Mariner’s Hymn; Cold War reflections; x programs and space; and Lamarckian evolution

View 710 Thursday, January 26, 2012

Apollo 1 1/27/67

Jerry,

On a more somber note: Apollo 1, 1/27/67. I still remember the announcement and it still haunts to this day. I suppose we are visual creatures and will remember Challenger and Columbia more viscerally. But don’t forget those that did not leave the surly bonds of the Earth.

I cannot say it any better than Heinlein in the poem he wrote that Mr. Thompson quoted in the email of 2/1/03 with Columbia down.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2160.html

From Mail Saturday, February 1, 2003 (On Columbia)

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view242.html#Saturday

O Spirit, whom the Father sent
To spread abroad the firmament;
O Wind of heaven, by thy might,
Save all who dare the eagle’s flight.
       And keep them by the watchful care
       From every peril in the air. (Modern version, the Mariner’s Hymn)

….Dr. Pournelle:

Mr. Heinlein wrote a verse in one of his short stories, of the Prayer for Travelers:

Almighty Ruler of the all,

Whose Power extends to great and small,

Who guides the stars with steadfast law,

Whose least creation fills with awe,

O grant thy mercy and thy grace,

To those who venture into space.

Amen.

Mark Thompson…."

Amen indeed, Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Agreed. I once had to listen to the tapes of the Apollo 1 fire. I do not think I will ever forget them. “Fire in the spacecraft.” It is worth your while to listen to this tribute by Julia Ecklar. There is also this one. Warning. These are pretty strong stuff.

Full View of Earth from VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP

Jerry

The picture was taken on 1/4/12. Look at the highest re, the atmosphere along the limb is spectacular.

<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2159.html>

Regards, Charles Adams

Some reflections.

In 1985 it was not obvious to anyone that the Cold War would end without battle and bloodshed. It is possible that President Reagan thought he saw that end coming; if so he was alone. None of his supporters did. In 1985 it looked as if the Cold War would continue, possibly forever. Igt was easy to panic in those days. Few remember them.

I believed then that the only hope for the survival of freedom was drastic change in America’s military; the adoption of a strategy of technology, including the implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative – Star Wars – and this would require that America become a Spacefaring Nation again; indeed, that was the title of the last formal report of the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy that I chaired, a policy endorsed and vigorously pursued by the late General Graham’s High Frontier organization. The Spacefaring Nation report was hand delivered to President Reagan, who personally read it, as he had read all the Council reports. The first of our reports was influential in the formation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, as had been our Strategy of Technoloy.

In the mid 1980’s it was obvious to me that the computer revolution was going to change the world in fundamental ways, but that view was not universally held or agreed to. One of those who had looked at ways that technology would change the world was Alvin Toffler, whose Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) were influential with many, including Newt Gingrich who had read them carefully. In 1980 I said that by the year 2000 everyone in the Free World would be able to get the answer to any question that had an answer. This would have profound effects on the Cold War.

Then, after the Falkland War of 1982, I drew another conclusion. Arthur Koestler had famously said that a sufficient condition for the elimination of totalitarianism was the free discussion of ideas within the totalitarian state. In 1982 a Moscow citizen was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession and use of an unlicensed copy machine. In those samizdat days intellectual ideas were circulated at great risk in the Soviet Union. Stories and ideas were hand typed using carbon paper, and the price of loaning someone a copy was usually that the borrower return two of them (and of course keep a copy for himself). This was not the free discussion Koestler said would be sufficient to end a totalitarian regime; but the Falkland War demonstrated that a nation that did not have small computers and people accustomed to using them was not going to have an effective military. I did some more thinking on the subject and concluded that without the widespread distribution and use of small computers, a nation could not keep up in the technological war.

We opened The Strategy of Technology with the following:

"A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.

There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….

A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
–General d’Armee Andre Beaufre

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html

The conclusion seemed obvious: ideological totalitarianism was doomed. The Soviet Union could not continue as an ideological state. It would need something else to hold it together. The Soviet Union was a world power only because of its military power; its ideological appeals were fading. It would need economic strength to maintain its military power – to be the Second World nation rather than just another Third World nation. It was already Bulgaria with missiles.

The conclusion from that again seemed obvious. Make the missiles too expensive, and the USSR becomes a Third World power. What was needed was pressure on the Administration to continue a strategy of technology against the USSR; if you could not destroy the Soviet Union you could reduce its threat to the world. But to do that you could not be soft.

This wasn’t popular among the Democrats who held power in Congress, and who had held power in Congress for thirty years, causing a number of Republicans to assume postures of a permanent opposition. The Republicans, most of them, were no more firm. They were a permanent minority, and they knew it. The notion that the Republicans might again take the House was considered odd. Newt Gingrich and his small contingent did believe it was possible. They also understood that George H. W. Bush did not believe it, nor did the Republican establishment.

The Soviet Union fell. George H W Bush managed to get long time Republicans and Reagan enthusiasts like Larry Niven to tell his fans that he couldn’t wait for November to turn George H W Bush out. And Clinton came in, with a Democratic majority, but it was a vulnerable majority.

Then came 1994, when the only leader in America who thought that it was time for a real change took out a Contract with America. The Republicans took both houses of Congress.

And note that in 1996 the Republican Establishment, which had failed to take the House and had no choice but to accept Newt’s leadership after he took the House for the first time in forty years – forty years of wandering in the wilderness – the same Establishment ran Bob Dole, the only man Clinton could beat, for President. Dole is now denouncing Newt Gingrich.

In the 1980’s some of us could see that the world was changing in fundamental ways. It wasn’t clear what the implications of those changes would be – certainly not all of them. The Internet hadn’t happened yet. The USSR had 26,000 warheads aimed at the United States. Reagan was mashed between hawks like Abrams and the Iran Contra people and appeasers from the Carter wing of the Democratic Party. One needs to understand those times to understand what was being said.

Newt on the Space Program

Dr Pournelle,

Very little of what Newt says in this Cocoa, Florida (south of Cape

Canaveral) town hall discussion will be new to readers of your site, but it’s a nice summary of the way forward.

<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SpacePolic>

—Joel

Whatever his faults and strengths, Newt is unquestionably the best friend space exploration has in the upcoming election, and he has endorsed the notion of Prizes and X-Projects as a low cost way to support the program without stifling it with government and bureaucracy. For my views on X programs see: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/gettospace.html For a summary of my views on prizes, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail242.html#prizes 

Government believes that the answer to our problems is to raise revenue, which is to say, raise taxes. The President believes that this is fair play. They raise the taxes on the successful in order to raise the salaries and benefits of, if not themselves, then those who work for them. This is known as Fair Play.

Warren Buffet’s secretary makes enough money as wages to be in the 30% income tax bracket. Buffet pays himself a salary of a dollar a year, but has money on which he has already paid taxes invested in enterprises that pay in capital gains. Is Fair Play a capital gains tax of 30%? The effect of that on both revenue and the economy would be severe. But we all know that.

I will say again, crime is not rebellion, and sin is not a denial that sin exists; and the distinction is real.

If you want something else to worry about I offer you:

Super-powered ‘frankenmalware’ strains have been detected in the wild:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/25/frankenmalware/print.html

“Viruses are accidentally infecting worms on victims’ computers, creating super-powered strains of hybrid software nasties. The monster malware spreads quicker than before, screws up systems worse than ever, and exposes private data in a way not even envisioned by the original virus writers.”

Sounds an awful lot like . . . biology.

Evolution. Brrrr.

Ed

Of course we have seen this coming since the Game of Life, Sugarscape the Brookings institute simulations (http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/1996/artifsoc.aspx ) . I did a column on Sugarscape in BYTE July 1997. http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis479/projects/*sugarscape/sugarspace5.htm

Does biology sound like a self-modifying computer program?

There used to be meetings of people interested in artificial life and its evolution, but I haven’t heard of many recently, possibly because I just lost track. I haven’t heard anything about Sugarscape or the Game of Life in some years. Not sure why. In any event it ought not be surprising that someone could write a self-evolving program that would pick the best it could find in malware – or malware that will infect any worms it can find. And it’s just beginning.

While we are thinking about self-modifying programs, think also about intelligent design assisted evolution: that is, Lamarkian evolution rather than Mendelian.

The story line in Freefall http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm is very relevant to this topic; but do go to the beginning of the story, because there is a lot of backstory that you need in order to understand why a talking artificially intelligent wolf is discussing Three Law Robotics. You can catch up in a few days, and I have found it more than worth the time it takes.

And that ought to be enough to think about for the day. LASFS tonight for me. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Norman Edmund RIP

Norman Edmund, Founder of scientific supply catalog company Edmund Scientific. The Edmund Scientific catalog was my dream book in high school And I got my first computer, which was mechanical and ran with marbles and mechanical switches, from Edmund. The company is still run by his children and grandchildren. http://www.scientificsonline.com/ RIP

 

http://www.scientificsonline.com/