). Lest such concerns seem remote or farfetched, it is worth noting that space already has an environmental problem, in the thousands of pieces of old satellites and rockets that clutter Earth orbit and pose dangers to manned and unmanned spacecraft.

Still, from a libertarian viewpoint, the ambiguous status of celestial bodies in national and international law might seem to have a positive side. After all, governments are forbidden from making claims of national sovereignty, while few clear restrictions are imposed on the private sector. California entrepreneur Dennis Hope has cheerfully pushed this interpretation to an extreme: His firm, Lunar Embassy, sells paper "deeds" to lunar real estate, since the Outer Space Treaty does not prohibit such private claims. Other space enthusiasts speak of a "loophole" in the treaty. The agreement is normally interpreted as allowing an entity to keep material it has "extracted"; thus, the U.S. government became the owner of moon rocks from the Apollo missions. Under the principle of extraction, some argue, a company could assure its ownership of an asteroid by moving it to a new orbit.

But any notion that the legal vacuum could prove helpful to economic activity--with companies operating in deep space, blissfully free of taxes and regulations--is quite implausible given legal and practical realities. The Outer Space Treaty explicitly subjects all nongovernmental space activity to governmental "authorization and continuing supervision." The pact may prevent the authorities from protecting private property, but it does not stop them from expropriating it (or its proceeds). Nor is it likely that sheer physical distance will effectively remove space enterprises from governmental jurisdiction; it will be a long time before any private entity is able to operate in space without extensive support facilities (and a bank account) on Earth. And the central problem of "anarchocapitalism"--protecting property against private transgressions--is not resolved simply because the property happens to be located on a celestial body.

Any workable system of extraterrestrial property rights, then, requires more than merely not violating, or creatively inter-preting, existing laws and treaties. Such rights must be legally recognized and enforceable; some form of authority must be involved, and its role (and limits) clearly defined. There must be explicit standards regarding the acquisition and use of property. This is not to say that all legal and regulatory details can or should be determined in advance; the system must be sufficiently flexible to cope with evolving uses and problems. But in broad outline, a property rights system can be conceived, and put into practice, right now.

Two key questions must be addressed: First, who is the relevant authority (and how does it enforce the rules)? And second, how does someone become a property owner? To find plausible answers to these questions, it is worth considering a range of possibilities, including some that have serious drawbacks.

With regard to the question of authority, one can imagine several untenable extremes as well as a viable middle ground. One extreme would be a unilateral assertion of national authority. For example, the U.S. government could abrogate the Outer Space Treaty and declare sovereignty over some or all of the moon (while noting that the American flag is already there). Or, a bit more subtly, a government might extend recognition to certain property claims (probably those of its own citizens or companies) even without claiming sovereignty over the territories in question. Such unilateralism, however, would generate international tensions and, in all likelihood, competing claims by foreign governments. The rights of the supposed property owners--recognized by the courts of only one country--could hardly be said to exist.

The opposite extreme would be excessive internationalism: placing jurisdiction over extraterrestrial property rights in the hands of the U.N., for example, or requiring a global consensus among governments. An international body charged with such responsibility probably would be either powerless (lacking its own enforcement mechanisms) or dangerously powerful--and in either case, lacking the accountability instilled by democratic, national elections. A broad multilateral consensus is, at best, a distant goal, and would require the consent of various regimes that have shown little respect for property rights on Earth, let alone in space.

The middle ground is found in reciprocal obligations among national governments. In such a scenario, the United States and several other countries (possibly a small number to begin with) agree to recognize certain extraterrestrial property claims by private entities of each other's countries (as well as their own). The participating nations explicitly forswear any claim of national sovereignty; long-term questions, about self-governing space colonies and the like, are held in abeyance. Any national government can join the system, provided it agrees to basic standards regarding the validity of property claims (and civil or criminal penalties for their violation). Even private entities located in nonparticipating countries are eligible for property ownership, provided they agree to be subject to the same standards and penalties.

How is any of this enforced? No all-powerful international court is required; the courts of the participating nations adjudicate claims and disputes (in accordance with agreed-upon standards). Nor is it possible to trample extraterrestrial property rights with impunity from outside the borders of the signatory countries. Any product made in defiance of a recognized property claim (using materials extracted from someone else's asteroid, say) is subject to confiscation or punitive tariffs upon entry to a participating nation. Furthermore, any government or other entity using force to override a property right is subject to military action as well as economic sanctions. And these penalties all can be implemented on Earth; at least for the foreseeable future, no space-based army or police force is required.

Regarding the initial acquisition of property rights, here too the system's viability may depend on its capacity to balance competing approaches and priorities. A venerable legal tradition, traceable to ancient times, supports the granting of ownership to the first entity that literally sets foot upon a particular territory. Yet modern courts also have recognized certain territorial claims established without a direct human presence, as when salvage firms explore undersea wrecks via remote-controlled cameras. By analogy, one can imagine a hierarchy of claims in space: Full ownership of territories (of specified size) might be reserved for entities that conduct manned missions or establish human settlements. More limited forms of ownership (mining rights, for example), or simply smaller land grants, might be allocated to entities that send robotic probes to survey a territory (to a specified degree of precision).

Some proponents of manned space exploration oppose the notion of granting property rights based on robotic expeditions. Alan Wasser, a board member of the National Space Society, argues that such rights would diminish the incentives and prospects for human space colonization. Why, he writes, "would we want to give someone a land grant for some small step and allow them to do nothing more for the next 20 years except stop anyone else who is ready to settle and develop the land?" This argument is questionable even if one shares Wasser's priorities. Robotic missions might well provide the technological and economic underpinnings for subsequent human activities. And robotic missions may have economic and social benefits in their own right and for that reason alone be worthy of property protection.

Extraterrestrial property could also be allocated through procedures requiring no physical staking of claims by either humans or robots. As a few space enthusiasts have suggested, governments might simply auction unused or unexplored portions of celestial bodies to the highest bidders. A rough precedent can be found in present-day auctions of intangible assets such as use of the electromagnetic spectrum. But such an approach, whatever its benefits in generating public revenue and assigning immediate value to the properties, should be used sparingly, if at all. Weakening the link between territorial claims and actual exploration could undermine the perceived legitimacy of the property rights system, and so could the implication that the properties were "public" in their initial state. That notion could open the door to property distributions based on interest-group politics or arbitrary government power.

However they are initially established, extraterrestrial prop-erty rights will have little meaning unless they are transferable. One can imagine a brisk celestial property market taking shape as territories and resources are bought, sold, consolidated, subdivided, and speculated upon (with speculators providing much-needed liquidity and risk tolerance). Properties could even be linked to new types of "derivative" instruments--Martian deuterium futures, say, or lunar Real Estate Investment Trusts--tailored to various investor needs. Such financial "rocket science" might prove almost as important as the nuts-and-bolts type in creating a prosperous extraterrestrial economy.

Would such a property rights system result in dominance of space by some narrow economic elite? To the contrary, space is likely to prove hostile to concentrations of economic power. The territories and resources involved are vast; the markets are new and unpredictable. A company owning a dozen asteroids may find that it is just a bit player in the larger scene. The workings of a shareholder economy may distribute ownership among a broad public, and entrenched terrestrial industries may encounter new competition from space. Will the Third World be left behind? The current proliferation of space technology indicates otherwise, as nations such as India, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and Malaysia venture into the commercial satellite industry and other space-related fields.

To be sure, any attempt to create an extraterrestrial property rights system will draw resistance. Social critics might argue that celestial bodies are "the common heritage of mankind" and should be shared accordingly. The burden will be on them, however, to explain why socialism would work better in space than on Earth. Environmentalists might argue that such bodies are emphatically not the "heritage" of mankind and thus should be owned by no one. But as noted earlier, it is the absence of property rights that creates incentives for wasteful exploitation of celestial bodies. Moreover, space industries may provide crucial environmental benefits to Earth by tapping cleaner forms of energy and allowing pollution sources to be located far from human populations.

The debate could be a vociferous one, but it is well worth having. Property rights and free markets are too important to be confined to a single small planet.

Know It All

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 EDT

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 332 pages, $26.00

This is a book about everything, in a sense, and it contains something to provoke, disturb, or irritate just about everybody. Edward O. Wilson argues that all fields of knowledge and inquiry--ranging from physics and chemistry to art criticism and moral reasoning, with the social sciences somewhere in between--can and should be knit together into a comprehensive worldview. His case for "consilience," literally a "jumping together" of disciplines, encompasses, among other things, an attack on postmodernism, a brief for environmentalism, a critique of religion, a dismissal of Freudianism, a couple of swipes at the economics profession, and a protracted defense of biological explanations for human consciousness and behavior.

Wilson, a biologist who taught at Harvard for over four decades before his semi-retirement in 1997, has carved out an influential career in several intellectual niches: as one of the world's leading authorities on ants and other social insects; as an exponent of the concepts of biodiversity and "biophilia" (the latter being a deep, inborn human affinity for nature); and as a founder and popularizer of human sociobiology (also known by the roughly synonymous term "evolutionary psychology"), a school of thought that emphasizes genetic and Darwinian influences on culture and society.

Sociobiology, following its advent in the 1970s, sparked sharp criticism from thinkers in various disciplines who were committed to conceptions of human nature as highly flexible, nonexistent, or socially constructed. (Nonthinkers entered the debate as well; in one much-reported incident, leftist protesters at a conference dumped a pitcher of ice water over Wilson's head.)

These varied elements of Wilson's career all are evident in Consilience. While the book's sweeping thesis may seem to have little to do with insects, the tiny critters enter the narrative at several points. (In one of the book's best and most amusing passages, Wilson speculates about what sort of political speeches would be heard in a world where termites had evolved a high level of intelligence.) Wilson's concerns regarding biodiversity and biophilia are manifest in his discussion of the environment.

Most central to the book's argument, however, is sociobiology, which emerges as a crucial strand in the seamless web of knowledge that Wilson seeks to construct. For if human minds and societies are shaped by genes--segments of DNA, which in turn are shaped by the laws of physics and chemistry--then the outlines of a comprehensive worldview begin to appear.

There is much of value in Consilience. Wilson provides a cogent overview of neuroscience, population genetics, and other areas of biology. He presents a largely convincing picture of confusion and stagnation in the social sciences and humanities; it becomes easy to believe that these fields would benefit from some form of linkage to the natural sciences, or at least from a greater awareness among social scientists and humanities experts as to what's actually going on in the natural sciences.

Yet Wilson's overall argument is so far-reaching and ambitious that it begins to buckle under its own weight. Precisely because he asserts that everything is connected, the weakness of any of his claims brings the entire thesis into question. Ultimately, the consilient worldview seems more a dream for the distant future than a program for the present; and one wonders whether the real thing, if and when it emerges, will bear more than a passing resemblance to Wilson's vision.

Sociobiology, the linchpin of that vision, is a bold but rather speculative school of thought. Its view of the human condition lends itself readily to caricature. If people are driven by their genes--and in particular by the imperative to replicate their genetic material--then why, ask skeptics, would so few men be delighted to learn that they had fathered an extra child by a prostitute? Furthermore, given that humanity evolved to thrive in the African savanna, why do most people seem to prefer vacations in the mountains or on the beach? (High plane fares to Africa?)

Wilson, however, does not argue that genes determine exactly how people behave, or that every decision has an immediate Darwinian explanation. Rather, he propounds the more subtle notion of "epigenetic rules," hereditary regularities in brain structure and cognitive development that make certain types of learning and behavior more likely than others. These hereditary regularities tend to have some adaptive value, enhancing the ability of those who possess them to survive and reproduce in a given environment, but their precise manifestation will vary with time and place.

Such innate propensities, in Wilson's view, underlie certain widespread or universal features of human societies. The incest taboo is a prime example; Wilson argues persuasively for the existence and hereditary nature of the "Westermarck effect," a revulsion against sexual contact not only with relatives but with any person one lived with during early childhood. Bolstering his argument are data showing the high failure rate of Taiwan's once-common arranged marriages among unrelated people raised in the same household.

In defending the Westermarck effect, Wilson pokes a significant hole in Freudian psychology's doctrine that the incest taboo was formed to restrain powerful and widespread incestuous desires. Yet when Wilson addresses another question that has Freudian implications--Why do people dream about snakes?--the limitations of both sociobiology and his larger consilience program become clearer. Images of snakes in dreams or drug-induced hallucinations are experienced by numerous people all over the world, Wilson asserts, and such "dream serpents" often are invested with cultural significance, for example in shamanistic rituals. Seeking a consilient explanation for all this, he begins with an analysis of brain chemistry and the pharmacology of plants used by shamans; eventually, he winds up in a discussion of one Pablo Amaringo, a Peruvian artist who often paints pictures of snakes.

The connections between these topics are tenuous in any event, but sociobiology is a particularly weak link in the chain. Wilson argues that humans and their ancestors gained a survival advantage by reacting to snakes with fear and awe; fearsome dream serpents helped instill such reactions, and those cultures that reinforced the message through art and legend further enhanced their members' survival chances. But how certain will we ever be that these are the reasons why people dream about snakes?

As geneticist Steve Jones asks, why don't people dream about that other threat to our ancestors, rotten meat? Indeed, who knows how often people actually do dream about snakes in the first place, given that most dreams are forgotten and that worldwide polling on the subject is a formidable task? (I, for one, recall only a single snake dream in my life, and it occurred after I had owned a snake for months.)

Wilson's biological speculations extend to even the most ethereal of subjects. He likens religion to a mammalian "dominance hierarchy" in which the weaker members pay obeisance to the stronger (in this case the gods and their earthly representatives). He dismisses the poststructuralists' skepticism about knowledge and communication by noting that humans all have fundamentally similar brains with a common evolutionary heritage. Wilson's speculations on such matters are thought-provoking, but it is unlikely, to say the least, that religious believers or poststructuralists will find them compelling. And given the current sketchy state of biological knowledge about human brains and consciousness, there is little reason why they should.

Yet even if biological explanations can be taken too far, or applied prematurely, the social sciences often have erred in the opposite direction, by ignoring biology altogether. Wilson adeptly contrasts the meandering pace of the social sciences with the rapid progress occurring in the biomedical sciences; the latter, he notes, are more focused on seeking answers across multiple specialties and levels of explanation--in short, on consilience. Wilson rightly decries the dogmatic cultural relativism that has dominated anthropology during much of this century. He traces how a justified skepticism toward Social Darwinism evolved into a sweeping denial that human nature has anything to do with heredity. Sociology, as Wilson notes, is hindered by its own dogma that people are products of society. He likens the field, with its broad-brush approach, to what biology would be if biologists did not know or care that organisms are composed of cells.

By contrast, Wilson approves of economists' efforts to draw links between the "macro" and "micro" levels of economic activity, and between economic behavior and broader social phenomena. Nonetheless, Wilson's view of economics is mainly negative. Economic theories tend to be overly simplified and abstract, he argues, and they depend on a model of human behavior drawn largely from folk wisdom. These criticisms are questionable, however. Much economic theory, including the basic premise that humans are "ration-al utility maximizers," is counterintuitive and therefore quite the opposite of folk wisdom. (Where, in all the world's folklore, does one find the principle of comparative advantage?)

Moreover, whether sociobiology's mod- el of human behavior offers superior insights remains to be seen. Tellingly, one of Wilson's strongest points against conventional economics--that people often rely on "heuristics," or rules of thumb, rather than rational calculation--is derived from cognitive psychology, not sociobiology. Even so, he surely is correct to assert that integration between economics and biology is an avenue of research worth investigating.

The book's final chapter, titled "To What End?," is focused on environmental and social problems. Here, Wilson makes a number of assertions that seem to come from nowhere, or to jibe poorly with his main argument--not a good thing in a book about consilience. He argues that future generations should be "genetically conservative," or cautious in their use of genetic engineering; in an aside, he writes that such conservatism should not be confused with "the pietistic and selfish libertarianism into which much of the American conservative movement has lately descended." The book's final paragraph contains a sudden, ambiguous warning about "machine-aided ratiocination"; apparently, future generations should be cautious in using computers, too.

Wilson presents a grim picture of the global environment, emphasizing human population growth, the limits of arable land and potable water, and mass extinctions of plants and animals. Yet having argued that economics should be informed by biology, he now inadvertently demonstrates what biology and ecology look like when colored by a cursory and one-sided understanding of economics. Wilson complains about deforestation, for instance, while taking no notice of the government subsidies that often promote it. He worries that economic growth will increase humanity's environmental impact, and he calls, ominously, for governments to adopt unspecified "population policies"; he fails to note that in many nations rising prosperity has correlated with declining population growth. He avers that technological solutions to environmental problems are "prostheses" that make humanity more dependent and the environment more delicately balanced. And he wonders whether posterity will be angry at our era for presiding over the extinction of so many insect species. Bear in mind, though, that he is an entomologist.

Consilience, in the end, leaves us far from a convincing unification of knowledge. But it gives us a fascinating view of the world as seen by Edward O. Wilson, a bold, innovative, and idiosyncratic scientist.

Masters of the Universe

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 EST

Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, by Michio Kaku, New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 403 pages, $24.95

Visions begins on a note of arrogance. Unlike previous efforts to chart the future of technology, Michio Kaku assures us, his predictions are likely to be correct. As science approaches a full understanding of the laws of nature, a scientific consensus is emerging about where technology is headed and on what timetable. This book, Kaku asserts, reflects that consensus.

Baloney. What is remarkable about many of the advanced technologies Kaku discusses--artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nuclear fusion, electric cars--is the distinct lack of scientific unanimity about their potential. For every physicist who says that fusion is "the energy of the future," there's another who replies, "Yes--and it always will be." Even when the experts are in general agreement--as they once were about the infeasibility of cloning an adult sheep--consensus has hardly proven a guarantee of predictive accuracy.

Nonetheless, Kaku, a theoretical physicist and high-profile popularizer of science, has written an absorbing book, filled with thoughtful speculations about the 21st century and beyond. Visions sketches what might emerge from three 20th-century scientific upheavals: the "computer revolution," the "bio-molecular revolution," and the "quantum revolution." These revolutions are interconnected, as Kaku notes; discovery of the DNA double helix, for example, relied on X-ray crystallography, a technique derived from quantum physics. Such linkages, he expects, will take on growing importance in the next century, in the form of DNA-based computers and other hybrid technologies.

Visions provides an intriguing (and explicit) rejoinder to The End of Science, the 1996 book in which journalist John Horgan argued that the era of scientific discovery is sputtering out in disappointment and confusion. Similar to Horgan (but unlike eminent scientists such as Roger Penrose and Freeman Dyson), Kaku believes that breakthrough insights into nature's workings, such as evolution and relativity, are now mainly things of the past. But where Horgan detected intellectual drift and technological stagnation, Kaku sees something very different: The age of discovery is giving way to the age of mastery. Having learned the universe's rules, humans are finally ready to become full-fledged players in the game.

The quantum, biomolecular, and computer revolutions, in other words, are enabling us to be "choreographers of matter, life, and intelligence," no longer mere passive observers of nature's dance. Yet even while taking this expansive view of technology's potential, Kaku is adept at recognizing technological hurdles and limits.

Computing power, Kaku expects, will become increasingly cheap and ubiquitous in the next two decades, manifested in such products as wearable computers, smart cars, and digital scrap paper. Helpful (but sometimes annoying) "intelligent agents" will sort your e-mail, update your schedule, and remind you to watch your diet. But before long, Kaku notes, chip making will bump up against the physical limits of silicon, and further progress will depend on the development of holographic memory, organic processors, quantum transistors, and other exotic technologies.

After 2020, Kaku predicts, the first glimmerings of true artificial intelligence will appear, as computers acquire common sense and as the Internet evolves into something similar to the "magic mirror" that imparts wisdom in fairy tales. After 2050, robots endowed with some degree of consciousness and self-awareness may roam the earth. Might humanity eventually be enslaved or slaughtered by its robotic creations? Kaku closes his discussion of artificial intelligence with an overview of the built-in safeguards that should be devised to prevent such an outcome.

Biotechnology also will make vast strides in the early 21st century, according to Kaku. By 2020, the genetic underpinnings of many hereditary diseases will be understood, and entire classes of cancer will be curable. People will own CD-ROMs containing their own personal DNA codes. Between 2020 and 2050, genetic research will see slower progress, as scientists grapple with the intricacies of gene function and protein folding. During this period, however, it will become possible to grow new vital organs in the lab, perhaps extending the human life span by decades.

After the century's midpoint, Kaku writes, "we may be able to manipulate life itself." Yet he is impenetra-bly vague about what this means. More interesting is Kaku's discussion of feats that probably lie beyond biotech's reach. Performing major design changes on human beings--say, growing wings on a person's back, in Kaku's whimsical example--is unlikely to be feasible even in the late 21st century. Consider the obstacles involved: The genes that initiate wing formation in a bird or insect may do nothing in a human (or may activate homologous organs, such as arms); these genes would have to be altered to allow a wingspan of some 20 feet; and the human's entire genome would have to be transformed to create the lighter bones and stronger muscles required for flight.

Surveying the "quantum future," Kaku assesses a broad range of possibilities for manipulating matter and developing new sources of energy. Electric cars and magnetic-levitation trains are emerging as viable forms of transportation, he argues, and solar power is poised to become a leading energy source. Room-temperature superconductors and microscopic lasers may find numerous industrial applications. Nanotechnology's molecule-sized machines are of uncertain feasibility, Kaku notes, but dust-sized sensors and motors will be used widely in the coming decades. Some other staples of science fiction, such as force fields and portable ray guns, appear to be incompatible with known laws of physics, he adds.

Space technology will make steady, if unspectacular, progress in the next few decades, according to Visions. Kaku is dismissive of the notion of a manned mission to Mars in the early 21st century, basing his argument on exorbitant cost estimates now widely regarded as erroneous. Yet after 2020, he emphasizes, astronomical instruments may be sensitive enough to detect Earth-like planets in other solar systems. The century's latter half may see ambitious efforts to develop fusion-powered interstellar rocket ships. Antimatter engines loom as an intriguing prospect sometime beyond 2100.

Kaku's social and political asides are less imaginative than his technological speculations. He argues, plausibly but predictably, that the economic strength of nations in the 21st century will depend on their technological prowess. In chapters devoted to "second thoughts," he presents grim scenarios of "information ghettos" and bioengineered germ weapons; his solutions are unremarkable generalities about education and international cooperation. Some of Kaku's political pronouncements are mere clichés. Discussing the nation-state's future, he writes, "As John Lennon said in his song `Imagine,' perhaps it's not hard to imagine a world without nations."

Might a public backlash against technology derail much of the progress forecast in this book? The history of advanced technologies in the 20th century--nuclear energy comes to mind--indicates that not everything that is technically feasible will end up receiving political and social acceptance. Certainly, the 21st century's "choreographers of matter, life, and intelligence" will face their share of protest movements and hostile regulators. Visions, however, has little to say about such matters.

That is unfortunate, since Kaku's own experience might have provided an interesting perspective. A longtime antinuclear activist, he was a leading figure in the 1997 protest campaign against the Cassini space probe, a plutonium-using scientific mission to Saturn. Critics of the anti-Cassini movement, including me, argued that the campaign relied on gross exaggerations of the mission's risks and that the broad opposition to "nukes in space" threatened to cripple space exploration. In addressing the uncertainties of technological change, Kaku the author might have taken some tips from Kaku the activist.

Yet even if technology follows a more unpredictable--and politically volatile--path than the one glimpsed in Visions, the book's strengths readily outweigh its weaknesses. Kaku's predictions are intelligent and thought-provoking, and his technological optimism never veers into an unconvincing techno-utopianism. Moreover, no one can accuse him of thinking small. Looking beyond the 21st century, Kaku sketches out a bold future of galactic colonization and more.

Drawing upon categories devised by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, Kaku sees technological civilizations advancing through several phases: Types I, II, and III. Type I refers to a global civilization, the masters of a single planet. A Type II civilization utilizes the resources of an entire solar system; such a society might even build a vast shell or "Dyson sphere" around its star. A Type III civilization operates on a galactic scale, occupying numerous solar systems. In this scheme of things, humanity is currently a backward society, or Type 0, but is on the verge of attaining Type I status.

Becoming a Type II civilization will take many centuries, according to Kaku, and achieving galactic Type III status requires many millennia. But it's worth the effort: Civilizations of Types II and III are invulnerable to asteroid impacts, supernova explosions, and other natural disasters.

Toward the book's end, Kaku launches into a discussion of wormholes, superstrings, and other exotica of modern cosmology. After billions of years, even galactic civilizations are doomed, as the universe freezes in a Big Chill or collapses in a Big Crunch. But on the book's last page a new category is introduced: the Type IV civilization, masters of space and time. Such beings might be able to build tunnels to parallel universes. Here, then, is Kaku's ultimate statement of technological optimism: Intelligent life might survive the end of our universe.

New Waterworld Order

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Sat, 01 Nov 1997 00:00:00 EST

Item: Starting in mid-1998, an international corporate alliance led by Boeing will launch commercial satellites from a mobile rocket pad in the Pacific Ocean. Sea Launch, a converted oil rig, will shuttle between its California home port and a launch site about 1,000 miles southeast of Hawaii.

Item: A consortium of Japanese steel companies and shipbuilders recently constructed Mega-Float, a nearly 1,000-foot-long experimental platform in Tokyo Bay. The structure will facilitate research into possible floating airports, shipping terminals, power plants, and other facilities.

Item: The Pentagon is examining the feasibility of vast offshore military bases consisting of interlocking, self-propelled platforms. U.S. Marine helicopters may soon be relocated from Okinawa, Japan, to a stationary platform off the island's coast.

The era of the offshore platform has arrived. Of course, it arrived several decades ago for the petroleum industry, but the broader potential of maritime structures is now coming into view. For a diverse assortment of industries and organizations--and perhaps homeowners, a subject to which I'll return--floating platforms carry enormous potential benefits, from the economic and political to the environmental and aesthetic.

The keynotes of this technology are mobility, flexibility, spaciousness, separateness--and a high degree of freedom from government control. Such freedom may not be the objective of current projects in offshore technology; indeed, such a goal may be explicitly disavowed by companies that set out to develop maritime platforms. But having an address in international waters, or simply the capability to move readily from one harbor to another, inevitably will give a powerful new meaning to "offshore" markets and tax havens.

What might emerge is a free market waterworld. Companies saddled with too much taxation or regulation on land might move (or threaten to move) to the middle of the ocean; less dramatically, they might relocate up the coast, in a different country or state. Even without offshore technology, companies often flee from a hostile business climate to a better one. Floating platforms will make such moves easier, extending mobility to companies, such as utilities and heavy manufacturers, whose fixed presence was once assumed. And even stationary platforms, provided they are sufficiently numerous or scattered, will be difficult for regulators to micromanage from shore.

Consider some of the possibilities: Nuclear or chemical companies will be able to locate their plants miles from residential areas, free from the not-in-my- backyard litigation of environmental and community activists. Real estate developers eager to circumvent zoning regulations will build office parks with unparalleled waterfront views. Railway terminals, once seen as immovable "infrastructure," will be relocated periodically to accommodate shifting markets and demographics. Shipping and port-related industries, long among the most state-controlled and subsidized sectors of the world economy, will be swept by waves of competition.

To sure, all this will take decades. Auto workers will not soon wake up to find General Motors floating in the Atlantic. But the constraining factors for offshore projects are mainly cost and necessity, not engineering. The oil industry has developed increasingly large, sophisticated, and durable platforms in recent years. In the 1970s, drilling in several hundred feet of water was a daunting technological challenge; today, platforms and drilling ships operate in waters 3,000 or more feet deep, even in the midst of icebergs and severe storms. Big Oil is not the only industry pioneering waterworld-type technologies. Gigantic cargo ships now ply the world's trade routes. The very largest are too wide to pass through the Panama Canal and can carry twice as much freight as their counterparts of a decade ago. Cruise ships also have taken a turn toward the bigger and more grandiose. And thanks to satellite communications, offshore platforms and vessels need never be out of touch. In the oil business, vast quantities of data are routinely transmitted among drill rigs, tankers, exploratory ships, and corporate headquarters.

No utopian vision is needed to drive such technological advances. The oil industry's use of offshore platforms was motivated by very practical considerations: Terrestrial oil wells were drying up or becoming entangled in the politics of an unstable Middle East. Similarly, the Mega-Float project arose from Tokyo's chronic land crunch and high real-estate prices, as well as the desire of Japanese steel makers and shipbuilders to find new markets. The U.S. military's interest in the offshore world is fueled by the demands of post-Cold War diplomacy: Countries eager to provide bases for American troops have become harder to find in the absence of an immediate threat, and residents of places like Okinawa are less willing to put up with noisy helicopters overhead.

The Boeing-led Sea Launch Company will provide a dramatic display of offshorecapabilities and advantages. The $500 million project comes at a time when a boom in the commercial satellite industry has caused bottlenecks and delays at
traditional (mostly government-owned) launch sites such as Cape Canaveral. The oceangoing platform, measuring 430 by 220 feet and equipped with an array of diesel engines, will conduct most of its launches from the equator, where the earth's rotation provides the greatest boost for lifting satellites into high orbits. A separate ship will serve as command center and rocket assembly facility.

Sea Launch, it should be noted, will operate under U.S. regulatory licenses, and company President Allen Ashby downplays any notion that the platform's location in international waters carries political significance. In practice, however, the project will be free of the environmental protests that have confronted rocket launches in Florida, Japan, and elsewhere. Also, Sea Launch, a joint venture that includes Russian and Ukrainian rocket makers, will be shielded from protectionist pressures that elsewhere have hindered international collaboration in the aerospace industry.

With such a diverse range of industrial activities taking shape, can offshore residences be far behind? Might full-fledged communities, perhaps even whole new countries, be formed on platforms? Proposals along those lines have bobbed up occasionally over the years, some with an explicitly libertarian theme. True, no floating housing complex has yet begun construction, let alone been completed--not surprising, since startup costs might well run into the billions. But sooner or later, costs will decline and some critical mass of condo buyers will be achieved. A real Ocean City will come into existence.

Will that be a good thing? Perhaps not. A central virtue of maritime technology is the independence it affords from land-based authority. Less clear is whether offshore communities will have a high degree of freedom internally. Traditionally, ships and offshore platforms (as well as planes, trains, and other mobile or isolated entities) have operated along more-or-less authoritarian lines, often by necessity; there can, after all, be only one captain, at least at any given time. A floating city, especially one that regards itself as sovereign, will have the difficult task of constraining its own command-and-control tendencies.

Be that as it may, offshore technology overall offers vast promise for expanding freedom and prosperity. Putting businesses on platforms is a logical extension of current trends--the rise of the Internet, the invention of new financial instruments
--that already have strengthened markets and weakened central authorities. Furthermore, government control need not (and should not) disappear altogether for a thriving ocean-based economy to emerge. Being a few thousand miles from shore confers a certain autonomy, even without a declaration of independence.

Star Scientist

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:00 EDT

Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, by Carl Sagan, New York: Random House, 256 pages, $24.00

For nearly two decades before his death in December 1996, Carl Sagan was arguably the most famous scientist in America. Author of numerous books and articles aimed at a general audience, host of the public-television series Cosmos, and frequent guest on The Tonight Show, Sagan addressed subjects ranging from human prehistory to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to the consequences of nuclear war. He became virtually an all-purpose explainer of and spokesman for the scientific enterprise. His own research in planetary astronomy, respectable though it was, was distinctly secondary to his skills as a popularizer in ensuring his fame.

In many respects, Sagan was well-suited for the role of scientist-as-celebrity. His writing style was lucid, elegant, and often dramatic. At its best, it conveyed a sense of the epic quality of cosmic and biological evolution. He was an adroit public speaker who garnered attention through minor eccentricities such as the plosive "b" with which he pronounced "billions." (Yet, claims Sagan in Billions and Billions, he never mouthed the title's redundant phrase; rather, it was Johnny Carson who did so, in skits caricaturing his favorite astronomer.) Self-promotion was an obvious, and oddly appealing, feature of Sagan's public persona, as when the camera in Cosmos lingered endlessly on the host's awestruck heavenward gaze.

Sagan was an advocate as much as an expositor. He was a persuasive proponent of space exploration; unlike many astronomers, he envisioned a grand human future in space, not just a series of ever-more sophisticated data-gathering probes. He was a passionate debunker of astrology, alien abductions, channeling, and other forms of pseudoscience and irrationalism. Sagan pointed out repeatedly that widespread scientific illiteracy is a dangerous thing in a society heavily dependent on science and technology. He did more than his share to combat that danger.

To be sure, at times he succumbed to the occupational hazards of the science popularizer: the oversimplification of esoteric ideas, the blurring of distinctions between speculation and established fact, and the dressing-up of personal or political views in the mantle of scientific authority. Sagan overstated the certainty of climate models showing a possible "nuclear winter," and erroneously predicted a spate of cold weather and darkened skies resulting from the oil fires of the Persian Gulf War. He also gave undue credence to the highly speculative notion, little-accepted among neuroscientists, of a "triune brain," in which the human cerebrum coexists uneasily with distinct vestiges of reptilian and early mammalian anatomy. The triune brain theory enabled Sagan to denounce behaviors of which he disapproved--such as Cold War-era defense spending--as emanations of primitive brain parts.

Billions and Billions, a posthumously published collection of essays, reflects Sagan's diversity of interests--as well as his tendency to combine brilliant scientific exposition with less-than-convincing political argument. The book is divided into three sections. The first, titled "The Power and Beauty of Quantification," contains largely apolitical essays on science and mathematics. The second, "What are Conservatives Conserving?," is a set of warnings of environmental dangers, with particular emphasis on the thinning ozone layer and global warming. The final part, "Where Hearts and Minds Collide," covers a range of topics at the intersection of science and politics, and ends with Sagan's
reflections on the illness that eventually would take his life.

The book opens with its title essay, in which Sagan discusses the public's growing but imperfect familiarity with the large numbers used in astronomy, economics, and other fields. His own association with "billions" came at a time when "millions" had become a bit passé, he notes, and soon "trillions" will be commonly evoked in reports of national debts, distances to nearby stars, and more. This leads to an explanation of the workings and benefits of exponential notation in describing very large numbers. A subsequent essay elucidates the concept of exponential growth, drawing upon examples that involve chessboards, bacteria colonies, world population, and radioactive decay.

A discussion of wave phenomena, ranging from splashes in a bathtub to gamma rays in space, displays a similar inventiveness in the use of examples and analogies. Less successful is "Monday-Night Hunters," which draws links between modern sports and prehistoric survival tactics; this essay includes an odd, first-person vignette of life in the Pleistocene era. The book's first section closes with a tour of astronomy's fast-moving frontiers. Sagan sketches out current scientific evidence and speculation regarding planets in other solar systems; possible past, or present, life on Mars and Saturn's moon Titan; and the origin and fate of the universe. Sticking closely to his formal discipline, Sagan is at his most precise and authoritative.

In the section "What are Conservatives Conserving?," Sagan delivers a jeremiad about the environment, while disdaining to grapple with opposing arguments made by conservatives, libertarians, or anybody else. A highly pessimistic view of global warming is accompanied by a warning that powerful interests are beholden to fossil fuels and thus seek to deny the problem. The idea that environmentalists might overstate the problem for reasons of their own is not even contemplated, much less explored. On the issue of ozone depletion, an adept explanation of the chemistry involved is marred by Sagan's grotesque musing that there is some "remote cosmic justice" in lighter-skinned people getting skin cancer, since whites were mainly responsible for inventing ozone-thinning chlorofluorocarbons.

Sagan's environmental proposals emphasize the development of solar energy, wind power, and other "alternative" energy sources. He correctly notes the growing competitiveness of solar energy in certain market niches, such as rural electrification in the Third World. Yet his prescriptions are heavily weighted toward government mandates, research subsidies, fuel taxes, and the like. The environmental benefits of markets--or of market-oriented regulations such as tradable pollution allowances--receive little notice. His mindset is that of a Progressive-era planner, confident of his ability to guide new technologies into socially useful roles.

The book's final third is dominated by the matters of "life and death" evoked in Billions and Billions's subtitle. In an essay originally published in 1988 in Parade and the Soviet magazine Ogonyok, Sagan presents a grim recounting of the histories of the United States and the Soviet Union. Sagan strains to present the superpowers as more-or-less equally culpable in the Cold War--even placing minor or debatable American acts, such as the CIA's mining of Nicaraguan harbors, alongside vast Soviet atrocities, such as Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Nonetheless, as Sagan laments, the glasnost-era Soviets saw fit to censor their published version, despite assurances to the contrary.

Also reprinted is a speech given by Sagan that same year at a rededication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial in Gettysburg. His theme is the danger posed by modern weapons of mass destruction, which are orders of magnitude more powerful than the arms of the Civil War. Yet Sagan is far too much of a technophile to seek solutions in a wholesale dismantlement of industrial society. In "The Twentieth Century," he notes that modern technology also has wrought much good: longer lifespans, greater literacy, expanded leisure time. Furthermore, this century has brought vast advances in every branch of science--a fact that Sagan celebrates, while acknowledging science's tendency to strip away cherished assumptions and beliefs.

In an essay on abortion, Sagan makes his own effort at such stripping away. He argues that the fetus's capacity for rudimentary thought--measured by electrical activity in the brain--is the proper criterion of its personhood. Since fetal brain activity does not occur until the third trimester, this criterion would allow abortions during the first six months--and thus the position of Roe v. Wade is arrived at on completely different grounds. While this argument is highly unlikely to convince pro-life activists or, for that matter, supporters of late-term abortions, and is weakened by the tendentiousness of Sagan's tone, it is at least an attempt to bring fresh thinking into a deadlocked debate.

Among the high points of Billions and Billions is "The Rules of the Game," a clever discussion of ethical principles. Sagan begins with an amusing summary of the well-known golden rule and less-familiar dicta such as the iron rule ("Do unto others as you like, before they do it unto you") and the tin rule ("Suck up to those above you, and abuse those below"). Then, drawing upon the work of social scientist Robert Axelrod and others, he recounts how a tit-for-tat strategy--a mixture of cooperation and retaliation--proved successful in computerized game-theory tournaments. Sagan concludes, among other things, that moral questions are not beyond experimental investigation.

Sagan's essay "In the Valley of the Shadow" recounts the ups and downs of his struggle against myelodysplasia, a bone-marrow disease so rare and little-understood that Sagan, for all his trans-disciplinary knowledge, had never previously heard of it. Sagan writes movingly about the emotional support he received from his family, friends, doctors, and people who had never met him. Despite his long-standing skepticism of religion, he was buoyed to learn that thousands had prayed for him in a Manhattan cathedral and at a Hindu gathering on the banks of the Ganges. His final entry, dated October 1996, strikes a note of cautious optimism about his recovery; some two months later, he was dead.

That loss is felt far beyond his immediate circle. Carl Sagan was interesting even when he was wrong, and even those who disagreed with him were compelled to recognize his formidable intelligence and intellectual curiosity. He provided a much-needed voice for science, and a living rebuke to the many scientists who regard public understanding of their work as a secondary or impossible mission. Future popularizers of science will be hard-pressed to match his eloquence and
range.

Kenneth Silber writes about science, technology, and economics.

(BIOGRAPHY, SPACE, SCIENCE)

ORIGINAL LOCATION LINK

Spaceship Enterprise

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Tue, 01 Apr 1997 00:00:00 EST

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, by Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner, New York: The Free Press, 328 pages, $25.00

Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets, by John S. Lewis, Reading, Mass.: Helix Books/Addison-Wesley, 274 pages, $26.00

Why should humans go to Mars? One reason is that the job market there looks pretty good. Martian society will experience a chronic shortage of labor, due to the small size of its initial population and the high cost of transportation from Earth. Hence, wages will be high, career opportunities will abound, and innovation will be rewarded. Paperwork, bureaucracy, and the quest for purely formal credentials will be kept to a minimum. Such are the exigencies of life on a harsh frontier.

Such ruminations might sound far-fetched, the stuff of some distant future, perhaps, but of no practical interest to anyone alive today. But that future may be closer than most people, including many space experts, currently think. In The Case for Mars, Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner present a powerful and pragmatic argument for near-term exploration and colonization of our celestial neighbor. In their telling, the first humans could be on Mars within a decade, and many thousands could be living there by the mid-21st century.

Zubrin, formerly a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, is the leading proponent of "Mars Direct," a plan for a stripped-down, no-frills, manned mission, using existing or readily developable technologies. Under the plan, a four-member crew travels straight to the Martian surface in a heavy-lift rocket (making no intermediate stops in Earth or Mars orbit); explores large swaths of territory with the aid of ground rovers; and then returns to Earth using an oxygen-methane fuel synthesized from the Martian atmosphere. Eliminated from this scenario are the vast spaceports and Battlestar Galactica type spaceships traditionally envisioned for interplanetary travel.

By drastically lowering mission costs, Mars Direct could extricate the red planet from its current political oblivion. When President George Bush called for a manned Mars mission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration responded with a bloated, 30-year, $450 billion plan, which Congress quite justifiably shot down. Mars Direct, by contrast, might cost between $20 billion and $30 billion. (A modified version, called Mars Semi- Direct, with an estimated cost of $55 billion, is now accepted by NASA as a "baseline" for formulating yet more plans. No actual mission is currently scheduled.)

Moreover, cost overruns and bureaucratic inertia could be avoided by turning Mars Direct into a "Mars Prize." Under this approach, formulated by Zubrin and the Progress and Freedom Foundation at the behest of Newt Gingrich, government's role is simply to provide cash incentives for the private sector to perform the mission. This would be done in stages: preliminary rewards for such feats as automated fuel synthesis in the Martian atmosphere, and a $25 billion grand prize for getting a crew to Mars (and back). Unlike the traditional "cost-plus" contracts of the aerospace industry, a Mars Prize would inspire the work to be done under budget.

In addition, Mars Direct's particular trajectory through the solar system, and its avoidance of time spent in orbit, enable an extended (500-day) stay on the surface, rather than a plant- the-flag mission of limited scientific value. The crew, consisting of two field scientists and two high-tech mechanics, would give priority to the search for signs of past or present life on Mars. That cosmic question cannot be explored adequately just by examining Martian meteorites on Earth, or even by sending robot probes to Mars. Imagine, write Zubrin and Wagner, parachuting a remote-controlled rover into the Rocky Mountains and trying to locate a dinosaur fossil.

Increasingly, however, human activity on Mars would be oriented toward the future, toward the building of a permanent society. The Case for Mars sketches out what that might entail, including ever-larger domed habitats and eventual terraforming to raise temperatures and oxygenate the atmosphere. Beyond such technological challenges, moreover, the book addresses the crucial economic issue: A large-scale human presence on Mars cannot endure indefinitely as a black hole for subsidies from Earth. The fourth planet must pay its own way. How might it do that?

Mars will need a thriving export sector to pay for its imports of manufactured goods from Earth. (Even with a high degree of automation, Martian society's labor shortage ensures that imports will be necessary far into the future. Furthermore, such trade will be desirable, given the rule of comparative advantage.) Fortunately, Mars contains a plenitude of natural resources with export potential. Deuterium, a fuel useful for today's nuclear-power industry and essential for future nuclear-fusion reactors, is a particularly promising candidate for interplanetary commerce.

Ideas as well as natural resources could make valuable exports, as Martian innovations in biotechnology and robotics are licensed for use on Earth. Indeed, the authors argue, investment in the Martian economy could begin even before any humans have set foot there. Mining rights, for example, could be allocated to any company that sends a probe to survey a piece of Martian territory to some specified degree of precision; such rights could be traded actively right now, much as land grants to trans-Appalachian America were bought and sold decades before settlers actually arrived.

Moreover, licensing and direct exports to Earth are not the only means by which the inhabitants of Mars could make a living. Much as colonial America was the linchpin of a "triangle trade" between Great Britain and the British West Indies, Mars might become a key intermediary for economic activities elsewhere in space. In particular, note Zubrin and Wagner, the planet would be a convenient local supplier for mining operations in one of the solar system's most resource-rich neighborhoods: the "Main Belt" of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The vast economic potential of asteroids and other extraterrestrial bodies is the subject of Mining the Sky. John S. Lewis, co-director of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, argues that the payoff from space exploration will be bigger than virtually anyone has recognized. Much bigger.

Consider: The asteroid belt contains an estimated 825 quintillion (a billion times a billion) tons of iron -- enough to build shells around planets, gigantic cities in space, and starships carrying entire civilizations. How much is this iron worth? Lewis performs a fanciful calculation: At present prices of around $50 a ton, the asteroids yield $7 billion of the metal per person for everyone alive today, or an affluent standard of living for a population far larger. Moreover, iron is merely one element found in the Main Belt, which also contains gold, silver, copper, manganese, titanium, uranium, and much else.

Nor does the Main Belt have a monopoly on space's potential riches. Mining the Sky ranges broadly across the solar system, finding technological and economic possibilities all the way from the moon and "near-Earth" asteroids to the distant orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Lewis sometimes blurs the distinction between near-term technologies and distant or improbable ones, an effect that is intensified by the book's fictional vignettes about asteroid miners and other colorful characters. Nonetheless, Mining the Sky succeeds in conveying a sense that space is anything but an empty, unimprovable wasteland.

The moon's ample supply of helium-3, long touted by space buffs as a potential fuel for advanced fusion reactors, is duly noted, as are the even larger supplies of the substance in the atmospheres of all of the giant outer planets. Jupiter and Saturn present particularly daunting prospects for exploitation, Lewis acknowledges, since their powerful gravitational fields would require any departing vehicle to have an extremely high escape velocity. However, with a flourish of untrammeled technological optimism, he points out that souped-up helium-3 rockets just might do the trick.

Even some of the dangers posed by extraterrestrial objects might turn out to be opportunities. Lewis points out that near-Earth asteroids (some of which are easier to get to than the moon) could be mined to reduce their mass, thus minimizing the threat of a cataclysmic collision. The asteroidal material then could be converted into solar-power satellites that would collect and transmit energy for Earth. Moreover, Lewis notes, some near-Earth asteroids also pass in the vicinity of Mars and the Main Belt; these bodies, suitably hollowed-out, someday may serve as the "traveling hotels" of the solar system.

Lacking in Mining the Sky, but present in abundance in The Case for Mars, is a clear set of priorities for practical action. Lewis provides little concrete advice on how to bridge the chasm between the present state of space exploration and the bountiful future he envisions. By contrast, Zubrin and Wagner provide not only a detailed program for going to Mars but also a critique of competing objectives. In particular, the Mars enthusiasts seek to shoot down the moon as a goal for human colonization; the satellite, they note, is relatively impoverished in water and other resources needed for survival (a point still valid despite the recent detection of ice on the moon).

The Case for Mars and Mining the Sky both draw a sharp contrast between a brilliant space-faring future and a bleak existence if humanity remains Earth-bound. Both make reference to the dictum of H.G. Wells that "the choice is the Universe -- or nothing." However, the books differ notably in their discussion of that choice.

Mining the Sky contends that the notion that natural resources are running out is a myth -- but one that's all too true if Earth is the only source considered; Lewis even hazards a prediction of global collapse into subsistence agriculture around 2030 unless the riches of space are tapped. The Case for Mars, ultimately, is based more on the need for a frontier than on any shortage of terrestrial minerals. Zubrin and Wagner warn that Earth is slipping into a malaise of bureaucracy, cultural homogeneity, and diminished technological progress. Mars, they argue, would give rise to a dynamic new branch of human civilization, one whose entrepreneurial energies would reinvigorate Earth society as well.

Eventually, Mars, the asteroids, and the rest of the solar system may have been explored and settled. What then? Mining the Sky ends with a call for humanity to expand throughout the entire galaxy, creating a population of countless quintillions; Lewis's sheer maximalism may discomfit even some space enthusiasts. In The Case for Mars, Zubrin and Wagner proclaim that our distant descendants on a multitude of worlds, even with all their advanced capabilities, will still marvel at the boldness of those who began the great push into space. Science fiction has long been filled with such entertaining and inspiring visions. These two books show they might be affordable, too.

Goodbye, Einstein

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 EDT

The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age , by John Horgan, Reading, Mass.: Helix Books/Addison- Wesley, 309 pages, $24.00

Shortly before the millennium ends, I shall write my magnum opus, tentatively titled The End of Books Titled the End of Something. In it, I shall reveal a profound shift in human affairs, unnoticed by anyone but myself: the passing of the era in which the reading public was bombarded with sweeping, speculative tomes that draw the curtain down upon History, Equality, Racism, or some other Big Thing.

It will be sad to say farewell to all these valedictory volumes, for they have been entertaining, if a bit portentous. What they have in common are soaring authorial ambition, plenty of certitude about what the post-Whatever future will look like, and a willingness to use unconventional definitions to justify the title's hyperbole. (The End of History , you may recall, did not mean that nothing more would happen; it meant that a Hegelian process of social evolution had culminated in democratic capitalism.)

Yet the demise of endism is not quite upon us yet. (Perhaps it will come only when all major categories are exhausted and publishers start receiving manuscripts with titles like The End of Volleyball.) The End of Science, a lively, witty book by science writer John Horgan, exemplifies the genre's virtues and faults: It is fun to read. It will make people think. It careens from one topic to another in the service of its grand theme. And it issues a death certificate that is, in all likelihood, more than a little premature.

Built loosely around Horgan's excellent profiles of well-known scientists and philosophers for Scientific American, The End of Science takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of particle physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, complexity theory, anthropology, and inchoate fields such as "limitology" (Horgan's term for efforts to determine science's limits) and "scientific theology" (far-out speculations about the ultimate role of intelligence in the universe). Throughout, Horgan finds evidence that the scientific quest for knowledge is, rapidly and irreversibly, running out of gas.

The End of Science is not primarily concerned with science's social and political troubles of recent years, such as the superconducting supercollider's cancellation or the rise of New Age mysticism. These are, if anything, mere symptoms of the deeper malaise that Horgan diagnoses: Science's major breakthroughs, such as evolution and quantum mechanics, are already behind it, leaving only the mundane task of filling in the details of existing theories. Like modern poets who lumber in the shadow of Shakespeare and Dante, scientists now have little prospect of matching their illustrious predecessors. There is nothing all that important left for them to discover.

Haven't we heard this before? Horgan's thesis recalls the oft-told story of the 19th- century patent official who wanted to shut down his office because everything had been invented. But that tale has been exposed by historians as apocryphal, as Horgan notes. Similar reports that Victorian-era physicists complacently regarded their discipline as more- or-less complete appear upon inspection to be exaggerated. Anyway, even if these stories were historically accurate, the objection that people were mistakenly arguing Horgan's point 100 years ago would not be very compelling: Perhaps science has finally reached the end point that was wrongly predicted before.

Unlike some present-day physicists who claim to be verging on a "theory of everything," Horgan does not present science's end in triumphalist terms. Rather than exiting the stage in a blaze of glory, science is seen stumbling into a cul-de-sac, bumping up against its own intrinsic limits while leaving many questions unanswered. Seeking to expand the boundaries of current knowledge, researchers are increasingly engaged in what Horgan calls "ironic science"--imaginative but empirically untestable theorizing about the nature of consciousness, the origin of the universe, and other intractable mysteries. Hence, physicist Edward Witten expounds upon infinitesimal superstrings and multiple dimensions, seemingly unfazed that no one has any idea how to detect such things. Cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking toy with unverifiable notions of wormholes, baby universes, and time travel. Biologists studying the origin of life move from one faddish theory to another, unable to recreate with any certainty the conditions of the primordial earth. Might the much-publicized fields of chaos and complexity open a new horizon for substantial research? Not likely, Horgan argues; chaos theorists' computer simulations have turned out to be little more than poetic metaphors, with limited explanatory power.

Horgan, a science enthusiast, is unimpressed by postmodern philosophy's claims that scientific facts are mere social constructs. He notes that the radical relativist Paul Feyerabend did not hesitate to seek medical attention upon learning he had cancer. Indeed, much philosophy of science, encapsulated in Horgan's encounters with its practitioners, appears to be self-refuting gibberish, as when Sir Karl Popper pounds a tabletop while shouting that he is not dogmatic. Yet as science moves into its post-empirical phase, Horgan predicts, it will lose its privileged status among disciplines, becoming something like philosophy or--worse yet--literary criticism. Stumped by the conundrums of quantum mechanics and superstring theory, the once proud physics profession will descend into noisy, unresolvable debates, much like those of the Modern Language Association. Set against this bleak backdrop, Horgan presents amusing vignettes of the scientists he has met. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins icily dismisses an audience member's muddled questions. Chaos theoretician Mitchell Feigenbaum bumps his shin against a coffee table in a painful encounter with reality. Francis Crick appears as a grinning "Mephistopheles of biology," gleefully deflating common assumptions about consciousness and free will. Many of Horgan's interlocutors harbor a deep ambivalence toward the notion that science might be finite: They want to find answers, but also to continue questioning.

Pure science, seeking knowledge for its own sake, is the noblest of human endeavors, according to Horgan (who does not note that similar claims are routinely made on behalf of art, religion, and even "public service"). Even in its speculative, "ironic" mode, science can serve a valuable purpose, kindling our sense of awe and reminding us how little we know. But, Horgan insists, the era of scientific discovery is over, much like that of exploration of the earth. Its passing will exacerbate humanity's spiritual anxieties. Echoing Francis Fukuyama, as well as biologist Gunther Stent's notion of a "new Polynesia," Horgan expects society to drift into a bored hedonism, perhaps punctuated by occasional warfare. Applied science will continue in the new era, Horgan acknowledges, since technological innovations can still be squeezed from existing theories. But this will be mere engineering, not really science. Moreover, it won't amount to much. Space travel will always be limited by the huge distances involved. Once-promising fields such as nuclear fusion and artificial intelligence have lost much of their luster. Even the greatest imaginable achievement of applied science--human immortality--would be something of a letdown, Horgan thinks, since it would not radically alter our understanding of the universe.

The End of Science takes note of some possible loopholes in its own pessimistic scenario. Perhaps extraterrestrial life will be discovered tomorrow, opening a grand new era of comparative biology. Maybe civilization will eventually become so wealthy that it can afford particle accelerators that encircle the globe. Or superintelligent robots will perform scientific experiments beyond our wildest imaginings. To raise such objections, of course, is tantamount to dismissing them; besides being good material for The X-Files, they serve only to bolster Horgan's case.

Back in the real world, however, science is showing stronger vital signs than one might expect of an enterprise entering its final convulsions. Astronomers have recently compiled the first hard evidence for the existence of planets circling other stars. Physicists stung by the supercollider's demise have begun designing new types of accelerators to probe fundamental questions about the nature of matter. Biologists have discovered that bacteria can thrive in ocean-floor vents and other extremely inhospitable locales, completely cut off from the energy of the sun. The empirical ethos is deeply embedded in modern science; it may not evaporate as easily as Horgan expects.

In The End of Science's final chapters, Horgan plunges into fantastical speculations about God and the universe that are only tenuously linked to the book's main argument. Perhaps all life and intelligence will ultimately converge in a God-like "Omega Point," a vast information-processing network predicted by physicist Frank Tipler (taking a cue from theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). In Horgan's view, this all-powerful cosmic computer would pursue the only question worthy of it: Why is there a universe rather than nothing? Not surprisingly, given Horgan's pessimism, even the Omega Point ends up stumped.

Blurred Vision

info@reason.com (Kenneth Silber) — Wed, 01 Nov 1995 00:00:00 EST

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell, New York: Basic Books, 305 pages, $25.00

What is the point of the ideological crusades of the left? To make the world better? Not prima rily, according to Thomas Sowell. The main purpose is to make members of the left feel good, and to do so by placing them in a position of apparent intellectual and moral superiority to the rest of humanity. Leftists, in this book's terminology, are "the anointed," and their overriding goal is to distinguish themselves from "the benighted," which includes everybody else.

The "vision" of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benightedand thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwiseto view social conditions as largely outside of anyone's control and subject to innumerable trade-offs and con straintsis repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.

Sowell's exploration of this world view ranges broadly across social and economic topics, uncovering hidden assumptions, statistical fallacies, and verbal sleights of hand in the arguments of the left. The Vision of the Anointed moves from the War on Poverty, the Warren Supreme Court, and other elements of 1960s liberalism to the political correctness of recent years that insists upon gen der-neutral language and denounces Mercator-projection maps as culturally biased. Sowell targets a variety of people and organizations: Ralph Nader, John Kenneth Galbraith, legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, journalist Tom Wicker, former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Worldwatch Institute, and the Children's Defense Fund, among others.

The Vision of the Anointed impressively marshals facts and figures to puncture "progressive" ideas and proposals on a wide range of subjects. This is in keeping with Sowell's stated purpose to present an empirical comparison of the promised and actual consequences of policies advocated by self-anointed elites. Unfortunately, the book's argument is weakened by its relentlessly polemical tone. Sowell makes little effort to conceal the disdain he feels for his intellectual opponents, and although this makes for entertaining reading, it also demonstrates that the anointed are not alone in showering derision upon those with whom they disagree.

A senior fellow at the Hoover Insti- tution and an economist by training, Sowell has earned a formidable reputation in several niches of intellectual life: as a staunch opponent of affirmative action and other preferential policies; as a critical observer of contemporary American law and education; and as a theoretical expositor of social and political decision-making processes, ideolo gies, and institutions. In The Vision of the Anointed , he oscillates between the concrete and the abstract, between analyzing specific programs and policies favored by the left and formulating general principles regarding how such initiatives are conceived and implemented, and why they often fail when measured against their stated objectives. What emerges is a picture of the anointed as not merely self-righteous but often impervious to opposing arguments and evidence.

Sowell traces a four-stage pattern: First, a social or economic situation is declared a "crisis" based on scant evidence. Second, policies are proposed to end the "crisis," and criticism of such proposals is dismissed as simplistic or dishonest. Third, the policies are enacted. Fourth, evasive arguments are used to obscure mounting evidence that the policies have not worked or indeed have been disastrously counterproductive. To demonstrate that such a pattern is characteristic of the anointed's initiatives, Sowell draws heavily upon examples from the 1960s: the antipoverty programs proposed by the Kennedy administration and initiated by the Johnson administration; the introduction of sex education into public school curricula; and the emphasis in criminal justice on "root causes" and rehabilitation.

The War on Poverty, for example, was launched at a time when the poverty rate had been in steady decline for a decade and a halfhardly the crisis proclaimed by proponents of antipoverty programs. Once the programs were implemented, the number of people in poverty declined, but then began to rise again. Moreover, the initiative's stated goal was to reduce government dependency "to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves," in the words of President Kennedyyet the result was a dramatic increase in dependency. Faced with such uncomfortable facts, War on Poverty proponents changed the subject, emphasizing the noble intentions of the effort or arguing that, in its absence, the situation would have been even worse.

Similarly, sex education was advocated in the late 1960s on the grounds that it was urgently needed to combat teen pregnancy and venereal disease, both of which had been in sharp decline for years. Subsequently, as sex education programs became widespread, rates of pregnancy and venereal disease among teenagers skyrocketedperhaps not caused by sex education, but certainly not prevented by ityet advocates continued to regard the efficacy of such programs as axiomatic. In Sowell's discussion of criminal justice, the pattern emerges yet again: Crime rates were in long-term decline prior to the 1960s, then soared as punishment was de-emphasized in favor of a therapeutic approach; this troubling outcome, however, sparked little rethinking among defenders of the new approach.

A similar disregard for evidence is apparent in another phenomenon decried by Sowell: that of "Teflon prophets" and "mistaken messiahs"thinkers on the left who maintain their reputations even as their predictions turn out wrong. Among them is environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, whose projections of resource scarcity and widespread starvation have been wildly off the mark. Another is John Kenneth Galbraith, whose The New Industrial State and other writings depicted large American corporations as invulnerable to market forcesjust before numerous major airlines, newspapers, and retailers went bankrupt and the Big Three automakers came under unprecedented competition from Japan.

Sowell methodically dissects misleading uses of numbers that buttress the left's world view. One such practice is to allege discrimination based on statistical disparities among groups without adequately controlling for nondiscriminatory factors.
Much-publicized Federal Reserve studies, for example, recently purported to show
widespread racism in mortgage lending based on higher rejection rates for minority loan applicants than whites in the same income brackets, but the studies did not take into account differences be tween the groups in net wealth and collateral. Another statistical fallacy is to not recognize
that a given series of numbers may represent a changing assortment of people. Alarmed discussions of income inequality refer to the "top 1 percent" and "bottom 20 percent" of income earners without noting that individuals move into and out of such categories all the time.

In addition to disentangling tendentious statistics, Sowell seeks to penetrate the rhetoric of the left. He denounces phrases that blur the issue of personal responsibility: Saying that people lack "access" to jobs, for example, or that there is an "epidemic" of drug abuse, implies that such things simply happen to people, regardless of their own behavior. Sowell justifiably complains about the prevalence of buzzwords, such as crisis and greed, aimed at preempting issues rather than debating them. (He undermines this point, however, by using his own preferred buzzword anointedon virtually every page of this book, long after the term's sarcastic power has dissipated.)

The Vision of the Anointed touches upon many themes familiar to readers of Sowell's previous books, articles, and columns. Indeed, much of the material here will be overly familiar to longtime readers of Sowell's work, particularly his wide-ranging treatises Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions .

As in Knowledge and Decisions, Sowell emphasizes that human knowledge consists largely of the unarticulated experiences of numerous people, not the formal learning of an articulate elite; hence, market processes that convey the ideas and preferences of the many are superior to grandiose social-policy schemes that rely on the talents and wisdom of the few. A related theme is the impor tance of incremental, rather than categorical, decision making: The crucial question, often ignored in policy debates, is not whether something is good but how much of it is desirable and affordable. The Vision of the Anointed also recapitulates Sowell's argument, stated at length in A Conflict of Visions, that underlying many policy disputes are differing assumptions, largely unspoken, about humanity's moral and intellectual capabilities and the range of social possibilities.

Amplifying these themes, Sowell contrasts the anointed's world view with the opposing "tragic vision," which emphasizes the inherent limitations of humanity and society. Where the anointed see categorical solutions to social problems, the tragic vision recognizes that unavoidable trade-offs will leave many desirable objectives unmet. While the anointed regard freedom as the ability to achieve goals, the tragic vision more modestly defines freedom as the absence of coercion. The anointed, unlike their opponents, strive for "cosmic justice"a vision of perfect fairness, in which disadvan tages and inequalities are eliminated by the actions of a benevolent government.

A common habit of the anointed, Sowell writes, is to treat various elements of society as "mascots" or "targets." Groups that are distrusted or disliked by the general publicsuch as crimi nals, vagrants, and disease carriersare adopted by the left as pet causes; by extending their concern to the "less fortunate," the anointed differentiate themselves from the benighted public. Meanwhile, other groups are targeted by the anointed, precisely because they are held in generally high esteem; successful business people and professionals are among such targets, and hence the anointed favor expansive liability laws that make companies and doctors highly vulnerable to lawsuits.

When Sowell shifts his focus away from consummated policies and toward ongoing controver sies, the unintended effect is to highlight the left's current lack of power and relevance. The recent crusade against Mercator-projection maps is a case in point. Such maps, which make countries near the equator look smaller than those near the poles, have been denounced by the National Council of Churches and other groups as an example of Eurocentric bias against the Third World. Sowell points out, correctly, that the Mercator projection has long proven useful for navigation and other purposes and that alternative types of maps distort the globe in different ways. The deeper point, however, is that the anointed are spending their time on such arcana precisely because they are no longer busy restructuring society.

Indeed, The Vision of the Anointed strikes an unduly pessimistic note. Sowell describes the anointed's world view as the "prevailing" vision of our time: widely accepted among political and intellectual elites, and influential enough to have colored even the views of its opponents.
With each passing decade, he claims, the anointed's vision will become even more pervasive and insular, as precedents accumulate for their proposals and policies. But at a moment when the left is on the ropes politically and intellectually, Sowell's depiction of its self-deluded thinkers and policy makers inflicting broad harm upon society seems oddly anachronistic.

In that sense, The Vision of the Anointed , with its emphasis on controversies from the 1960s, overlooks the changing nature of the left. Increasingly, the focus of "progressive" energies is not on elaborate policy analysis but rather on obscure, intellectualized, free-floating hostility toward exist ing institutions. Instead of planning a new War on Poverty, the left seems eager to retreat into various realms of esoterica, including deconstructionism, multiculturalism, and the "politics of meaning." The Vision of the Anointed's portrayal of a rationalistic elite infatuated with social engineering is a more compelling vision of the anointed's past than of their present or future.