Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now

January 16, 2012 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Last week we asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112. From BBC News

1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)

IP: Likelihood 10/10. We will need to feed 10 billion people and nature can’t keep up with demand, so we will need much more ocean farming for fish. But algae farming is also on the way for renewable energy, and maybe even for growth of feedstock (raw materials) or resource extraction via GM seaweed or algae.

PT: Good chance. According to Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the Nasa Langley Research Center, saltwater algae that’s been genetically modified to absorb more nitrogen from the air than conventional algae could free up to 68% of the fresh water that is now tied up in conventional agriculture. This water could go to thirsty populations.

2. We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)

IP: Likelihood 10/10. Transmission will be just as easy as other forms of brain augmentation. Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net.

PT: Good chance. Synthetic telepathy sounds like something out of Hollywood but it is absolutely possible, so long as “communication” is understood to be electrical signals rather than words.

3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal (game_over)

IP: Likelihood 9/10. It is more likely that direct brain links using electronics will achieve this, but GM will help a lot by increasing longevity – keeping people alive until electronic immortality technology is freely available at reasonable cost.

PT: Good chance. The idea that breakthroughs in the field of genetics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence will expand human intelligence and allow our species to essentially defeat death is sometimes called the Singularity.

4. We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. There is already some weather control technology for mediating tornadoes, making it rain and so on, and thanks to climate change concerns, a huge amount of knowledge is being gleaned on how weather works. We will probably have technology to be able to control weather when we need to. It won’t necessarily be cheap enough to use routinely and is more likely to be used to avoid severe damage in key areas.

PT: Good chance. We will certainly attempt to. A majority of scientists in the US support a federal programme to explore methods for engineering the Earth’s climate (otherwise known as geoengineering). These technologies aim to protect against the worst effects of manmade climate change.

5. Antarctica will be “open for business” (Dev 2)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. The area seems worth keeping as a natural wilderness so I am hesitant here, but I do expect that pressure will eventually mean that some large areas will be used commercially for resources. It should be possible to do so without damaging nature there if the technology is good enough, and this will probably be a condition of exploration rights.

PT: Pretty close. Before there is a rush to develop Antarctica we will most likely see a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. Whether the Arctic states tighten control over the region’s resources, or find equitable and sustainable ways to share them will be a major political challenge in the decades ahead. Successful (if not necessarily sustainable) development of the Arctic portends well for the development of Antarctica.

6. One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. This is very plausible. We are already seeing electronic currency that can be used anywhere, and this trend will continue. It is quite likely that there will be only a few regional currencies by the middle of the century and worldwide acceptance of a global electronic currency. This will gradually mean the others fall out of use and only one will left by the end of the century.

PT: Great try! The trend on this is actually more in the opposite direction. The internet is enabling new forms of bartering and value exchange. Local currencies are also now used by several hundred communities across the US and Europe. In other words, look for many more types of currency and exchange not fewer, in the coming decades.

7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)

IP: Likelihood 10/10. We can expect this as soon as 2050 for many people. By 2075 most people in the developed world will use machine augmentation of some sort for their brains and, by the end of the century, pretty much everyone will. If someone else does this you will have to compete.

8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)

PT: Good chance. Right now, medical nanorobots exist only in theory and nanotechnology is mostly a materials science. But it’s a rapidly growing field. Nanorobots exist within the realm of possibility, but the question of when they will arrive is another matter

IP: Likelihood: 7/10.

9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)

IP: Likelihood 10/10. This is likely by 2045-2050 and almost certain by 2100. It’s widely predicted that we will achieve this. What difference it makes will depend on what other energy technologies we have. We might also see a growth in shale gas or massive solar energy facilities. I don’t think that wind power will be around.

10. There will only be three languages in the world – English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. This does look like a powerful trend, other languages don’t stand a lot of chance. Minor languages are dying at a huge rate already and the other major ones are mostly in areas where everyone educated speaks at least one of the other three. Time frame could be this century.

11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. This seems inevitable to those of us in the West and is likely to mean different kinds of marriages being available to everyone. Gay people might pick different options from heterosexual people, but everyone will be allowed any option. Some regions will be highly resistant though because of strong religious influences, so it isn’t certain.

12. California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. There are some indications already that California wants to split off and such pressures tend to build over time. It is hard to see this waiting until the end of the century. Maybe an East Coast cluster will want to break off too. Pressures come from the enormous differences in wealth generation capability, and people not wanting to fund others if they can avoid it.

13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)

IP: Likelihood 8/10. First space elevators will certainly be around, and although “cheap” is a relative term, it will certainly be a lot cheaper than conventional space development. It will create a strong acceleration in space development and tourism will be one important area, but I doubt the costs will be low enough for most people to try.

14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)

PT: Pretty close. At the very least, more couples are choosing advanced fertility techniques over old-fashioned conception. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, in which an artificially inseminated embryo is carefully selected among other inseminated embryos for desirability, is becoming increasingly common in fertility clinics. Using this technique, it’s now possible to screen an embryo for about half of all congenital illnesses. Within the next decade, researchers will be able to screen for almost all congenital illnesses prior to embryo implantation.

IP: Likelihood 5/10.

15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world’s natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)

PT: Pretty close. I cannot comment on the museums but the Earth is on the verge of a significant species extinction event. Protecting biodiversity in a time of increased resource consumption, overpopulation, and environmental degradation will require continued sacrifice on the part of local, often impoverished communities. Experts contend that incorporating local communities’ economic interests into conservation plans will be essential to species protection in the next century.

IP: Likelihood 2/10.

16. Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)

IP: Likelihood 7/10. Desert greening is progressing so this is just about possible.

17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)

IP: Likelihood 6/10. I think we will certainly see some weaker forms of marriage that are designed to last a decade or two rather than a whole lifetime, but traditional marriage will still be an option. Increasing longevity is the key – if you marry at 20 and live to well over 100, that is far too long a commitment. People will want marriages that aren’t necessarily forever, but don’t bankrupt them when they end.

18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)

PT: Great try! However, I think that the trend is in the direction of more sovereign nations rather than fewer. In the coming years, corporations or wealthy private citizens will attempt to use earth-moving technologies to build their own semi-sovereign entities in international waters.

IP: Likelihood 2/10.

19. War by the West will be fought totally by remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)

IP: Likelihood 5/10.

20. Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)

IP: Likelihood 7/10. Well, possible, but not as likely as some other trends.

You can continue to contribute to the debate on Twitter using the hashtag #100yearpredictions. Ian Pearson is a future technology consultant and conference speaker. Patrick Tucker is spokesperson for the World Future Society and deputy editor of The Futurist magazine.

Filed Under: SCIENCE, WILD CARDS

Love Among the Equations | Cocktail Party Physics

September 29, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

By Jennifer Ouellette | September 29, 2011 | Comments7

NOTE: Four years ago on this date, the Time Lord and I officially tied the knot. I wrote the piece below last fall, as The Calculus Diaries was coming out, but it didn’t really seem to fit anywhere –too “math-y” for the mainstream, too intensely personal for your average science publication, and honestly, still kind of a work in progress. But in the spirit of the blog as “writing lab,” it seems appropriate to post it here, on our fourth anniversary, as a way of saying thanks to the man who irrevocably changed my life … for the better. Here’s to many more years to come. 

Shortly after becoming engaged, my now-husband and I drove from a conference in San Francisco to our new home in Los Angeles via the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel just north of Malibu and found ourselves admiring the brilliant orange, red, and purple hues stretching across the darkening horizon, savoring the peaceful sound of ocean waves lapping against the shore.

Against this idyllic Hallmark moment, Sean put his arms around me, pressed his cheek to mine, and gently whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?”

A Fourier transform is a mathematical equation that takes a complex wave of any kind – water, sound, light, even the gravitational waves that permeate the fabric of space time – and breaks it down into its component parts to reveal the full spectrum of “colors” that are otherwise hidden from human perception.

Another woman might have been taken aback by Sean injecting a bit of cold hard math into the warm hues of a romantic ocean sunset – talk about over-analyzing the scene and spoiling the mood! Me? I found it charming, yet another intriguing color in the spectrum that makes up this multifaceted man with whom I have chosen to share my life.

My husband is a theoretical physicist. He spends his days pondering big questions about space, time, and the origins of the universe. It’s not just Fourier transforms that lurk in the nooks and crannies of our marriage. Our pillow talk includes animated discussions about Boltzmann brains, the rules of time travel, poker, phase transitions, and the possibility of a multiverse: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes out there, beyond our ken, perhaps containing carbon copies of ourselves – the same, and yet somehow different.

I have issues with this concept, especially when I’m sleepy: all those universes filled with doppelgangers cluttering up the landscape just strikes me as crowded and untidy. But Sean wrestles with these questions all the time, and is adamant in his defense. “It’s infinity,” he reassures me. “It’s not like we’ll run out of room!” I guess the multiverse has unlimited storage space.

I wasn’t looking to fall in love, and never imagined I would be a wife. Years of failed relationships had convinced me that I had no gift for making love work. My romantic calculations seemed doomed to failure, always slightly off, never quite yielding the right combination, no matter how intricately I manipulated the numbers.

By the time Sean entered my orbit, my heart had been broken into little pieces and reassembled so many times, I was convinced the telltale cracks would never fully heal. I gave up on dating, buried myself in work and told myself it was better this way. I built a thick wall around my heart and guarded the perimeter zealously.

Love stole back into my life, ninja-like, while I was looking the other way. Sean is a scientist, and I am a science writer, but our day-to-day lives were like parallel lines that never met. Our paths didn’t cross until we discovered each other’s blogs online. We quickly formed an online friendship, both recognizing a kindred spirit across the vast expanse of Cyberspace. Two months and many emails later, we arranged to meet over dinner at a physics conference in Dallas.

Physicists are often unfairly characterized as absent-minded geniuses, socially inept, with zero fashion sense, a la Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.  It’s an exaggeration, but there is a tiny element of truth to that. So I was pleasantly surprised when a tall, lanky man with boyish good looks and an engaging smile appeared in the hotel bar, sporting jeans and a casual-yet-chic jacket. This was not your stereotypical physicist.

He ordered a martini. “I’d like to taste the vermouth,” he instructed the bartender. (He is a man who takes his cocktails seriously.) We chatted about science, art, music, and books, with the odd foray into personal details and more philosophical musings. A first date is usually fraught with self-conscious anxiety, as each person strives to present only the most flattering colors in their personal spectrum — preferably through a soft-focus lens. But we had an instant rapport, an easy familiarity from our electronic exchanges that translated effortlessly into “meat space.” By the end of the evening, I was smitten, and happily, the feeling was mutual.

We defied the geographical distance, racking up countless frequent flyer miles. Six months after that first encounter, he proposed, and a year later, I found myself married and living in sunny southern California. I felt as if I’d stepped into an alternate universe where the calculations of love had finally worked out in my favor. I had become my own doppelganger.

With my new life came a new appreciation for the secret language of scientists: mathematics. Like many people, I had steadfastly avoided all things math since high school. My eyes glazed over at the merest glimpse of an equation. I was convinced it was irrelevant to my life – or at the very least, unnecessary.

But now that life featured a man who left technical papers scattered about the house, filled with mysterious symbols that might encode the secrets of the universe. Our living room boasted a white board with a constantly changing parade of scrawled equations, and our groaning bookshelves now included massive tomes on quantum mechanics and general relativity.

The deep, technical aspects of his work was the one part of Sean’s life that was truly closed to me, although as someone who writes about physics for a living, I certainly grasped the basic concepts — far more than the average non-physicist. But if I wanted to appreciate the full spectrum of the man I’d married, I would have to learn a little bit more of his language. So I resolved to overcome my longstanding kneejerk rejection of all things numerical and teach myself the basics of calculus.

Sean was patience personified during my quest, explaining basic concepts, leaving practice problems on our white board every morning for me to solve, and artfully dodging the occasional bit of metaphorical heaved crockery whenever I hit a frustrating obstacle (“Integrate that!”). The frustration was real: Our communication gap when it came to math was a yawning chasm at the outset. Often I didn’t even know how to phrase my questions in a way he could comprehend.

Slowly, surely, that gap began to close as he helped me see that equations were all around me. We found calculus in the rides at Disneyland, and the exquisite architecture of Antoni Gaudi. We went to Vegas, learned to shoot craps, and Sean tutored me in the calculus of probability (and a spot of game theory for good measure). Even our quest to buy a house became fodder for exploration.

It turns out that the world is filled with hidden connections, recurring patterns, and intricate details that can only be seen through math-colored glasses. Those abstract symbols hold meaning.  How could I ever have thought it was irrelevant?

This is what I have learned from loving a physicist. Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.

I will never listen to ocean waves or view the setting sun in quite the same way again. I looked out over the water that evening and saw a picture-perfect ocean sunset, but there was so much more that I missed. Sean looked out onto the same scene and saw the rich complexity of nature expressed in mathematical symbols, the fundamental abstract order lying just beneath the surface. And through his eyes, I can now catch a glimpse of that hidden world — proof that love can transform you just as surely as the Fourier equation transforms a seemingly simple ray of white light into shimmering technicolor.

Happy anniversary, Time Lord!

Jennifer OuelletteAbout the Author: Jennifer Ouellette is a recovering English major turned science writer who loves to indulge her inner geek by finding quirky connections between physics, popular culture, and the world at large. Follow on Twitter  @JenLucPiquant.

More »

Filed Under: CULTURE, SCIENCE

Wired Science – The Cutting-Edge Physics of a Crumpled Paper Ball

August 24, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

“Crush a piece of typing paper into the size of a golf ball, and suddenly it becomes a very stiff object. The thing to realize is that it’s 90 percent air, and it’s not that you designed architectural motifs to make it stiff. It did it itself,” said physicist Narayan Menon of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It became a rigid object. This is what we are trying to figure out: What is the architecture inside that creates this stiffness?”

Menon’s expedition into the shadowy heart of a crumpled sheet — of aluminum foil, to be precise — was undertaken with fellow Amherst physicist Anne Dominique Cambou and published in an August 23 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article. The pair think they’ve mapped the mathematical underpinnings of its rigidity.

 

The geometry of a conically distorted sheet of paper, painted and viewed through cross-polarized lenses that reveal subtle variations in wavelengths of reflected light. Cerda et al./Nature. 

Of course, it may seem surprising that a balled-up sheet of paper or foil should contort itself beyond knowledge. But Menon noted that when physicists finally described the precise dynamics of conical crumpling, which you can achieve by laying a sheet of paper over a coffee cup and poking down with one finger, it was regarded as a mathematical tour-de-force.

A crumpled cone is a far simpler example of the tendencies that produce a crumpled ball: when a flat plane is subjected to distortional stress but only permitted to bend, not stretch, it transforms suddenly and unpredictably into a landscape of folds and facets, each representing an entirely new surface. It’s what researchers call a “far from equilibrium” process, guided by strange rules and non-linear effects. The mechanics of an individual crease are understood, but when physicists try to predict where that crease will appear or how it will influence the next, understanding goes dim.

Trying to peer inside a crumpled ball by simulating the process in three dimensions is “mathematically nasty,” a problem that quickly pushes lab-grade computers to their limits, said Menon. And trying to reverse-engineer structure from patterns revealed upon unfolding just isn’t possible. What happens in a crumpled ball stays in a crumpled ball.

‘I love it that these simple-looking problems are so nasty sometimes.’

“If you’re not talking about simulation, but mathematical understanding of these things, that’s one step harder,” said Menon. “We understand the underlying equations of the mechanics of a thin sheet very well. Those have been around for a century. But solving those equations, to produce a physical understanding, is difficult even in simple cases. If you’re talking about a structure that owes its properties to 1,000 or more of these structures, interacting in complicated ways, that’s asking more than we can do now.”

To look into crumpled balls, Menon and Cambou used X-ray microtomography, an imaging technique that, like a medical CT scan, assembles three-dimensional images from thousands of two-dimensional, cross-section snapshots. They imaged dozens of balls of different sizes, searching for statistical patterns in their internal geometries.

Internal snapshot of a simulated crumpled plastic sheet. Tallinen et al./Nature 

They found that a crumpled ball is most dense in its outer regions, and least dense in its core. Once inside its folds, there’s no way of knowing from their shape which direction is out and which is in (as, for example, one can determine from an onion, which has layers of skin arranged in curves parallel to its outer surface.) “If I was a creature that lived inside this ball, could I make my way out by looking at the way things are arranged? The answer is no,” said Menon.

When he and Cambou studied arrangements of creases and folds, they found a distinctive pattern. Planes often lie flat against other planes. “It’s a fairly uniform object, though you’ve created it by a random, not-so-uniform process,” said Menon. “That’s the most surprising thing. There is no real geometrical reason why things should stack and layer in that way.” But if the researchers don’t know why this happens, they can speculate as to its effect: strength.

Multiple layers of a thin sheet soon become walls. Per the lack-of-orientation observation, these walls are aligned in thousands of random directions. Press down and, from any angle, you’re pressing against down columns. “It can resist being crushed in all different directions,” said Menon.

To explore why this happens, he and Cambou are now using transparent plastic sheets to make three-dimensional movies of crumpling. The implications extend far beyond Menon’s lab. “You’ve heard of crumple zones,” he said. “I’m just as interested in understanding leaves, or thin membranes of animal tissue, or the conformation of the Earth’s crust when it’s folded into mountains. I love it that these simple-looking problems are so nasty sometimes.”

Images: 1) Reconstructed cross-section image of a foil ball approximately 4 inches in diameter. (Menon & Cambou/PNAS) 2) Turinboy/Flickr

 

http://summify.com/story/TlK1B8e3iSFLCc9K/www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/crumpled-paper-physics/

Filed Under: SCIENCE

BBC News – Antimatter belt around Earth discovered by Pamela craft

August 18, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth’s magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped “normal” matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) – launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System – so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these “daughter” particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth’s magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela’s goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

‘Abundant source’

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.

False colour bubble chamber image of antiproton/proton annihilation Antiprotons “annihilate” if they come into contact with normal protons

The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place – at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they “annihilate” in a flash of light.

Although normal matter particles outweigh the antiprotons by thousands to one, the band is “the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth”, said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

“Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism,” he told BBC News.

“Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced.”

Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft – an idea explored in a report for Nasa’s Institute for Advanced Concepts.

 

Filed Under: SCIENCE, WILD CARDS

On Discovering Life. by Dimitar Sasselov

July 21, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Two separate quests, one to discover habitable worlds, the other to synthesize artificial organisms, now unite to redefine “life” and its place in the universe.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has begun refining our understanding of the fabric of space and time, and NASA’s Kepler mission is sharpening our estimates of how common Earth-like planets are in our galaxy. Yet as these cosmic-scale projects open the second decade of the new millennium they are returning science to a frontier that seems oddly 19th century. Science is going back to the scale of life—that middle ground of minute energies and high complexities that lies between the immense galaxies and the infinitesimal particles.

My statement that life is science’s new focus sounds naive and out-of-touch—after all, just open the newspapers or see the research budgets for biology and medicine, and you’ll notice an overwhelming amount of interest and funding for the life sciences. But that all has to do with us humans: first and foremost, with our health and bodies, and second, with our environment, the ecosystems of planet Earth. There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The roll call of early pioneers and prospectors is notable, but short. Fortunately, increasing numbers of researchers are now re-entering this fertile frontier.

The open secret of this emerging frontier is that we do not have a fundamental definition or understanding of life. Similarly, we do not understand life’s origins, how life emerges from chemistry. We do know that the chemistry of life on Earth, or “Terran” biochemistry for short, is rather restrictive in its molecular permutations. Unnecessarily so, it seems, given the enormous choice of good options provided by chemistry for building biological bodies and functions. However, we do not know whether nature or nurture is the reason. The bio-chemistry we see (and are!) could be universal, like gravity, where the same basic rules apply anywhere. Or our biochemistry could instead be one of many options, one that just happened to fit Earth’s environmental conditions.

The question of alternative biochemistries, learning whether they are possible or not, now appears tractable, and though this does not directly answer the big questions of life’s definition and origins, it represents a giant leap in the right direction. Of course, looking blindly for possible pathways to Terran or to alternative biochemistries would be a depressingly pointless endeavor, given the seemingly infinite possibilities. But if we assume that the emergence of life in general is a planetary phenomenon, then the possible geochemical environments within and outside our solar system are constrained by planetary science and astrophysics. These disciplines allow us to estimate both the initial conditions on early Earth for the pathway to Terran biochemistry, as well as conditions in other planetary systems for any alternative biochemistries.

Two simultaneous but distinct approaches have defined the work on the origins and biochemical diversity of life. One approach is from within, following paths that begin with existing Terran biochemistry and move away from its set of molecules and networks in search for alternatives. The other approach is from outside, following paths from plausible prebiotic initial conditions. Both approaches have scored recent breakthroughs. John Sutherland’s lab (University of Manchester), in a brilliant example of systems chemistry, has performed a synthesis of nucleotides—building blocks of genetic molecules like DNA and RNA—in which two of a nucleotide’s crucial parts, the base and the sugar, emerge as a single unit under natural conditions. Moving in the opposite direction, George Church’s lab at Harvard has achieved the successful synthesis of functioning ribosomes—the molecular machines that read genetic code and make the proteins for cells.

Today scientists have learned how to write genetic code, and as described by J. Craig Venter, such state-of-the-art biotechnology work is “creating software that makes its own hardware.” Venter said this in 2008 when reporting his team’s successful artificial transformation of one bacterium species into another. The synthesis of ribosomes of your choice is a big deal, because, to borrow computer jargon, it allows you to change the “operating system” when writing new genetic code. The next major step beyond modifying Terran organisms is to create alternative biochemistries and entirely new trees of life.

One example of an alternative biochemistry that is both intuitive and relatively close to fruition is the case of “mirror” life—that is, life with biochemistry essentially identical to our own, but composed of molecules of the opposite chirality, or “handedness.” Terran biochemistry is based exclusively on proteins built from “left-handed” amino acids; for balance, all Terran sugars are right-handed. Scientists understand why organisms can’t be chirally ambidextrous, with equal parts left- and right-handed proteins, but nobody knows whether the left-versus-right choice is a matter of chance or necessity. Alternative ideas to explain Terran life’s left-handedness have been proposed, ranging from a deeply rooted asymmetry in the fundamental forces of nature to astronomical factors like the polarization of starlight. Armed with the newly learned skills to synthesize ribosomes at will, researchers are now attempting to create mirror life in hopes of testing these theories.

But even a simple and somewhat familiar alternative biochemistry like mirror life will not lead to an artificial life form without the necessary next step of “compartmentalization.” This is a fancy way of saying that any self-sustaining biochemistry needs a container to hold it. On Earth, cells are the containers—their semi-permeable membranes encapsulate all the biochemical machinery life needs. Jack Szostak’s lab at Harvard has shown how these membranes can naturally form to create “protocells” and how these protocells can even spontaneously reproduce by splitting into two and more protocells. Szostak’s constructs seem tantalizingly close to real cells. If protocells like these can be reliably paired with a fully-functional mirror biochemistry, the first truly alien life form may not come from a distant planet, but from a petri dish in a research lab. Unless an unexpected obstacle awaits us, this could happen in the next couple of years.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t study distant planets to inform our laboratory studies of alternative biochemistries. Compared to the diversity of possible planetary systems suggested by theoretical models, our own solar system appears to offer a very limited set of planetary geochemical environments for us to sample. Astronomers are now rapidly discovering entirely new classes of planets orbiting other stars. One kind in particular—rocky planets with two to 10 times the mass of Earth—is turning up seemingly everywhere we look. These so-called “super-Earths” probably have characteristics quite different from our own planet, but they may very well be cradles for forms of life with exotic biochemistries. Across the light-years, we may soon study these bizarre planets for global signs of life. These studies will inform our efforts in the lab, and vice versa, in a self-reinforcing process that leads towards understanding the cosmic conditions for life.

Whatever we end up learning, it is bound to transform our world in at least two ways. First, the technology that comes out of it is going to be powerful. Similar to how the 20th century brought us synthesis in chemistry, the 21st is bringing a synthesis in biology, with all the requisite implications for new materials, therapies, industries, and applications we cannot yet predict. The second impact, which has no parallel in synthetic chemistry, is nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of life and its place in the cosmos. It remains uncertain how we shall have to adjust our worldview, as we’ve yet to see whether extraterrestrial life is rare or ubiquitous—but either way, the implications will be earthshaking.

Dimitar Sasselov is the director of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University.

Filed Under: SCIENCE

Larry Brilliant: Enabling sustainable humanity through getting serious about risk. By Andrew Maynard

May 30, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

[Transcript]

I’ve occasionally been accused of thinking big when it comes to Risk Science. So I was rather chuffed to hear former Executive Director of Google.org Larry Brilliant out-big me on every point as he delivered the 10th Peter M. Wege lecture here at the University of Michigan a couple of weeks ago.

Larry was talking about sustainable humanity, and the need to actively work toward a global society that overcomes problems (some old, some emerging) and continues to get better. But threaded through the lecture was the theme of risk, and the urgent need we face to become more educated and informed on the risks that humanity faces, and how together we can overcome them.

Many of the themes that emerged are near and dear to my heart, and are reflected in the Risk Science Center’s vision – enabling evidence-based and socially-responsive action on human health risks in a rapidly changing world. In fact, the lecture and Larry’s following answers to questions were so relevant to the Center that I felt like saying – next time someone asked what we were about – to simply say “what he said!”

Much of this was encapsulated in the following response to a question from Larry following the lecture:

We need a whole new generation of leaders, leaders who are cross-trained in governance, who understand risk literacy, who can communicate complex problems in simple ways, who truly believe in democracy, and who are willing to engage with their constituents in a way that ups the conversation. So people know what the hell they’re voting for. And what the consequences and the risks that they’re taking on. We’ve reached the stage where the public is being used as if it were the ultimate re-insurer. What happens when a nuclear power plant us built on an earthquake fault and things go bad? It’s paid for by the tax payers in ways that we haven’t contemplated. Who has done the risk cost benefit analysis of continuing to use fossil fuels? So these are not things that we normally train students with. It’s a shame but I think that the three “r’s” of reading, writing and arithmetic must have a fourth “r” added: risk; as we understand the ever-more risky world that we have inherited and the complex interrelated-ness of the factors that lead to it.

Of course, enabling sustainable humanity is about far more than risk. But, as Larry so eloquently indicated, we neglect developing a deep and sophisticated understanding of risk and how we should be responding to it at our peril.

Read more: http://2020science.org/2011/04/01/larry-brilliant-enabling-sustainable-humanity-through-getting-serious-about-risk/#ixzz1NsDoKTSE

Filed Under: SCIENCE, WILD CARDS

Can Science Eliminate Disease?

May 4, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Written by Hammad Azzam

Aubrey de Gray: You can live to 1,000.

The molecular dance in biological beings is one of the most fascinating orchestrations in the micro-world, and the processes governing this tango are unanimously acknowledged to be mysteriously byzantine. Medicine, which is mainly the act of mending such processes, was until recently a glorious form of trial-and-error, augmented by a web of probabilistic models that output the creation of treatments.

The Medicine of our times, however, is going through a fundamental transformation. We are beginning to peer into the molecular domain, acquiring in-depth details of the functions of the cell and formulating theories that describe the intricate pathways of the biological universe. Medicine is essentially starting to move from the traditional guesswork format to a science based on understanding and modeling the molecular behavior of the organic world.

And like with any other transformation, there are those that can take it to the extreme. Consider, for example, Aubrey de Grey. He is a computer science engineer turned gerontologist (a medical field focused on combating aging) who wrote a book titled Ending Aging outlining an agenda that could extend the human lifespan by an order of magnitude, and at the same time inject youth’s energy into that extended life. Aubrey is after the fountain of youth and he thinks it’s attainable in our lifetime. In fact, on the back cover of his book he declares that many people alive today could live to be a thousand years.

At first sight, this might seem eccentric and even borderline delusional. Stubborn diseases are as stubborn as they have ever been; debilitating and terminal illnesses like Alzheimer’s are still killing people in masses; paralysis is irrecoverable and cancer is so horribly scary that some people refuse to say the word when they refer to the disease. It might feel that we are helpless when it comes to creating new cures, but things are starting to change.

Take for example Alzheimer’s. Elan and other pharmaceutical companies have been pursuing tracks to eradicate the disease altogether with vaccines. Northwestern University School of Medicine Researchers Christopher Bissonnette and Jack Kessler converted stem cells (general cells in the bone marrow) into brain cells that can be used to replace damaged neurons. Star Scientific discovered a compound in nicotine that could eradicate Beta Amyloid deposits, believed to be the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s. In addition, Techniques like Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) are going to unravel the mystery of the neuron jungle. Neuroscientists will be able to produce micro-detailed movies (not images) of the brain, in correlation with patients’ real life experiences. The second decade of the twenty-first century will be the decade of the brain. Scientists will discover in a year more about that black box than was done in the past few decades. We could come to understand what makes us understand and abstract abstraction itself. Brain treatments will be the most natural outcome.

Another example of the deep impacts that scientists have made in medicine is with nervous system injuries (paralysis, blindness, deafness, etc). It is common knowledge that once a nerve suffers extreme damage, there is no coming back, be it through a broken neck, a severed back, or optical nerve impairment. Once the nerve is damaged, the delivery mechanism is completely arrested. In the not so distant future, that will start changing.

According to Anthony Atala, an authority in Regenerative Medicine, building an organ will be “like baking a cake”. His recent TED Conference lecture was highlighted by a video that showed a 3D organ printing process. “It takes about seven hours to print a kidney” he proclaims and then he shows the audience a fresh out of the oven actual kidney printed by a 3D organ printer while he was presenting!

Marry that with Embryonic Stem Cell research (which works by taking embryonic cells at the very early phase of fertilization, and chemically altering them to incorporate the DNA of the target patient) and you’ll have an infinite supply of customer-to-order body parts ready for deployment. Scientists will potentially have organs that not only match the patient’s signature (thus avoiding rejection), but are also young; embryonic young. In theory, this seems very promising. In practice, results coming in have matched the hype. When was the last time you heard of someone paralyzed, from the hip down, reclaiming control over his bowel movement and walking the streets, or a blind man regaining 90% of his vision (that’s probably better vision than half the people reading this article).

What was squarely placed on the miracles shelf throughout history has happened a few times last year.

Last on the list, and by no means least, is cancer. The list of breakthroughs last year can probably fill a dozen books. To name a few, Nanomedicine helps drug delivery that precisely targets tumors, sparing healthy cells from side effects; stem cells explains why some cancers recur, paving a way for effective root-cause treatments; and immune system boosts empower the body to fight off tumors naturally and effectively. In addition, the demise of cancer could be in early detection. When we start to detect cancer cells, with precision, when they are but a few cells in size, eradicating them will be relatively easy.

Still, what is clear is that the human body is turning out to be much more complex than anticipated. Every time we peel a layer, the onion seems to be getting bigger. Will Aubrey and his team be reporting on the advancements in medicine in the year 2145 or will it be his grandchildren. Luckily, we won’t have to wait that long. The story will start to unravel in the coming few years…

And I’ll be watching…

Dr. Hammad Azzam is the author of Shifting Borderlines: How Science Fiction is Becoming Science. His last post for Forbes discussed The Blurring Line Between Science And Science Fiction

Filed Under: SCIENCE, WILD CARDS Tagged With:

Space Forensics Might Point to a Martian Ancestry

April 30, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

By Ray Villard .   From  Discovery News.

Mars_microbes

Our search for life beyond Earth could take us down the road to a shocking look into the mirror — a climax straight out of a Twilight Zone plot.

A team of researchers at MIT is proposing to apply forensic science testing on the Martian surface. Specifically, the task would be to do DNA and RNA sequencing on Martian microbes (if they exist) to see if they share a common genetic origin with us.

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Places to Find Alien Life

DNEWS VIDEO: ALIEN SPECULATION

This addresses the novel question of panspermia — that we are descended from Mars life that migrated to Earth. Such testing could also offer key insights into how serious a risk Martian microbes would present to human colonists.

The MIT team led by Christopher Carr and Maria Zuber (head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, are proposing to build an instrument to send to Mars and test for extraterrestrial genomes.

Despite the numerous landers and rovers we’ve sent already, the only surface biology experiments were carried out in a bold but premature effort in 1976 aboard the trailblazing NASA Viking landers. The confusing results from these tests remain controversial and ambiguous today.

Invaders From Space

Such a mini-forensics lab would test the hypothesis that life on Earth may have come from Mars. The Martians didn’t arrive in spaceships, but microbes hitchhiking aboard meteorites blasted off Mars by ancient impacts. After millions of years in space, the meteorites would fall onto Earth and the microbes adapt to a new home.

Alh84001_copm

Experiments done at Harvard University show that bacterial spores can survive riding alone on a simulated meteorite impact on Earth — even without airbags. There is also data that microbes could also hibernate for the thousands of years in the vacuum of space before falling to Earth.

An estimated one billion tons of rock have already traveled from Mars to Earth. The controversy continues today as to whether we already have alien biological evidence for Martians aboard the Allan Hills Martian meteorite, ALH 84001.

But panspermia is not a two-way street because it is much harder to get enough asteroid impact energy to launch microbe-laden Earth rocks toward Mars (because Earth has a deeper gravitational well for the rocks to blast out of). What’s more, Mars probably became more suitable to the origin of life before the slower cooling, and more heavily bombarded, Earth did. There is compelling evidence for the existence of a great Martian ocean that once existed 3-4 billion years ago. As on Earth, life would be expected to have originated in such an ocean.

Drill_0280_H

Digging Up Life

The Mars genome experiment would need to be aboard a lander or rover capable of drilling into the Martian soil and retrieving a sample from beneath the surface. Life could hang out just below the surface where there could be water and protection from solar UV radiation. This is suspected to be the case at the Phoenix Polar Lander site in the Martian arctic.

The miniature lab would isolate any living microbes that might be present, or even microbial remnants. The device would autonomously separate out the genetic material and then amplify the DNA or RNA in microbes by using the same techniques used for forensic DNA testing on Earth. It would then use biochemical markers to search for genetic sequences.

The shocker would be that the genetic sequences matched those found in Earth microbes. The conclusion: “we are Martians!”

But wait, how could we be sure they weren’t really Earth microbes that hitched a ride to Mars aboard a U.S. or Soviet spacecraft, and then colonized the Red Planet?

“There may indeed be some confusion,” says astrobiologist Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “If we find organisms on Mars that are particularly cold adapted we might conclude that they did not come from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California (where Mars landers were built) or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”

This type testing is critical say the researchers because an alien microbe that is similar to Earth organisms is much more likely to be infectious to terrestrial life forms, than would a form of life that independently evolved.

This could give us pause about sending humans to a germ-laden alien world. It would be an ironic twist on the H.G. Wells classic 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds,” where invading Martians succumb to the common cold from Earth microbes.

See, Wells’ Martian warriors should have done genome testing first.

Filed Under: SCIENCE, WILD CARDS Tagged With:

Humans, Version 3.0

April 17, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Opinion by Mark Changizi.

The next giant leap in human evolution may not come from new fields like genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, but rather from appreciating our ancient brains.

Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like General Grievous in Star Wars.

All of these may well be part of the story of our future, but I’m not holding my breath. The first of these—natural selection—is impracticably slow, and there’s a plausible case to be made that natural selection has all but stopped acting on us.

Genetic engineering could engender marked changes in us, but it requires a scientific bridge between genotypes—an organism’s genetic blueprints—and phenotypes, which are the organisms themselves and their suite of abilities. A sufficiently sophisticated bridge between these extremes is nowhere in sight.

And machine-enhancement is part of our world even today, manifesting in the smartphones and desktop computers most of us rely on each day. Such devices will continue to further empower us in the future, but serious hardware additions to our brains will not be forthcoming until we figure out how to build human-level artificial intelligences (and meld them to our neurons), something that will require cracking the mind’s deepest mysteries. I have argued that we’re centuries or more away from that.

Simply put, none of these scenarios are plausible for the immediate future. If there is something next, some imminently arriving transformative development for human capabilities, then the key will not be improved genes or cortical plug-ins. But what other way forward could humans possibly have? With genetic and cyborg enhancement off the table for many years, it would seem we are presently stuck as-is, sans upgrades.

There is, however, another avenue for human evolution, one mostly unappreciated in both science and fiction. It is this unheralded mechanism that will usher in the next stage of human, giving future people exquisite powers we do not currently possess, powers worthy of natural selection itself. And, importantly, it doesn’t require us to transform into cyborgs or bio-engineered lab rats. It merely relies on our natural bodies and brains functioning as they have for millions of years.

This mystery mechanism of human transformation is neuronal recycling, coined by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, wherein the brain’s innate capabilities are harnessed for altogether novel functions.

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. In this view, natural selection is so riddled by accidents and saddled with developmental constraints that the resultant biological hardware and software should be described as a “just good enough” solution rather than as a “fine-tuned machine.”

So it is no wonder that, when many envisage the future, they posit that human invention—whether via genetic engineering or cybernetic AI-related enhancement—will be able to out-do what evolution gave us, and so bootstrap our species to a new level. This rampant overoptimism about the power of human invention is also found among many of those expecting salvation through a technological singularity, and among those who fancy that the Web may some day become smart.

The root of these misconceptions is the radical underappreciation of the design engineered by natural selection into the powers implemented by our bodies and brains, something central to my 2009 book, The Vision Revolution. For example, optical illusions (such as the Hering) are not examples of the brain’s poor hardware design, but, rather, consequences of intricate evolutionary software for generating perceptions that correct for neural latencies in normal circumstances. And our peculiar variety of color vision, with two of our sensory cones having sensitivity to nearly the same part of the spectrum, is not an accidental mutation that merely stuck around, but, rather, appear to function with the signature of hemoglobin physiology in mind, so as to detect the color signals primates display on their faces and rumps.

These and other inborn capabilities we take for granted are not kluges, they’re not “good enough,” and they’re more than merely smart. They’re astronomically brilliant in comparison to anything humans are likely to invent for millennia.

Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended—i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.

But how do I know this is feasible? This tactic may use the immensely powerful gifts that natural selection gave us, but what if harnessing these powers is currently far beyond us? How do we find the right innate power for any given task? And how are we to know how to adapt that task so as to be just right for the human brain’s inflexible mechanisms?

I don’t want to pretend that answers to these questions are easy—they are not. Nevertheless, there is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened.

We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.

In this transition from Human 1.0 to 2.0, we didn’t directly do the harnessing. Rather, it was an emergent, evolutionary property of our behavior, our nascent culture, that bent and shaped writing to be right for our visual system, speech just so for our auditory system, and music a match for our auditory and evocative mechanisms.

And culture’s trick? It was to shape these artifacts to look and sound like things from our natural environment, just what our sensory systems evolved to expertly accommodate. There are characteristic sorts of contour conglomerations occurring among opaque objects strewn about in three dimensions (like our natural Earthly habitats), and writing systems have come to employ many of these naturally common conglomerations rather than the naturally uncommon ones. Sounds in nature, in particular among the solid objects that are most responsible for meaningful environmental auditory stimuli, follow signature patterns, and speech also follows these patterns, both in its fundamental phoneme building blocks and in how phonemes combine into morphemes and words. And we humans, when we move and behave, make sounds having a characteristic animalistic signature, something we surely have specialized auditory mechanisms for sensing and processing; music is replete with these characteristic sonic signatures of animal movements, harnessing our auditory mechanisms that evolved for recognizing the actions of other large mobile creatures like ourselves.

Culture’s trick, I have argued in my research, was to harness by mimicking nature. This “nature-harnessing” was the route by which these three kernels of Human 2.0 made their way into Human 1.0 brains never designed for them.

The road to Human 3.0 and beyond will, I believe, be largely due to ever more instances of this kind of harnessing. And although we cannot easily anticipate the new powers we will thereby gain, we should not underestimate the potential magnitude of the possible changes. After all, the change from Human 1.0 to 2.0 is nothing short of universe-rattling: It transformed a clever ape into a world-ruling technological philosopher.

Although the step from Human 1.0 to 2.0 was via cultural selection, not via explicit human designers, does the transformation to Human 3.0 need to be entirely due to a process like cultural evolution, or might we have any hope of purposely guiding our transformation? When considering our future, that’s probably the most relevant question we should be asking ourselves.

I am optimistic that we may be able to explicitly design nature-harnessing technologies in the near future, now that we have begun to break open the nature-harnessing technologies cultural selection has built thus far. One of my reasons for optimism is that nature-harnessing technologies (like writing, speech, and music) must mimic fundamental ecological features in nature, and that is a much easier task for scientists to tackle than emulating the exhorbitantly complex mechanisms of the brain.

And nature-harnessing may be an apt description of emerging technological practices, such as the film industry’s ongoing struggle to better design the 3D experience to tap into the evolved functions of binocular vision, the gaming industry’s attempts to “gameify” certain tasks (exemplified in the work of Jane McGonigal), or the drive within robotics for more emotionally expressive faces (such as the child robot of Minoru Asada).

Admittedly, none of these sound remotely as revolutionary as writing, speech, or music, but it can be difficult to envision what these developments can become once they more perfectly harness our exquisite biological instincts. (Even writing was, for centuries, used mostly for religious and governmental book-keeping purposes—only relatively recently has the impact of the written word expanded to revolutionize the lives of average humans.)

The point is, most science fiction gets all this wrong. While the future may be radically “futuristic,” with our descendants having breathtaking powers we cannot fathom, it probably won’t be because they evolved into something new, or were genetically modified, or had AI-chip enhancements. Those powerful beings will simply be humans, like you and I. But they’ll have been nature-harnessed in ways we cannot anticipate, the magic latent within each of us used for new, brilliant Human 3.0 capabilities.

Mark Changizi is a cognitive scientist and author. His upcoming book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Man, is available for pre-order now.



Filed Under: CULTURE, SCIENCE

From SEEDMAGAZINE.COM On Resilience by Carl Folke

April 16, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

How much disturbance can a system withstand? With roots in ecology and complexity science, resilience theory can turn crises into catalysts for innovation.
In the 1930s the American art collector Albert Barnes commissioned Henri Matisse to produce a major painting for his private gallery in Merion, outside Philadelphia. Matisse was ecstatic: He rented an old cinema in Nice, where he lived at that time, and spent the entire next year completing the work, a dance triptych. He was pleased with the result. But when the piece arrived in Merion, Barnes wrote to Matisse explaining an unfortunate oversight: His collaborators had taken the wrong measurements, so the painting did not fit on the gallery wall. The difference in size was marginal, and Matisse could easily have tweaked the triptych to fit the wall, a technical fix. But instead he rented the cinema for another 12 months to complete a new painting with the right dimensions. Moreover, since he felt that mindless duplication was not real art, Matisse considerably changed the concept, effectively creating a whole new design. And in this process of reworking the piece, as he experimented with forms that would capture the dancers’ rhythmic motion, he invented the famous “cut outs” technique (gouaches découpés), what he later labeled “painting with scissors.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, Matisse turned a mistake into an opportunity for innovation. The new triptych not only pleased Barnes, but also served as the stylistic starting point for what would later become Matisse’s most admired works.

The French master’s ad hoc ingenuity captures the essence of an emerging concept known as resilience. Loosely defined, resilience is the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks and disturbances (like climate change or financial crisis) and using such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation. In human systems, resilience thinking emphasizes learning and social diversity. And at the level of the biosphere, it focuses on the interdependence of people and nature, the dynamic interplay of slow and gradual change. Resilience, above all, is about turning crisis into opportunity.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held, implicit assumption that systems respond to change in a linear—and therefore predictable—fashion is altogether wrong. In resilience thinking, systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity.

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of regime shifts and tipping points. It looks at incremental stresses, such as accumulation of greenhouse gases in combination with chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. How far can a system be perturbed before this shift happens? How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? How can active transformations from an undesirable social-ecological state into a better one be orchestrated? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the resilience challenge.

The resilience line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage. Resilience encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world.

Arguably the most urgent of these tasks is the nested set of global environmental crises we now confront: climate change, ocean acidification, pandemics, water scarcity, overfishing, and loss of ecosystem services. The tremendous acceleration and expansion of the human enterprise, especially since World War II, is pushing the Earth dangerously close to the limits of the human activity it can sustain, and beyond which abrupt environmental change is increasingly likely. Obviously, global sustainability demands that humanity remain within these planetary operating boundaries. The relevant question then becomes: What will it take?

To begin, we need to put our role on this planet in perspective by placing humanity and the Earth’s systems in a geological context. If you graph the range of global temperature variations over the past 100,000 years, most of it forms a wild, erratic sawtooth pattern as climatic variations have at turns scorched or frozen the world. But, about 10,000 years ago, temperature variation stabilized, and we entered what geologists call the Holocene epoch. This is the stable period during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, developed and flourished.

Considering the fact that our modern globalized society has developed within these unusually stable conditions, it might come as no surprise that today’s hospitable environment is often taken for granted in investment decisions, political actions, and international agreements.

Before the Holocene period, the climatic conditions on Earth were likely too unpredictable—with temperatures fluctuating wildly—for humans to settle down and develop in one place. Clearly, the only rational strategy now is to try and ensure that we remain in the human-friendly Holocene phase, that human development does not kick us into an unknown geological era.

The big challenge for humanity, then, is to begin working with the processes of the biosphere, instead of against them. This is not merely an environmental strategy—it is about sustaining our own development on planet Earth. And there are countless pathways for such development, as long as the biophysical preconditions for a functioning Earth system are respected.

This global resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that treat environmental issues as external to society, that offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems. It also runs counter to the philosophies of many traditional conservationists; they tend to see the world as environmentally stable, and seek to “save the environment” by limiting or excluding human activity. Both perspectives treat human and nature as two separate entities.

Embarrassingly, in a few generations we seem to have created a mind-set that either assumes that the economy is at the very center of the universe, or that nature needs to be saved from us humans. This is a dangerous mental trap, one we must escape as soon as possible in order to seed a prosperous future for humanity.

Luckily, the climate crisis has kick-started a new kind of mental revolution: We are slowly reconnecting with the planet. We are beginning to recognize that humans are part of the biosphere, simultaneously shaping it and fundamentally dependent on its functioning. This thinking is present in an accumulating body of work on ecosystem services, like the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, that surveys the capacity of the world’s natural systems to support human development.

Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability, and transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. How can societies persist and adapt in order to avoid tipping over critical thresholds into undesirable situations? When a shift into an undesired regime appears inevitable (or has already occurred and is irreversible), how can social-ecological systems transform to fit the new circumstances? One example of such “transformability” is the recent shift in governance of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Here the challenges of climate change, eutrophication, and overfishing have led Australians to begin treating the reef as an invaluable, embedded part of their economy, and to begin managing it through collaborations between citizens, scientists, and policymakers. The current search for alternative energy sources to build a society that is less dependent on fossil fuels is another example. Overturning petroleum—the very foundation of human development thus far—will require unprecedented creativity and social innovation. In other words, it will demand a new ethic of social-ecological resilience.

Don’t be too alarmed by unexpected events, be prepared for them, and make use of them to improve negative circumstances. These actions will require trust and collective effort, a theme brought into focus with the awarding of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom, a key player in resilience thinking. Ostrom’s work gives evidence that grassroots, cooperative action can be enormously successful when it comes to caring for public commons—resources that benefit all, and that are traditionally vulnerable to exploitation. This message is at the core of the resilience framework. That the global community is now recognizing it provides hope that resilience will be the new lens through which we face the turbulence, and opportunity, of the coming decade. Like that great French painter, with the right vision, we too can adapt to adversity, rethink our approach—and perhaps create a masterpiece in the process.

Carl Folke is the science director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and director of Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM April 16, 2011

Filed Under: CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURE, SCIENCE