And I was supposed to be thinking about the wealth that was going to come tumbling out of the sky to make that dream real—yes, wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. Nickel and iron, gold, silver and platinum, smelted in solar furnaces a kilometer across. I had my claim staked in the last great bonanza, and I was going to own the world. Well, I won't tell you I wasn't thinking about that. I'll admit there was a tear in my eye as I watched the ship streak skyward, but it was just a reaction to the dry desert wind. Nobody saw it, and if anyone had dared to suggest it was the sheer emotion of watching mankind finally reach out to claim the stars I would have called them a liar. I'm a lawyer. We call people liars all the time when we know it isn't true.
I pulled Julie tight to my side as the pillar of incandescent steam rose into the darkening sky and the ship faded to a tiny spark, lost among stars now beginning to twinkle. Beside us Brian looked down from the place where the ship had been. There was a long silence, then he pulled a little black box out of his pocket.
"Hey!" he said. "You guys have got to see this . . ."
The Science in the Story
Paul Chafe
Counting to 1023 on 10 Fingers
Brian's parlor trick is easy if you put in five minutes figuring it out. To start we'll learn to count to 255 on eight fingers. This leaves the thumbs out of the equation and is actually useful for doing hexadecimal math for computer work. The trick is to count in binary. This way each finger is a binary digit, 1 or 0 (a bit in computer terms). Your fingers represent these digits in number columns as follows:
128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
index middle ring pinky pinky ring middle index
Left Hand Right Hand
To represent a number, raise the fingers that add up to that number. For 5 you would raise the ring and index fingers of your right hand (4 + 1 = 5). For 100 you would raise the middle and ring fingers on your left hand and the ring finger on your right hand (64 + 32 + 4 = 100).
To count in binary, use the following three rules every time you want to increase the count by one.
1) Start with the 1's finger.
2) If a finger is raised, lower it and move to the next finger.
3) If a finger is lowered, raise it and stop.
So we start with all our fingers down and look at the right index finger—the 1's finger. It's lowered, so we follow rule 3, raise it and stop. Incredibly, we've counted to one. To count higher, we start again with the index finger. This time it's raised, so we lower it and move to the middle finger. It's lowered, so we raise it and stop. Be sure you're not facing anyone when you do this, as your gesture may be misinterpreted. This finger is worth two by itself. Leave the middle finger up, and go back to the first finger for the next count. It's lowered, so we raise it and stop, and we're left with both the 2's finger and the 1's finger upraised, for a total of three. The next go-round lowers both these fingers and raises the 4's finger, and so on. When all four fingers of the right hand are raised (total 15) the next cycle lowers them all and takes us to the pinky of the left hand (worth 16). Conveniently this allows each hand to represent one hexadecimal digit (a nybble). Both hands together represent a byte. The mathematically motivated will quickly figure out how to take ones and twos complements, subtract, multiply and divide, and add in the thumbs to get a count up to 1023.
Squishing Quarters
The journey from the electromagnets in your doorbell to nuclear fusion isn't quite so long as you'd think, and Brian's quarter squisher is an interesting waystation on the trip. The process of high-velocity magnetic metal-forming is actually an old and well-developed technology, although it is a fairly specialized one. The basic theory is simple. A metal disk or ring is placed inside a coil of wire, and a huge current is dumped through the coil from a big capacitor bank. The coil forms a magnetic field, and by induction induces a current in the edge of the metal disk. This secondary current generates its own magnetic field, which by Lentz' law must oppose the field which generated it. The opposing fields generate a reaction force between the disk and the coil, the disk is compressed inward and the coil expands outward. Make the currents large enough and this reaction force is enough to overcome the compressive strength of the metal. With high fields the collapse is very fast and symmetrical and excellent seals and cold welds can be created. This technique is used to close the sealing rings on Boeing 777 -landing-gear pistons, just for example.
As such magneforming is a clever but specialized industrial process, not really any more interesting than plasma arc welding or X-ray part inspection. However there are a few experimental enthusiasts who use huge capacitor banks and discharge coils to collapse quarters (and other coins), as well as perform other dramatic and potentially dangerous high-energy experiments of dubious utility. At the power levels available in home-brew setups the coin is usually just reduced in diameter and increased in thickness (the coil, which experiences an outward reaction force as strong as the inward force experienced by the coin, is usually blown into pieces). However, with higher powers and some clever control of the field geometry there is no reason they couldn't be collapsed into spheres. If we imagine even higher-field devices the possibilities become more interesting—magnetic confinement fusion uses a ring of magnets to confine a plasma, and magnetic target confinement fusion actually implodes a beer-can-sized container full of fusion fuel to compress it as well. Both are active areas of fusion-power research today. The fusion drive described in the story uses a similar technique, with a conductive disk of plasmized carbon and hydrogen standing in for the coin. If we are willing to sacrifice the coil (and perhaps the rest of the setup) in the effort then the ultimate limit to the compressive forces generated by this arrangement is governed only by the rise time of the current dumped through the coil and the length of time the coil manages to conduct that current before it fails. One-shot systems aren't practical for a fusion drive, but given strong enough materials and high enough fields magnetically driven implosion of fusion plasmas for power and thrust generation are a possibility.
Considering one-shot systems again, explosively driven field generators are under development as "soft" weapons to knock out electronic and electrical systems via electromagnetic pulse—as was done in the story with the fusion drive's power-storage ring. Such explosively driven systems are capable of producing tremendous fields and the use of these goes beyond soft weapons to serious fundamental research. Of course these fields could also produce tremendous, if brief, magnetic compressions. In fusion research this field overlaps with other forms of implosion, like those used to detonate nuclear weapons, which produce temperatures and pressures akin to the interior of a star. Given research done out of Earth's orbit with really large implosions we can imagine a whole new field of research dealing with materials compressed, at least briefly, to unimaginable densities—maybe white-dwarf or even neutron-star densities. The energy required to produce compressions like this is tremendous, but if the amount of material compressed is small enough it may not be impossible (whether this is practical or the best way to do this is an entirely separate question). It is appealing to consider creating a tiny, tame black hole through implosion, which would be an experimental tool of incalculable value in extending our understanding of space and time. Unlike a sample compressed to white-dwarf or neutron-star densities, which would violently decompress as soon as the compressing force was removed, material compressed to black-hole densities would be held in that state by its own gravitational field. However, all black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation, a quantum mechanical effect, and the lower the mass of the hole the faster it evaporates. The large black holes formed in supernovae evaporate so slowly as to be about as permanent a feature of the universe as can be imagined, but any mass that humans might conceivably contrive to compress into a black hole would certainly evaporate the instant it was formed—but we might well learn more about the structure of the universe in that instant than we have in all of previous recorded history.
Pervasive Su
rveillance
George Orwell predicted the totalitarian surveillance state in the prophetic 1984, which depicted a government perpetually at war to generate the social conditions necessary to impose its restrictions on every aspect of domestic personal life. The Orwellian surveillance state was a reality for those who lived in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, where the Gestapo and the KGB enjoyed complete freedom to wiretap and bug private citizens as well as cause the disappearance of those who opposed the regime, but it was postwar East Germany that developed the most intrusive (if not the most brutal) police state in history. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Ministry for State Security) directly employed nearly one in fifty East Germans as either officers or paid informants, and some estimate that their unofficial (unpaid) informant network may have involved over ten percent of the population. Friends, colleagues, husbands and wives, parents and children spied on each other and reported to the secret police. The repression of dissent and omnipresent fear that living in such a surveillance society engenders is well documented and needs no repeating here. However, it is important to note that the East German situation is probably as intrusive as it is possible for a police state to become. Surveillance requires manpower to process the data gathered, and the problem becomes one of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—who shall watch the watchers? There is an upper limit to the amount of watching that can be done before the state starts to bog down under the demands of the surveillance regime. It is also important to note that even the almost complete pervasion of East German society by the Stasi was not enough to prevent the collapse of the East German government when the Berlin Wall fell. The historical record shows that repressive regimes inevitably engender their own destruction, a lesson seemingly lost on governments in general, which seem to have an almost automatic reflex to extend their control over their populations.
In the Western world surveillance technology has progressed a long way from the days when an eavesdropper was someone who literally hung from the eaves of a building in order to overhear the private conversations going on inside. We have grown accustomed to the constant overwatch of surveillance cameras, in banks, in shopping malls, and convienience stores, in government buildings, office buildings and apartment buildings and airports, on highways, at intersections and in parking lots. East Germany was not wealthy enough to afford this largesse of video cameras (which have only become relatively cheap in the last ten years anyway), but even if it had been it is doubtful this would have changed things much. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes holds as well for video surveillance as for informers—it is not enough to simply gather the information, it must be processed, and it is here that the bottleneck occurs in any surveillance system, or in fact in any intelligence system. Because of this basic fact most of the cameras that watch us go through our daily lives just flash our image in front of bored security guards or store it on grainy videotape to be overwritten the next day. Only if we are unfortunate enough to be involved in some sort of incident (or be caught doing something embarrassing) will the evidence see the light of day—hopefully just on a TV reality show but potentially in a court of law.
This reassuring limit on the surveillance state changes when the need for a human watcher is eliminated. Computer image-processing techniques now allow a person's facial fingerprint to be stored in a database. An unattended video camera can then scan a crowd and the computer can pinpoint individuals whose faces appear in the database as they appear in the scene. Depending on the details of the system other cameras can then be brought to bear, tracking the target through the crowd. Systems like this are already in use in London, England, and Miami, Florida, at the Superbowl and other large public events, and soon they will be widespread. More advanced systems are able to identify specific activities and categorize them as suspicious or not. As the price and size of both computing and video equipment continues to fall it is perhaps inevitable that computer automated surveillance will become even more ubiquitous than human monitored surveillance is today.
Of course automated video surveillance is only the most obvious of a growing host of mass tracking technologies that allow a tremendously detailed picture of an individual's life to be built up. Every single one of the technologies detailed in the story exists in working form today and the government's Total Information Awareness program intends to pull all the threads together to build the big picture. Luxury cars and rental fleets now routinely have satellite tracking systems installed in them. The purpose is to prevent theft (and speeding), but the system can also be used to track the car's legitimate owner at will. Telephone companies have the not-well-publicized ability to individually triangulate and track any switched-on cell phone, even when it isn't being used for a call, and when a call is made the location it was made from is recorded along with the rest of the call billing information. Soon biometric chips scanning finger or retina prints will control access to buildings, vehicles and even personal computers and cell phones. This will ensure that only legitimate users have this access—but also provide detailed tracking information as to an individual's whereabouts. Proposed legislation would change the Internet email system to positively verify the identity of every person using an email address. The espoused purpose is to eliminate spam, but the system would also effectively destroy electronic anonymity, allowing every email to be tracked to a specific individual. Perhaps the most effective high-technology tracking device is the simple instabank card. With direct electronic funds transfer rapidly replacing cash, every purchase an individual makes is logged into the bank's (and the seller's) computer system. When cash becomes an anachronism every transaction will be traceable.
It is likely that most of this surveillance will not be done by federal government agencies but by private corporations and, to a lesser extent, by local and state police agencies. However, the search targets in the databases will almost certainly come from records held by the federal government, and various laws (notably the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism bill passed in the wake of September 11th) allows the government almost unlimited access to private data in corporate databases, on demand and without a subpoena. This confluence of government and corporate control is a disturbing development because each has different areas of power that reinforce each other. The legal never-neverland that John and Julie found themselves caught in also exists today, thanks to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Patriot Act. Innocent individuals who have been unfortunate enough to fit government profiles (by, for example, buying one-way train tickets with cash and looking Arabic) have been arrested and held incommunicado in solitary confinement for months.
Due process of law demands certain stringent standards of proof, but addition to a government watch list requires no proof at all—there is no accusastion of crime involved, merely generalized suspicion. Private companies are under no obligation to provide service to any given individual. Of course private companies are also under no obligation to pay attention to government watch lists, but any company which does so would undertake a tremendous liability risk if something went wrong, and we can expect that most companies will use them for this reason if for no other, denying service to those the government deems suspect. Experience with government no-fly lists distributed to airlines after September 11th shows that these lists contain large numbers of law-abiding citizens, from gun control opponents to civil rights activists, whose only crime seems to be standing in opposition to federal government policy (as yet no bona fide terrorists have been arrested as a result of the no-fly program). When automated video surveillance becomes widespread individuals on government watch lists may find themselves denied entry to stores and malls, refused banking services and public transportation, perhaps even denied entrance to their place of work (if their employer rents space in an office building owned by another company). Such individuals would be effectively expunged from everyday life, with no recourse whatsoever under current law.
In the West we e
njoy a strong tradition of democracy and hold individual rights and freedoms as sacrosanct, and the right to personal privacy is foremost among them. It is tempting to assume that we will always enjoy these freedoms, but we cannot take them for granted. It is important to remember that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected and used a series of self-generated "emergencies" (most notably the burning of the Weimar German parliament, the Reichstag) to extend his power until he reigned as dictator. The excesses of Joe McCarthy, Herbert Hoover, the Iran-Contra conspiracy and the Clinton FBI file scandal show that our own systems are not immune to manipulation by those who might use them abusively. It is important to address the issues of both terrorism and more conventional crime, but it is also important to keep them in perspective. September 11th was a horrendous attack, but it killed fewer people than die in a typical month of car accidents on American highways or in a week due to tobacco smoke diseases in American hospitals. Despite repeated alerts there has not been a terrorist attack since then, presumably despite the best efforts of the terrorists. (The anthrax attacks that followed September 11th were traced to an American bioweapons facility and the investigation is now focusing on individual government scientists employed there.)
There is always a trade-off to be made between collective security and personal freedom, but the equation is not simple and less freedom does not automatically lead to more security. Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had very low crime rates and no terrorism whatsoever, but this did not contribute to the collective security of their citizens. In January 2003 the proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act was leaked from the Department of Justice (who at the time were denying that any such legislation was under consideration). Commonly known as Patriot II, the DSE act introduces measures which give the government the effectively unlimited right to spy on, arrest and detain indefinitely and in secret any person suspected of terrorism—but then goes on to broaden the definition of terrorism to include the commission of any crime, or even unknowingly assisting in the commission of any crime. Significantly, Patriot II would allow the government to strip the citizenship of any such person, leaving them vulnerable to the draconian provisions already applicable to non-citizens suspected of terrorism in the already passed Patriot I, including unlimited detention without charge, secret trial by military tribunal, and secret execution. These are the ground rules of a totalitarian state. Combined with the advent of pervasive surveillance technology these measures would give the government powers of control that Stalin and Hitler could only dream of. Power flows from the muzzle of a gun. Freedom flows from the refusal of a people to allow their rulers too much power.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 30