conspiracy theory by request

All right, now I’m never one to be much of a conspiracy theorist but I have several friends who are, (you know who you are though ...and so do "They"). I have heard an awful lot of crackpot conspiracy theories too, most of which are really lame, easily explained away and appear to be not much more than a desperate cry for attention. However I am quite capable of spinning a conspiracy up if I have a reason to, I don’t have a very good reason but here goes anyway, by request. I hope you like it, I’ll try to keep it coherent and cohesive.

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The end of freedoms as we know them is on the horizon, the future is going to be more oppressive than North Korea circa 2004. Why? …Technology will empower the oppressors to an extent that we will have no choice but to obey or die.

Can’t we just elect away a bad leadership? How will technology do that on it’s own? Well, as to electing away our problems, no we can’t. We are already having a great problem in America electing leaders because the type of person it takes to get elected is usually not the type of person you want leading. An irrational disconnection surely, but rarely is a leader chosen for leadership skills; they are chosen on campaign skills and the skills of the campaign staff wherein lies the fundamental flaw. As to how technology will be our undoing, that’s actually sensible and easy if you put all of the pieces on the table at once. I divide the tech problem into two parts, intelligence and force.

Intelligence is being accelerated almost exponentially by technology and I am not referring to brainpower, I am referring to collecting information. Already intelligence gathering has reached a point where personal privacy can be completely eliminated by technical means. Local and remote listening devices can hear every sound made practically anywhere. Infra-red, visible light, gamma-ray and other scanning devices can see nearly anything you do whether the device is looking at you from a hidden clear view or scanning you right through the walls; you can be seen. Currently, when you aren’t in your home you are legally surveilled repeatedly, in most every store, at the bank, in the parking lot on the road and those are just the common places. Covert surveillance by numerous means legal and otherwise is already pervasive in American and other societies. So what’s the real problem with that? Well right now except for the annoyance of the loss of privacy, not too much really; far less than the potential. This infrastructure is not yet being really used to ‘enslave’ society as it currently lacks cohesiveness, coordination and particularly interconnectivity as most surveillance is private, unshared and inaccessible to all but the installation owners. This is our saving grace here.

So force is the other half of the equation, what I mean by that is actually a little complicated and goes all the way back to the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers of the USA placed in those documents a great deal of safeguards to keep The Government balanced and try to prevent it from becoming repressive or oppressive. They did some of this with the intent that they placed in the documents (I'm only referring to a few parts here) about keeping and bearing arms, maintaining a militia and a statement about it being the duty of the citizenry to remove a defective government (the typical NRA argument in favor of guns). This check has worked very effectively and currently still does, but may not for much longer.

Now I’ll ask a question and then answer it for you: What is the reason that in the US, the very powerful military doesn’t just try to take over the government as we have seen in so many other countries? The answer is that it’s the people. The US military is made up of people that could not be coerced into oppressing the general population because they are the general population. It would be nearly impossible to persuade the US military’s hundreds of thousands of people to either overthrow their own government or to work with it to oppress the people; despite the fact that the US military now possesses the required power to do just that. Even with a heavily armed population there is now enough of a strength-difference that the military could put-down an uprising or enforce an oppression now if it were for some reason to happen. It’s not going to happen with this situation, I’m only pointing out that the required force is there but the will is not. But this too is changing.

What if you could oppress a population with a full-strength military without needing to persuade 500,000 troops to do your dirty work? Well, its an ability coming soon to a US military on the cutting edge of technology. The possibility will soon exist of having only a tiny ruling-class that could run the country, and back it up with an effective force. We've seen the potential for omniscience, enter the last piece of technology to make it all possible, Omnipotence without conscience.

Autonomous vehicles. There are already autonomous aircraft that can go out and perform a military mission and return to base with no human intervention. So far this is limited to surveillance aircraft (Autonomous UAVs) like Global Hawk but it is expanding to include armed aircraft (UCAV) like X-45. I've seen both of these machines myself very close up, very impressive stuff. Soon UCAVs will be automated as well. They will be soulless armed flying soldiers carrying out whatever orders they are given without question. They will continue to multiply and be designed into many forms from automated giant bomber down to 3-6” flying assassin version of a MAV an automated micro-UCAV (that seeks it’s prey with a poison dart). I won’t even mention what is on the horizon with MEMS and nanotechnology; that stuff can really get under your skin. Currently DARPA is sponsoring the Autonomous Robotic Ground Vehicle Challenge wherein the best and brightest from the US are competing to build a self navigating, self driving vehicle capable of going on or off road to reach it’s destination. Adding weapons to this would be easy by comparison. As it turns out driving is a lot harder than flying for an automated machine, all of the machines failed the challenge the 2004 competition but it's likely at least a couple will succeed in the next competition.

These automated machines aren’t just coming soon to a conspiracy theory near you, many of them are already here and not just prototypes, they’re in service. As these vehicles continue to grow in number and the number of people in the military continues to shrink, power is concentrated. A power that gets too concentrated can potentially reach beyond the checks and balances placed upon it. It has the potential to become a tool that allows a very few people to command a great deal of unchecked strength. That’s always dangerous.

Lastly; I’ll pour my last bit of fuel onto the fire for my conspiracy theory friends, I’ll tie this all together. (This can is just about empty, but don’t worry I have another, the nanotech one, for another day.) We have a government that is becoming increasingly repressive in its behavior, has an ever increasing availability of intelligence with ever increasing organization and soon will have an unquestioning loyal enforcer of anything it decrees. Couple those capabilities to a truly corrupt government and it spells slavery or death for all. To me this seems an extraordinarily dangerous path to be on unless led by the enlightened and altruistically benevolent. So, who you gonna vote for next election?
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Now this whole diatribe was by request and reflects probably the worst-case of each of the discussed subjects but I personally see the things in here as quite cautionary. All of the capabilities and statements I made are based on real verifiable facts, hit the links and see for yourself. I really hope that we can learn to coexist peacefully and free with our own growing capabilities but I do see darker days ahead before we strike a reasonable balance between power/control/intelligence vs. freedom/justice and I do believe that new checks and balances will be required to stave off the above potential but I am also confident that these checks and balances will come. The sad thing being that they will come only after ‘violations’, and each time those occur, freedoms will be eroded, sometimes permanently. Where we end up I cannot say but I do think that technology for it’s own sake will have to fully embrace philosophy in order to keep from destroying us all. A little less “can we” and a little more “should we” is in order. I believe this fully and yet I also love and crave technology and put great importance on pure unrestricted research for it's own sake. A balance must be struck or maybe the doomsayers will be right.

Let us hope that we can get good control of the situation before we end up chasing a monster to the old windmill with torches and pitchforks.

SDAA Starparty at TDS

Well I go to these all the time but haven't mentioned them here yet... now I have.

This weekend, Saturday night I went out to the San Diego Astronomy Association's dark sky site at Tierra Del Sol, east of Campo and South of the communities of Live Oak Springs and Tierra Del Sol. There are three star parties a month and I try to make at least one of them per month but I have been very busy this summer and roaming all over So Cal.

I brought out one of my telescopes, my LX-200-C, 7" Maksutov-Cassegrain reflector (I brought 3 instruments with me actually but only set up the one). I didn't do much visual observing (which is unusual for me) instead I hooked up the Meade LPI imager with a loaner laptop and tried (poorly) to take some pictures. That imager is as its name implies a Lunar-Planetary-Imager and there was no moon, bright planet or other bright object to image, especially so when my aperture is so small. I tried adding a focal reducer but the only picture I got at all of anything was one blurry frame of Mizar & Alcor, the double-star in the handle of the Big Dipper. Not very impressive. When I tried it without the focal reducer I saw even less and found it extremely difficult to get even a bright star (Fomalhaut) into the tiny field of view. My alignment on the scope was perfect and done with a reticle so the scope is blameless, it's just not a big or powerful enough camera for dim objects through a small scope. Maybe if I still had my 12" LX-200 (similar to this one) the results would be different or perhaps if I had a bright planet to shoot at. I was able to see (detect) Uranis but not effectively image anything at all.

The telescope I was using is a 7" aperture and f/15 which is rather a high ratio for a common reflector, it does fantastic on the bright planets and that is indeed what it is designed for. It does a fair job on other objects visually but when combined with this interesting but inexpensive camera does nothing for the dimmer objects. I guess I'll have to try the camera on the club's 22" scope.

Despite my lack of success, I familiarized myself with the software and camera and found the limits of this camera. Next time out I'll have to try again with the camera and a 10" f/6.3 LX-200 that I almost never take out. It should put about 4 times the light on the camera's tiny chip. In the time it took to experiment with this camera, I also met and talked with lots of the other members and friends as well as looked through a couple other scopes. Jose brought his new 24" Obsession-style Dobsonian. (Peter built the box, Obsession made the bearings and Discovery in Oceanside CA made the mirrors). All in all it was a good night.

Genesis, Oh Crap, Oh Crap, Oh Crap!

For the few people in the world that haven't heard, the Genesis sample return capsule has crashed in the Utah dessert. The series of parachutes and therefore the parafoil too failed to open. The capsule hit the ground at terminal velocity, which for it was about 190 miles per hour.

The contents of the capsule were all very fragile and were designed to survive only the planned mid-air catch. If the catch were to fail, science was still expected to be done using the shattered fragments of the sample wafers recovered from the thumped but still sealed vessel carrying them. However; the unrestrained impact of the capsule onto the ground means that most of the science to be gained from the mission is lost.

The capsule has of course broken open so the pristine vacuum-sealed capsule is not only violated but likely shards of the sample wafers have been ejected and plenty of dust and airborne contaminants foul the remains of vessel.

NASA/JPL - - CNN - - ABC - - Genesis Mission HomePage

I have been asked this a few times now so I'll also answer it preemptively here. The question is whether the contents of the capsule contain any potentially hazardous material. (A la Andromeda Strain) The answer is a straightforward 'no it isn't likely, virtually impossible'. It is far more likely that a meteorite would contain something than it is for Genesis. Genesis went out beyond Earths magnetosphere and collected individual ionized atoms and perhaps a few simple molecules from the Solar Wind, there are no complex organic compounds of any kind in this stream of particles. The only danger the impact causes is to the science and to our monetary investment in the project. It is now very likely that most of the science and outreach opportunities are gone (they were going to share the wafers all over the world).

UPDATE:
Well the tweezer-squad is hard at it and it looks like there'll be at least a fair amount of science to be recovered from the wreckage, that's good news. One team is actually happy it crashed the way it did, at least in a back-handed sort of way: The asteroid research team that was studying Genesis' reentry. That team was looking to track Genesis through its descent and in doing so verify and refine trajectory and behavior models for asteroid entries from deep space. Genesis' reentry is very much like that of a small asteroid so the reentry data was very valuable to their model. They got much more than they expected as the reentry was not interrupted by parachutes but continued all the way down and left a nice crater to study too. Some of the best science comes from accidents, let's hope they make the best of it.

Birch Aquarium (Scripps Institute of Oceanography)

Well I mostly took it easy this weekend but I did drag the gang out for one day to the Birch Aquarium, part of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. They have dozens of aquariums ranging from little 2 gallon tanks with jellyfish or seahorses in them, all the way up to the big 70,000 gallon wall of water (the Kelp Forest Tank) containing dozzens of species of fish plants and crustaceans. This tank has something like a 25~30 ft square viewing window and that window is made of 10 inches thick plexiglass. Very impressive. There are tidepools out on the balcony overlooking the Pacific and Scripps Pier and back inside in the other gallery right now is an extensive collection of seahorses and other related species, even a nursery for them.

After such an awesome view of so many things that looked so edible, I couldn't resist a trip to Red Lobster for dinner, I had the Ultimate Feast of course (bottom center of the page).

Mostly just a quiet long weekend staying up late, sleeping late and doin' nothin all day.