Animals which don’t know how to nuture their own young

Zoos around the world have a problem in that many of the more advanced species – such as primates – seem unable to nurture their own young. These have then to be adopted and raised by the keepers, with feeds every four hours and long sleepless hours trying to help these animals to survive. In many cases the animals are critically endangered so each survival is a critical to the survival of the species.

So how do you teach an animal, which itself was nurtured by humans, to raise its own young? If the stock held in zoos is intended for reintroduction to the wild in the long term, they will need to be able to do this.

With some birds like the great bustard, people have dressed in bird suits so that the young animals understand the process. However with primates it would be difficult to live in a primate costume for a year or more. This is where I believe advanced robotics will pay a part in the longer term future.

It would have to look right, with fur or feathers, sound right and behave appropriately. But if you can programme a robot to perform the right tasks, it wont get tired, or bored, or need a shower, or want to eat human food. A robot only needs power would have to involve  cable, but in the future might involve better batteries, and these might be recharged by microwaves or induction or some other locality based method.

Today’s robots aren’t able to do this yet, but artificial intelligence and advanced intelligence may give young animals a chance to learn nurturing skills from a machine with a remote programmer.

This will then give the species a better chance of survival in the wild.

Life after coal

I have an idea for a business, but first I’ll need an old – now disused – coal mine.

The idea is to create an archive for the long term future and to charge people to have their words and thoughts passed down as history to our descendants in the far future. The best way to do this would to have their words inscribed onto clay by potters and then fired to create hard china tablets. These could then be taken into a disused mine and stored for the future.

The front end of this would involve a website where people could add the text they want preserved and pay. Then potters would create the clay tablet and writers would add the text. The tablet would then be fired in a kiln, photographed and transported into the mine. The photograph would then be added to the website to prove the outcome.

I know its a crazy idea, but it might help a mining community get back onto its feet again.

 

Key Martian Terraforming Species

If you were to ask me which of Earth’s species we should save to help terraform Mars in 400 years time, I should ask you to think about cold tolerant top predators like the snow leopard and the Siberian tiger. I might also include the polar bear, but believe that Mars’ colonists will have to choose between penguins and polar bears, and will probably choose penguins because they need less sea ice than do polar bears.

Having cold tolerant top predators in place will be essential for maintaining a health deer population, which without the predators might become diseased or overpopulated.

I would also like to think about top marine predators like sharks and Orca, however whilst the cold tolerant Greenland shark would be an excellent choice for addition to a future cold northern Martian ocean, Orcas might have problems with Mars’ low gravity and water foam and spray. This might mean that whales and dolphins can never be introduced to Mars until a way is found to increase air pressure.

 

Declining Population and Birthing Centres

Sometime in the coming century human population will reach its peak and start to decline. As women get more control over their own lives, with increased disposable income, better healthcare, career opportunities, less war and more leisure time, they make the decision to have fewer children.

This isn’t a new trend, as its been going on for hundreds of years and downward trends in the number of children in secure and wealthy countries is just a trend that will be followed by the rest of the world as their living conditions improve.

However after our population starts to decline there will be a drive to persuade women to have more children. There may be incentives such as cash, better living conditions or free healthcare, but the downward trend will continue, with fewer and fewer women having more than one child.

It won’t be long before the world’s population becomes critically low, putting pressures on industries and governments not having enough customers or employees. Whole towns and cities may need to be abandoned as it would be too expensive to keep the roads open, hospitals may close as they don’t have enough patients and companies become bankrupt as their sales decline.

All this would take much of the pressure off our natural world which in the population growth period suffered large numbers of species extinctions, but it will decrease the human race’s total inventiveness as fewer people means fewer innovations.

The answer may be that children have to be produced in artificial wombs and raised in birthing centres. This idea may horrify you today, but in the future it is likely to be common for children to be born and raised in these institutions. Additionally because of lower population there may be fewer adults willing to serve as surrogate parents, meaning that artificial intelligence could fill the gap; teaching and nurturing  the young.

This could lead to appearance of generations of clever but cold people who have never experienced the love of a parent. In fact this begins to sound like Victorian England where people had so many children that they had little time for love, but we’ll all be dead so not to worry.

 

What would happen if the internet was a thousand times quicker?

The answer is that it will need to be in just a few years when augmented reality glasses become a usable reality.

Imagine yourself on a street corner of a strange city in 2030. You’re a bit lost and are trying to find a good restaurant for your evening meal.

Then your augrel glasses kick in. The first thing they do is overlay your vision of the streets with directions to restaurants, plus customer ratings and the types of food they serve. You focus on the arrow pointing toward an Italian, which the arrow says is 230 meters away and the other signs disappear.

More directional signs appear telling you how to cross the busy main road, you follow, and the directions alter as people cross and you are guided around the crowd. You glance briefly at an advertising hoarding on a building above you and options to ‘save as a favourite’ appear and then disappear when you lose interest.

Following the road you glance at a display of bags in a shop window and prices and quality information appear overlying each bag as your attention wanders. However you don’t have time, as information is appearing about your sister who is joining you for dinner says she is 5 minutes away and is following your movements and agreeing with your choice of Italian food.

A sign appears in your vision saying ‘rain coming’ so you put your umbrella up, and reach the restaurant 2 minutes before your sister. You are guided to your seat by the waiter who has known you were on your way since you decided on their restaurant, and a pop-up appears over his head saying is name is Manuel, has been working there for 5 years, and speaks English, Italian and French.

Your sister arrives and you greet each other and sit down. You glance at the menu label on the table and an analysis of the menu appears in your vision showing you your most likely dishes. Food you don’t like doesn’t appear at all. You focus on a pizza and information appears about the herbs and other ingredients they’ve used.

You focus on Oregano and additional information tells you it was grown locally by a small farmer on a roof garden and that it was harvested on Thursday.

As you enjoy your meal and the conversation with your sister, the photographs she’s taken of your parents appear in your vision, and both of you can see the same images at the same time. You talk about each other’s children and other photos appear.

Glancing across the restaurant you think you recognise as face, but information appears saying is Jim from the south suburbs who works in computer aided design and not your friend at all.

Much of the information I’ve suggested above is already out there, and could be found by searching the internet, but might take hours. The way I suggest could be much quicker and a lot of fun.

 

What happens when artificial intelligence does all the boring jobs?

People are becoming worried about what will happen when computers take over the boring jobs. Its a concern for taxi drivers worried about self driving cars, about traders worried about trading software and bin men worried about automatic rubbish collection.

However to answer these questions we have to go back in time rather than forward, and ask what happened to the people who swept the streets, added up thousands of figures by hand or drove carts when modern technology took their jobs?

The answer is that they changed profession and took on new roles. The sweepers became road menders, the calculators became accountants and the cart drivers became lorry drivers.

Artificial intelligence will make some jobs obsolete, there’s no doubt of that, but other roles will appear. So the taxi drivers may become mappers, looking for road or driving issues which have to be analysed by humans, the traders may write the trading software or modify the rules, and the bin men may take to servicing the automatic rubbish collection vehicles.

There will also be many things which artificial intelligence will do which is too boring, laborious or expensive for us to do such as separating rubbish for recycling. At the moment house holders are meant to do this, but some do it well and some badly, so recyclable materials are send to landfill and vica versa. Artificial intelligence will get this right without becoming bored, or tired or underpaid, and we can expect lower bills for our rubbish recycling.

Sex, Love and Communication in Inter-planetary Travel

The problems of long distance space flight, such as the long trip from Earth to Mars are many and include issues such as bone loss, eye damage and tissue damage caused by solar and cosmic radiation.

However psychological problems also need to be considered and I think communication is at the root of these. We are a social species and need to communicate. In Mars simulation trials conducted over the last 50 years many volunteers came out of the doors at the end of their months of confinement hating or refusing to communicate with their colleagues.

I believe there are three issues here; the first being the absence of a loving relationship like you might find within a family; the second is the long term presence of competitors within the habitat and the third is the absence of third party communication.

A simple answer to the second issue is to send astronauts, cosmonauts and tikonauts off on their long journeys with a loving partner. This and private time and space would allow them to discuss the issues which were worrying them.

The issue of communication with third parties is complicated by the time delay between Earth, Mars and the shuttle, but could be solved by a game of question and answer in which each voyager had to spend time each day answering questions from the public. Although not real time, it would allow them to talk to other people either on route to the Red Planet or on its surface.

The first issue of competition is relevant as those few of us who are made of the right stuff (I’m not) will probably be incredibly competitive individuals. Being confined with competitors for weeks, months or years could be psychologically damaging unless they could get away from each other.

This does mean that privacy needs to be thought about on long duration space flight, as does love and communication.

 

Macro machines composed of nano-robots

There are already companies designing and building nano scale robots. However there will eventually be a number of different kinds of nano machines. I would broadly categorise these as structural, transport, action, and dynamic nanos.

The structural form will have claspers so that they can form connections to make up the floors, walls and ceilings of machines and buildings which do not change once assembled. The transport devices will move materials such as metals toward a collection point using cilia or chemical transport systems. The action nanos will be designed to perform a function such as pumping liquids or gasses, performing computations, sensing the environment, or giving instructions to other nanos.

The final form of nano will be a variant of the structural form and their function will be to stop other micro robots functioning. This decontamination role will mainly involve a solidification of other nanos using glues and chemicals which will prevent any further movement or function.

Additionally I believe all nanos will eventually have the ability to reproduce themselves using a chemical process rather like the way a strand of DNA builds a stand of RNA by chemically collecting amino acids. However it will mean that these nanos will reproduce in 2 dimensions rather than in one, and will require a way for them to be deactivated using decontamination nanos or a kill switch.

Venus, heat and earthquakes

On Venus’s terraformed equatorial continents people may be tempted to live underground to avoid the heat. However doing so on a highly volcanic and earthquake prone planet is a recipe for disaster. An alternative which might be used in the early years of colonisation would involve living in buildings supported by hydraulic struts. These could dynamically correct for ground movement to keep a building horizontal.

However these buildings would struggle to keep people cool even with a large energy investment to refrigerate the residents.

A longer term alternative which would perform both tasks would be for people to live in tree cities. Each tree would I imagine to be a cross between an enormously bulbous baobab tree and a spineless cactus. These would be grown to enormous sizes and living areas either cut into them or imposed on their growth form by frames or chemical growth inhibitors. These tree cities would be made up of many such trees and would exude water from their internal walls and move cilia to move the air and keep residents cool. They would additionally insulate them from ground movements by sponge like roots and stems. These tree cities would be  planted rather than built and provided this was done with sufficient forethought, housing a growing human population would not be a problem.

Alien communication

The thing about little green men and women is that they aren’t very talkative, or at least that appears to be the case.

Using the Drake Equation, estimates of the number of technological civilisations in our galaxy which could communicate with us commonly lie in the 10,000 to 20,000 range. In 1984 the SETI institute was set up to try and listen in on their conversations, but apart from the very brief WOW message they have heard nothing.

So if there are that many civilisations in our galaxy, why don’t we hear more from them? There appear to be two possibilities:

1. The amount of power to get communications across light years of space is just too wasteful and advanced civilisations don’t do it. Instead they use directed messages via laser beams or focused radio waves.
2. They don’t use radio waves, preferring instead to use some other method we don’t know about yet. If this is the case, there may be thousands of messages passing the Earth every hour, but we just don’t notice them.