by Phil Baldock
Introduction
Recently I was approached by a young man (mid twenties) who was certain he had discovered the most profound innovation ever. He was convinced, in fact, that he had unlocked the stars and found a way to traverse interstellar distances with ease. What was he proposing?
Well, to get me up to speed, he showed me a quick YouTube video of a model car with oddly arranged common bar magnets being pulled along by a performer holding an imperceptible string, obviously hungry for views. He then scrolled through a collection of pencil drawings (which is incidental by the way, I do not object to this medium at all!) made without being an honestly 2D blueprint on the one hand or with even a modicum of knowledge of perspective on the other, and a comically harsh grip on the pencil (these, however, are generally bad signs) of an obvious Star Trek rip-off claiming that a series of spinning bar magnets would “channel the space distortion field” to facilitate warp travel.
Now, don’t get me wrong here.
I love that enthusiasm and I think it’s great that this young man would be so excited about romantic notions of space exploration, which of course are the driving force behind my waking hours also. I’m also biased solidly against chastising this too harshly since when I was 14 I did almost exactly the same thing with my high school physics teacher. There’s a great danger in sneering at things just because they’re not factually accurate, especially when they represent the pupil stage of human development (asked to draw a spaceship today I’m confident I can do much better).
What, then, is my problem?
VASIMR, Fusion and other Disappointments
It can be a little more dangerous when a big company does what I have just described. In their case, of course, the child’s pencil drawing is replaced with immaculate 3D, sleek websites, prestigious interviews with cooperative and artificially excited journalists that all combine to create armies of fans and supporters. This, by the way, is the perfect demonstration of why I don’t believe technological progress necessarily equates to human progress: the pencil sketch is obviously superior. It takes hours of quiet introspection and cannot be done on a production line so if it’s good it implies quality of one kind or another in the mind of the person who made it, which is not by necessity the case with any of the big company analogues mentioned above. Big companies, unlike small or even moderately sized children, tend by definition to command huge budgets and have plenty of employees with great talents in narrow fields (essential for survival in that role). When they misallocate society’s resources towards nonsensical projects, therefore, it constitutes a tremendous and tragic waste rather than just a child’s charming distraction or flight of fancy.
Tragic?
Money that is put into bad ideas is not put into good ones. The trouble with drawing the Enterprise because you think it looks cool is that innovation very rarely works that way. The best innovations in engineering in the past few centuries tend with exceptions (I’m looking at you, semiconductors) to make perfect sense in retrospect after being described in a couple paragraphs with simple language written in terms of existing science. Often the path of thought is strange and the way in which the innovation is World-changingly useful is not immediately obvious.
Why should a fluorescent rectangular plate that glows when a moving dot of electrons scans across it have any use to anyone? The time-scale varies of course: in the case of the cathode ray tube I’m almost certain you’re reading this from one of its successors right now. Since the whole point of genuine innovations is that they break with established rules it’s hard to write a formula for recognising one for what it is when you first see it. Still, at the risk of overlooking many exceptions, I think listening to a genuine innovation causes, sequentially:
- Mild boredom and confusion for the first few minutes.
- Distaste for the implications.
- Slow dawning of the nature of what you’ve just heard.
Since fashionable areas draw masses of attention they tend to be the worst places to look for innovations. They more often furnish the overall more common hypeable but fundamentally useless types of ideas, a species whose inspired reactions one experiences in inverse of the above:
- Excitement and immediate comprehension. You know the field well because plenty of people are around to popularise it. You want it to work.
- Hype for implications. Since it follows linearly from previous ideas its uses are obvious. It promises more of what you’re used to.
- Slow waning and disappointment as you are confronted by how little the new idea actually changes things.
Being honest, how closely does the cycle of your reaction to the latest Tokamak fusion power announcement fit into the former set? How much, by contrast, the latter? How much more so for anything with “nano” or “quantum” in the title? With the previous in mind hopefully the taxonomy I suggest for reactions to genuinely new ideas makes more sense:
- Mild boredom and confusion for the first few minutes. New ideas tend to appear in unpopular areas of science, hence there’s no groundwork of public efforts to explain them. No big fancy 3D animations of nuclei bouncing off each other, no charismatic TV presenters and fun documentaries. At least, not when the idea is still new.
- Distaste for the implications. A new idea capable of changing society necessarily enables paradigms that were not practical before. Things work fundamentally differently after the new idea is adopted and genuine change tends to be scary and confusing. The Starship Enterprise acts like an ocean-going vessel charting the setting of the World 300 years before Star Trek first aired. In other words, the show is popular because it suggests that future innovations will rescue the audience from unfamiliar and unpalatable modernity into their illustrious past. The past, not the future, is what warp drive is promising you!
Tell me, dear reader, did the personal communicator and easy long-range telecommunication turn out in real life the way Star Trek predicted? This is perfectly natural, by the way; I too long for our illustrious past. I’m willing, in fact, to choose new technology deliberately to accentuate good things for humanity and turn down completely any technologies that accentuate bad things. History here is blunt: innovation, real innovation is a promising but tricky game that can just as easily play you! - Slow dawning of the nature of what you’ve just heard. It’s only after the new technology has been demonstrated that you can start to come to terms with how reality works in the aftermath of its invention. Sometimes it takes a generation for it to set in but in such cases it can completely redefine the world in which a people live. As a concrete example, I fear very much for the effects of Large Language Model AI and adverts/frivolous entertainments that self-optimise towards being addicting upon the youth of my day.
That’s another clue, by the way: genuinely original ideas rarely disappoint by their powerlessness. Spark a flame from the smallest cigarette lighter and witness a similar phenomena. All manner of avenues for potential change flicker quietly back at you, beautiful and useful as often as they could be catastrophic. You should have learned this from a young age: use and respect but for God’s sake don’t play with fire, kids.
The young man with his pencil sketches of the Enterprise being powered by spinning bar magnets thus has plenty to tell us. He wants a continuation of the dream he saw on television, which is old, familiar and not at all a new invention. He looks for existing science to find an excuse for the world of his dreams to be possible. Apparently wanting to return to a life of sail is embarrassing because people on an airliner passing by overhead might look down on you and pity your utilitarian poverty and apparent lack of sophistication. It has to be sailing in space, you see. The Warp Drive gives it legitimacy because it’s so hard to make such a thing with modern technology. The tragedy is that if we actually built a warp drive its impact on society would likely be very different to Star Trek.
VASIMR is, sadly, just the same. As The Mars Society correctly surmises in their now famous public debate on this topic, the technology is fundamentally flawed and, even if it delivered on its promises, unlikely to help us much in reality (the necessary Tony Stark Arc Reactor tier power-to-weight ratio electricity sources remaining, as they do, out of our reach).
Does this all sound a bit depressing?
It doesn’t have to be. Technology is just a tool. Genuine innovation has the potential to be a good thing that delivers on its promises of new life and wonder. The lack of innovation has plenty of dangers too after all: do you really want a continuation of the mass industrial activities of the modern world unchanged for the next hundred years? Would there be anything left in the Pacific besides discarded plastic bottles and dissolved heavy metals?
Read up on the sorts of people who actually invent stuff. Craziness is practically in the job description. Sane and well balanced people tend not to plunge their hands into the dark expanse of unknown things and feel around for years at a time. Occasionally they grip and pull, dragging objects of awesome power from the abyss.
This is only a terrifying exercise if you:
- Don’t have the common sense to throw the really monstrous things right back in when you come across them.
- Are confused about the game you’re playing (the subject of this essay) and hence:
- Confuse a ream of Christmas lights for awesome power because of their bright flashing colours.
- Pass over the real thing because it breaks with expectations.
We live in a bleak time and so I completely understand looking for things that aren’t there. If you’d like to change to a new era, however, genuinely new innovations are just the sort of things to get you there. I’m not saying that all presently investigated technologies currently known that could help us don’t work, though I am saying that most of the well hyped ones tend to be dead ends. I have seen, and hopefully will report upon in the coming years, dozens of actually feasible ways into futures much more beautiful and hospitable to humanity than anything I’ve found described in Science Fiction. There are indeed candidate ways to move billions of tonnes of asteroid material around the Solar System with which to construct whole new worlds. There are indeed ways in which humanity could turn itself to a life and culture of adventure and warmth, could cure itself from the numbness and self-containing futility of our age. I’ve loved the stories that used to be popular in Sci-Fi of days gone by. They were off sometimes but that’s not their fault, being heavily constrained by necessity: the further you look into the future the harder prognostication becomes. I tend to read between the lines, choosing things from them as bricks and mortar to construct the spirit of what I want. While I don’t know how to travel light years in a matter of hours I have every reason to believe that the full breadth of every wonderful alien culture and species you’ve seen on Star Trek and every show of this kind could fit into our Solar System a thousand times over, hiding amongst the moons and asteroids. There is nothing in the Laws of Physics as they are presently known that in any way restricts the existence of thousand foot dragons stalking the depths of Europa’s deep subsurface oceans, the genetically engineered constructions of mysterious mermaids dwelling in contemplation among their fluorescent coral reef cityscapes. Sky pirates hiding amongst the clouds of Venus, a pirouetting nuisance to the great floating cities there, endless virile competition pushing them to heights of physical prowess and genius. Colossal, ten kilometre long complexes of cryogenic tanks floating silently in the void like ghosts, bringing nitrogen ice from Pluto to feed the orbital habitats of the Inner System. A few hundred major new ideas were enough to take us from wood and sails to supersonic aircraft, atomic explosions, the Internet and Moon landings (with plenty more on the side to fill in the gaps of course). Is it really so impossible to imagine a few hundred more of these things being powerful enough to take us among the Stars?
Perhaps the engine that takes us to a future brighter than anything we can imagine is just around the corner, hiding on some random guy’s sketch pad.
My point, and central complaint, is that it almost certainly isn’t one of the ones currently hyped or given billions of dollars.
2024-03 (submitted 14/03/2024)
