Bruce Sterlingbruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware: Not For Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, June 1992 F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr; outside USA $31/yr F&SF Science Column #1 OUTER CYBERSPACE Dreaming of space-flight, and predicting its future, have always been favorite pastimes of science fiction. In my first science column for F&SF, I can't resist the urge to contribute a bit to this grand tradition. A science-fiction writer in 1991 has a profound advantage over the genre's pioneers. Nowadays, space-exploration has a past as well as a future. "The conquest of space" can be judged today, not just by dreams, but by a real-life track record. Some people sincerely believe that humanity's destiny lies in the stars, and that humankind evolved from the primordial slime in order to people the galaxy. These are interesting notions: mystical and powerful ideas with an almost religious appeal. They also smack a little of Marxist historical determinism, which is one reason why the Soviets found them particularly attractive. Americans can appreciate mystical blue-sky rhetoric as well as anybody, but the philosophical glamor of "storming the cosmos" wasn't enough to motivate an American space program all by itself. Instead, the Space Race was a creation of the Cold War -- its course was firmly set in the late '50s and early '60s. Americans went into space *because* the Soviets had gone into space, and because the Soviets were using Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin to make a case that their way of life was superior to capitalism. The Space Race was a symbolic tournament for the newfangled intercontinental rockets whose primary purpose (up to that point) had been as instruments of war. The Space Race was the harmless, symbolic, touch-football version of World War III. For this reason alone: that it did no harm, and helped avert a worse clash -- in my opinion, the Space Race was worth every cent. But the fact that it was a political competition had certain strange implications. Because of this political aspect, NASA's primary product was never actual "space exploration." Instead, NASA produced public- relations spectaculars. The Apollo project was the premiere example. The astonishing feat of landing men on the moon was a tremendous public-relations achievement, and it pretty much crushed the Soviet opposition, at least as far as "space-racing" went. On the other hand, like most "spectaculars," Apollo delivered rather little in the way of permanent achievement. There was flag- waving, speeches, and plaque-laying; a lot of wonderful TV coverage; and then the works went into mothballs. We no longer have the capacity to fly human beings to the moon. No one else seems particularly interested in repeating this feat, either; even though the Europeans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese all have their own space programs today. (Even the Arabs, Canadians, Australians and Indonesians have their own satellites now.) In 1991, NASA remains firmly in the grip of the "Apollo Paradigm." The assumption was (and is) that only large, spectacular missions with human crews aboard can secure political support for NASA, and deliver the necessary funding to support its eleven-billion- dollar-a-year bureaucracy. "No Buck Rogers, no bucks." The march of science -- the urge to actually find things out about our solar system and our universe -- has never been the driving force for NASA. NASA has been a very political animal; the space- science community has fed on its scraps. Unfortunately for NASA, a few historical home truths are catching up with the high-tech white-knights. First and foremost, the Space Race is over. There is no more need for this particular tournament in 1992, because the Soviet opposition is in abject ruins. The Americans won the Cold War. In 1992, everyone in the world knows this. And yet NASA is still running space-race victory laps. What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986, is clearly a white elephant. The Shuttle is overly complex, over- designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an unworkable monster. The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted, and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s. It's not and never will be a "space truck." It's rather more like a Ming vase. Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties. It costs far too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for space activity. Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget, the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of NASA's budget for *years to come* -- barring unlikely large-scale increases in funding. Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet, because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination. Very few people are honestly excited about this prospect. The Soviets *already have* a space station. They've had a space station for years now. Nobody cares about it. It never gets headlines. It inspires not awe but tepid public indifference. Rumor has it that the Soviets (or rather, the *former* Soviets) are willing to sell their "Space Station Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can be bothered to buy it! Manned space exploration itself has been oversold. Space- flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring." "Exploring" generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about. Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely regimented of human activities. Most everything that is to happen on a manned space flight is already known far in advance. (Anything not predicted, not carefully calculated beforehand, is very likely to be a lethal catastrophe.) Reading the personal accounts of astronauts does not reveal much in the way of "adventure" as that idea has been generally understood. On the contrary, the historical and personal record reveals that astronauts are highly trained technicians whose primary motivation is not to "boldly go where no one has gone before," but rather to do *exactly what is necessary* and above all *not to mess up the hardware.* Astronauts are not like Lewis and Clark. Astronauts are the tiny peak of a vast human pyramid of earth-bound technicians and mission micro-managers. They are kept on a very tight (*necessarily* tight) electronic leash by Ground Control. And they are separated from the environments they explore by a thick chrysalis of space-suits and space vehicles. They don't tackle the challenges of alien environments, hand-to-hand -- instead, they mostly tackle the challenges of their own complex and expensive life-support machinery. The years of manned space-flight have provided us with the interesting discovery that life in free-fall is not very good for people. People in free-fall lose calcium from their bones -- about half a percent of it per month. Having calcium leach out of one's bones is the same grim phenomenon that causes osteoporosis in the elderly -- "dowager's hump." It makes one's bones brittle. No one knows quite how bad this syndrome can get, since no one has been in orbit much longer than a year; but after a year, the loss of calcium shows no particular sign of slowing down. The human heart shrinks in free- fall, along with a general loss of muscle tone and muscle mass. This loss of muscle, over a period of months in orbit, causes astronauts and cosmonauts to feel generally run-down and feeble. There are other syndromes as well. Lack of gravity causes blood to pool in the head and upper chest, producing the pumpkin- faced look familiar from Shuttle videos. Eventually, the body reacts to this congestion by reducing the volume of blood. The long-term effects of this are poorly understood. About this time, red blood cell production falls off in the bone marrow. Those red blood cells which are produced in free-fall tend to be interestingly malformed. And then, of course, there's the radiation hazard. No one in space has been severely nuked yet, but if a solar flare caught a crew in deep space, the results could be lethal. These are not insurmountable medical challenges, but they *are* real problems in real-life space experience. Actually, it's rather surprising that an organism that evolved for billions of years in gravity can survive *at all* in free-fall. It's a tribute to human strength and plasticity that we can survive and thrive for quite a while without any gravity. However, we now know what it would be like to settle in space for long periods. It's neither easy nor pleasant. And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space. They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined to do this despite all obstacles. If there were big money to be made from settling people in space, that would be a different prospect. A commercial career in free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than, say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining. But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is the communications satellite industry. The comsat industry wants nothing to do with people in orbit. Consider this: it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight. For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle, with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment. After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace or make products or services on the Shuttle. The era of manned spectaculars is visibly dying by inches. It's interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are currently eligible for retirement. By the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the old guard will be gone. This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at all. In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly continued apace. It's a little known fact that America's *military* space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget! This is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means of verification," i.e. spy satellites. And then there are military navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very impressive national asset. The much-promoted Strategic Defence Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the military. They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements, and are in no danger of being abandoned. And communications satellites have come a very long way since Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television. There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future. (The satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats are being launched by Chinese and Europeans. Newly independent Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet launching facilities at Baikonur, is anxious to enter the business.) Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and commercial prosperity. NASA or no NASA, money will be found to keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it makes a lot of common sense and it really pays. But a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA. NASA is still utterly determined to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers for this decision. Planetary exploration, life science missions, and astronomical surveys (all unmanned) have been cancelled, or curtailed, or delayed in the1992 budget. All this, in the hope of continuing the big-ticket manned 50-billion-dollar Space Shuttle, and of building the manned 30-billion-dollar Space Station Freedom. The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared telescope; and an orbital unmanned solar laboratory. We would have learned a very great deal from these projects (assuming that they would have actually worked). The Shuttle and the Station, in stark contrast, will show us very little that we haven't already seen. There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this strategy. With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the exploration of space could take a very different course. In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine imaginative scenario of unmanned spaceflight. "Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke speculated. "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close quarters. A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a narrow radio beam. It is unlikely that true television will be possible, with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges. The best that could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes." This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to true prescience. It's astonishingly close to the true-life facts of the early Mars probes. Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in 1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that "tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" -- as well as that of "true television." In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and electronic media are exploding exponentially. Advances in computers and communications now make it possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along entirely novel lines. Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. However, there is no "Martian colony." There are no three-stage rockets, no pressure-domes, no tractor-trailers, no human settlers. Instead, there are hundreds of insect-sized robots, every one of them equipped not merely with "true television," but something much more advanced. They are equipped for *telepresence.* A human operator can see what they see, hear what they hear, even guide them about at will (granted, of course, that there is a steep transmission lag). These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel* the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws. Piloting one of these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown cranny of the Moon -- now *that* really feels like "exploration." If they were cheap enough, you could dune-buggy them. No one lives in space stations, in this scenario. Instead, our entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. There are no "rockets" any more. Most of these robot surrogates weigh less than a kilogram. They are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted on high-flying aircraft. Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition: ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and provide their thrust. They might even be literally shot into orbit by Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-cannon." This wacky but promising technique would be utterly impractical for launching human beings, since the acceleration g-load would shatter every bone in their bodies; but these little machines are *tough.* And small robots have many other advantages. Unlike manned craft, robots can go into harm's way: into Jupiter's radiation belts, or into the shrapnel-heavy rings of Saturn, or onto the acid-bitten smoldering surface of Venus. They stay on their missions, operational, not for mere days or weeks, but for decades. They are extensions, not of human population, but of human senses. And because they are small and numerous, they should be cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video, while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber- optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond. The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna) these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere. They get crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds more, and no one's life is at stake. People, even quite ordinary people, *rent time on them* in much the same way that you would pay for satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for yourself.* This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution: "mainframe" space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a "personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists. In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence. The solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage. Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.* Whether this scenario is "realistic" isn't clear as yet. It's just a science-fictional dream, a vision for the exploration of space: *circumsolar telepresence.* As always, much depends on circumstance, lucky accidents, and imponderables like political will. What does seem clear, however, is that NASA's own current plans are terribly far-fetched: they have outlived all contact with the political, economic, social and even technical realities of the 1990s. There is no longer any real point in shipping human beings into space in order to wave flags. "Exploring space" is not an "unrealistic" idea. That much, at least, has already been proven. The struggle now is over why and how and to what end. True, "exploring space" is not as "important" as was the life-and-death Space Race struggle for Cold War pre- eminence. Space science cannot realistically expect to command the huge sums that NASA commanded in the service of American political prestige. That era is simply gone; it's history now. However: astronomy does count. There is a very deep and genuine interest in these topics. An interest in the stars and planets is not a fluke, it's not freakish. Astronomy is the most ancient of human sciences. It's deeply rooted in the human psyche, has great historical continuity, and is spread all over the world. It has its own constituency, and if its plans were modest and workable, and played to visible strengths, they might well succeed brilliantly. The world doesn't actually need NASA's billions to learn about our solar system. Real, honest-to-goodness "space exploration" never got more than a fraction of NASA's budget in the first place. Projects of this sort would no longer be created by gigantic federal military-industrial bureaucracies. Micro-rover projects could be carried out by universities, astronomy departments, and small- scale research consortia. It would play from the impressive strengths of the thriving communications and computer tech of the nineties, rather than the dying, centralized, militarized, politicized rocket-tech of the sixties. The task at hand is to create a change in the climate of opinion about the true potentials of "space exploration." Space exploration, like the rest of us, grew up in the Cold War; like the rest of us, it must now find a new way to live. And, as history has proven, science fiction has a very real and influential role in space exploration. History shows that true space exploration is not about budgets. It's about vision. At its heart it has always been about vision. Let's create the vision. Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware: Not For Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, July 1992 F&SF Box 56 Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr; outside USA $31/yr F&SF Column #2 BUCKYMANIA Carbon, like every other element on this planet, came to us from outer space. Carbon and its compounds are well-known in galactic gas-clouds, and in the atmosphere and core of stars, which burn helium to produce carbon. Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table, and forms about two-tenths of one percent of Earth's crust. Earth's biosphere (most everything that grows, moves, breathes, photosynthesizes, or reads F&SF) is constructed mostly of waterlogged carbon, with a little nitrogen, phosphorus and such for leavening. There are over a million known and catalogued compounds of carbon: the study of these compounds, and their profuse and intricate behavior, forms the major field of science known as organic chemistry. Since prehistory, "pure" carbon has been known to humankind in three basic flavors. First, there's smut (lampblack or "amorphous carbon"). Then there's graphite: soft, grayish-black, shiny stuff -- (pencil "lead" and lubricant). And third is that surpassing anomaly, "diamond," which comes in extremely hard translucent crystals. Smut is carbon atoms that are poorly linked. Graphite is carbon atoms neatly linked in flat sheets. Diamond is carbon linked in strong, regular, three-dimensional lattices: tetrahedra, that form ultrasolid little carbon pyramids. Today, however, humanity rejoices in possession of a fourth and historically unprecedented form of carbon. Researchers have created an entire class of these simon-pure carbon molecules, now collectively known as the "fullerenes." They were named in August 1985, in Houston, Texas, in honor of the American engineer, inventor, and delphically visionary philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller. "Buckminsterfullerene," or C60, is the best-known fullerene. It's very round, the roundest molecule known to science. Sporting what is technically known as "truncated icosahedral structure," C60 is the most symmetric molecule possible in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Each and every molecule of "Buckminsterfullerene" is a hollow, geodesic sphere of sixty carbon atoms, all identically linked in a spherical framework of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons. This molecule looks exactly like a common soccerball, and was therefore nicknamed a "buckyball" by delighted chemists. A free buckyball rotates merrily through space at one hundred million revolutions per second. It's just over one nanometer across. Buckminsterfullerene by the gross forms a solid crystal, is stable at room temperature, and is an attractive mustard-yellow color. A heap of crystallized buckyballs stack very much like pool balls, and are as soft as graphite. It's thought that buckyballs will make good lubricants -- something like molecular ball bearings. When compressed, crystallized buckyballs squash and flatten readily, down to about seventy percent of their volume. They then refused to move any further and become extremely hard. Just *how* hard is not yet established, but according to chemical theory, compressed buckyballs may be considerably harder than diamond. They may make good shock absorbers, or good armor. But this is only the beginning of carbon's multifarious oddities in the playful buckyball field. Because buckyballs are hollow, their carbon framework can be wrapped around other, entirely different atoms, forming neat molecular cages. This has already been successfully done with certain metals, creating the intriguing new class of "metallofullerites." Then there are buckyballs with a carbon or two knocked out of the framework, and replaced with metal atoms. This "doping" process yields a galaxy of so-called "dopeyballs." Some of these dopeyballs show great promise as superconductors. Other altered buckyballs seem to be organic ferromagnets. A thin film of buckyballs can double the frequency of laser light passing through it. Twisted or deformed buckyballs might act as optical switches for future fiber-optic networks. Buckyballs with dangling branches of nickel, palladium, or platinum may serve as new industrial catalysts. The electrical properties of buckyballs and their associated compounds are very unusual, and therefore very promising. Pure C60 is an insulator. Add three potassium atoms, and it becomes a low- temperature superconductor. Add three more potassium atoms, and it becomes an insulator again! There's already excited talk in industry of making electrical batteries out of buckyballs. Then there are the "buckybabies:" C28, C32, C44, and C52. The lumpy, angular buckybabies have received very little study to date, and heaven only knows what they're capable of, especially when doped, bleached, twisted, frozen or magnetized. And then there are the *big* buckyballs: C240, C540, C960. Molecular models of these monster buckyballs look like giant chickenwire beachballs. There doesn't seem to be any limit to the upper size of a buckyball. If wrapped around one another for internal support, buckyballs can (at least theoretically) accrete like pearls. A truly titanic buckyball might be big enough to see with the naked eye. Conceivably, it might even be big enough to kick around on a playing field, if you didn't mind kicking an anomalous entity with unknown physical properties. Carbon-fiber is a high-tech construction material which has been seeing a lot of use lately in tennis rackets, bicycles, and high- performance aircraft. It's already the strongest fiber known. This makes the discovery of "buckytubes" even more striking. A buckytube is carbon-fiber with a difference: it's a buckyball extruded into a long continuous cylinder comprised of one single superstrong molecule. C70, a buckyball cousin shaped like a rugby ball, seems to be useful in producing high-tech films of artificial diamond. Then there are "fuzzyballs" with sixty strands of hydrogen hair, "bunnyballs" with twin ears of butylpyridine, flourinated "teflonballs" that may be the slipperiest molecules ever produced. This sudden wealth of new high-tech slang indicates the potential riches of this new and multidisciplinary field of study, where physics, electronics, chemistry and materials-science are all overlapping, right now, in an exhilirating microsoccerball scrimmage. Today there are more than fifty different teams of scientists investigating buckyballs and their relations, including industrial heavy-hitters from AT&T, IBM and Exxon. SCIENCE magazine voted buckminsterfullerene "Molecule of the Year" in 1991. Buckyball papers have also appeared in NATURE, NEW SCIENTIST, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, even FORTUNE and BUSINESS WEEK. Buckyball breakthroughs are coming well-nigh every week, while the fax machines sizzle in labs around the world. Buckyballs are strange, elegant, beautiful, very intellectually sexy, and will soon be commercially hot. In chemical terms, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene -- a carbon sphere -- may well rank with the discovery of the benzene ring -- a carbon ring -- in the 19th century. The benzene ring (C6H6) brought the huge field of aromatic chemistry into being, and with it a enormous number of industrial applications. But what was this "discovery," and how did it come about? In a sense, like carbon itself, buckyballs also came to us from outer space. Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Kratschmer were astrophysicists studying interstellar soot. Huffman worked for the University of Arizona in Tucson, Kratschmer for the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. In 1982, these two gentlemen were superheating graphite rods in a low-pressure helium atmosphere, trying to replicate possible soot-making conditions in the atmosphere of red-giant stars. Their experiment was run in a modest bell-jar zapping apparatus about the size and shape of a washing-machine. Among a great deal of black gunk, they actually manufactured miniscule traces of buckminsterfullerene, which behaved oddly in their spectrometer. At the time, however, they didn't realize what they had. In 1985, buckministerfullerene surfaced again, this time in a high-tech laser-vaporization cluster-beam apparatus. Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, two professors of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, knew that a round carbon molecule was theoretically possible. They even knew that it was likely to be yellow in color. And in August 1985, they made a few nanograms of it, detected it with mass spectrometers, and had the honor of naming it, along with their colleagues Harry Kroto, Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien. In 1985, however, there wasn't enough buckminsterfullerene around to do much more than theorize about. It was "discovered," and named, and argued about in scientific journals, and was an intriguing intellectual curiosity. But this exotic substance remained little more than a lab freak. And there the situation languished. But in 1988, Huffman and Kratschmer, the astrophysicists, suddenly caught on: this "C60" from the chemists in Houston, was probably the very same stuff they'd made by a different process, back in 1982. Harry Kroto, who had moved to the University of Sussex in the meantime, replicated their results in his own machine in England, and was soon producing enough buckminsterfullerene to actually weigh on a scale, and measure, and purify! The Huffman/Kratschmer process made buckminsterfullerene by whole milligrams. Wow! Now the entire arsenal of modern chemistry could be brought to bear: X-ray diffraction, crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, chromatography. And results came swiftly, and were published. Not only were buckyballs real, they were weird and wonderful. In 1990, the Rice team discovered a yet simpler method to make buckyballs, the so-called "fullerene factory." In a thin helium atmosphere inside a metal tank, a graphite rod is placed near a graphite disk. Enough simple, brute electrical power is blasted through the graphite to generate an electrical arc between the disk and the tip of the rod. When the end of the rod boils off, you just crank the stub a little closer and turn up the juice. The resultant exotic soot, which collects on the metal walls of the chamber, is up to 45 percent buckyballs. In 1990, the buckyball field flung open its stadium doors for anybody with a few gas-valves and enough credit for a big electric bill. These buckyball "factories" sprang up all over the world in 1990 and '91. The "discovery" of buckminsterfullerene was not the big kick- off in this particular endeavour. What really counted was the budget, the simplicity of manufacturing. It wasn't the intellectual breakthrough that made buckyballs a sport -- it was the cheap ticket in through the gates. With cheap and easy buckyballs available, the research scene exploded. Sometimes Science, like other overglamorized forms of human endeavor, marches on its stomach. As I write this, pure buckyballs are sold commercially for about $2000 a gram, but the market price is in free-fall. Chemists suggest that buckmisterfullerene will be as cheap as aluminum some day soon -- a few bucks a pound. Buckyballs will be a bulk commodity, like oatmeal. You may even *eat* them some day -- they're not poisonous, and they seem to offer a handy way to package certain drugs. Buckminsterfullerene may have been "born" in an interstellar star-lab, but it'll become a part of everyday life, your life and my life, like nylon, or latex, or polyester. It may become more famous, and will almost certainly have far more social impact, than Buckminster Fuller's own geodesic domes, those glamorously high-tech structures of the 60s that were the prophetic vision for their molecule-size counterparts. This whole exciting buckyball scrimmage will almost certainly bring us amazing products yet undreamt-of, everything from grease to superhard steels. And, inevitably, it will bring a concomitant set of new problems -- buckyball junk, perhaps, or bizarre new forms of pollution, or sinister military applications. This is the way of the world. But maybe the most remarkable thing about this peculiar and elaborate process of scientific development is that buckyballs never were really "exotic" in the first place. Now that sustained attention has been brought to bear on the phenomenon, it appears that buckyballs are naturally present -- in tiny amounts, that is -- in almost any sooty, smoky flame. Buckyballs fly when you light a candle, they flew when Bogie lit a cigarette in "Casablanca," they flew when Neanderthals roasted mammoth fat over the cave fire. Soot we knew about, diamonds we prized -- but all this time, carbon, good ol' Element Six, has had a shocking clandestine existence. The "secret" was always there, right in the air, all around all of us. But when you come right down to it, it doesn't really matter how we found out about buckyballs. Accidents are not only fun, but crucial to the so-called march of science, a march that often moves fastest when it's stumbling down some strange gully that no one knew existed. Scientists are human beings, and human beings are flexible: not a hard, rigidly locked crystal like diamond, but a resilient network. It's a legitimate and vital part of science to recognize the truth -- not merely when looking for it with brows furrowed and teeth clenched, but when tripping over it headlong. Thanks to science, we did find out the truth. And now it's all different. Because now we know! Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Sept 1992. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr; outside US $31/yr F&SF Science Column #3 THINK OF THE PRESTIGE The science of rocketry, and the science of weaponry, are sister sciences. It's been cynically said of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun that "he aimed at the stars, and hit London." After 1945, Wernher von Braun made a successful transition to American patronage and, eventually, to civilian space exploration. But another ambitious space pioneer -- an American citizen -- was not so lucky as von Braun, though his equal in scientific talent. His story, by comparison, is little known. Gerald Vincent Bull was born in March 9, 1928, in Ontario, Canada. He died in 1990. Dr. Bull was the most brilliant artillery scientist of the twentieth century. Bull was a prodigiously gifted student, and earned a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at the age of 24. Bull spent the 1950s researching supersonic aerodynamics in Canada, personally handcrafting some of the most advanced wind- tunnels in the world. Bull's work, like that of his predecessor von Braun, had military applications. Bull found patronage with the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) and the Canadian Defence Research Board. However, Canada's military-industrial complex lacked the panache, and the funding, of that of the United States. Bull, a visionary and energetic man, grew impatient with what he considered the pedestrian pace and limited imagination of the Canadians. As an aerodynamics scientist for CARDE, Bull's salary in 1959 was only $17,000. In comparison, in 1961 Bull earned $100,000 by consulting for the Pentagon on nose-cone research. It was small wonder that by the early 1960s, Bull had established lively professional relationships with the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (as well as the Army's Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's own postwar stomping grounds). It was the great dream of Bull's life to fire cannon projectiles from the earth's surface directly into outer space. Amazingly, Dr. Bull enjoyed considerable success in this endeavor. In 1961, Bull established Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project). HARP was an academic, nonmilitary research program, funded by McGill University in Montreal, where Bull had become a professor in the mechanical engineering department. The US Army's Ballistic Research Lab was a quiet but very useful co-sponsor of HARP; the US Army was especially generous in supplying Bull with obsolete military equipment, including cannon barrels and radar. Project HARP found a home on the island of Barbados, downrange of its much better-known (and vastly better-financed) rival, Cape Canaveral. In Barbados, Bull's gigantic space-cannon fired its projectiles out to an ocean splashdown, with little risk of public harm. Its terrific boom was audible all over Barbados, but the locals were much pleased at their glamorous link to the dawning Space Age. Bull designed a series of new supersonic shells known as the "Martlets." The Mark II Martlets were cylindrical finned projectiles, about eight inches wide and five feet six inches long. They weighed 475 pounds. Inside the barrel of the space-cannon, a Martlet was surrounded by a precisely machined wooden casing known as a "sabot." The sabot soaked up combustive energy as the projectile flew up the space-cannon's sixteen-inch, 118-ft long barrel. As it cleared the barrel, the sabot split and the precisely streamlined Martlet was off at over a mile per second. Each shot produced a huge explosion and a plume of fire gushing hundreds of feet into the sky. The Martlets were scientific research craft. They were designed to carry payloads of metallic chaff, chemical smoke, or meteorological balloons. They sported telemetry antennas for tracing the flight. By the end of 1965, the HARP project had fired over a hundred such missiles over fifty miles high, into the ionosphere -- the airless fringes of space. In November 19, 1966, the US Army's Ballistics Research Lab, using a HARP gun designed by Bull, fired a 185-lb Martlet missile one hundred and eleven miles high. This was, and remains, a world altitude record for any fired projectile. Bull now entertained ambitious plans for a Martlet Mark IV, a rocket-assisted projectile that would ignite in flight and drive itself into actual orbit. Ballistically speaking, space cannon offer distinct advantages over rockets. Rockets must lift, not only their own weight, but the weight of their fuel and oxidizer. Cannon "fuel," which is contained within the gunbarrel, offers far more explosive bang for the buck than rocket fuel. Cannon projectiles are very accurate, thanks to the fixed geometry of the gun-barrel. And cannon are far simpler and cheaper than rockets. There are grave disadvantages, of course. First, the payload must be slender enough to fit into a gun-barrel. The most severe drawback is the huge acceleration force of a cannon blast, which in the case of Bull's exotic arsenal could top 10,000 Gs. This rules out manned flights from the mouth of space-cannon. Jules Verne overlooked this unpoetic detail when he wrote his prescient tale of space artillery, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1865). (Dr Bull was fascinated by Verne, and often spoke of Verne's science fiction as one of the foremost inspirations of his youth.) Bull was determined to put a cannon-round into orbit. This burning desire of his was something greater than any merely pragmatic or rational motive. The collapse of the HARP project in 1967 left Bull in command of his own fortunes. He reassembled the wreckage of his odd academic/military career, and started a commercial operation, "Space Research Corporation." In the years to follow, Bull would try hard to sell his space-cannon vision to a number of sponsors, including NATO, the Pentagon, Canada, China, Israel, and finally, Iraq. In the meantime, the Vietnam War was raging. Bull's researches on projectile aerodynamics had made him, and his company Space Reseach Corporation, into a hot military-industrial property. In pursuit of space research, Bull had invented techniques that lent much greater range and accuracy to conventional artillery rounds. With Bull's ammunition, for instance, US Naval destroyers would be able to cruise miles off the shore of North Vietnam, destroying the best Russian-made shore batteries without any fear of artillery retaliation. Bull's Space Research Corporation was manufacturing the necessary long-range shells in Canada, but his lack of American citizenship was a hindrance in the Pentagon arms trade. Such was Dr. Bull's perceived strategic importance that this hindrance was neatly avoided; with the sponsorship of Senator Barry Goldwater, Bull became an American citizen by act of Congress. This procedure was a rare honor, previously reserved only for Winston Churchill and the Marquis de Lafayette. Despite this Senatorial fiat, however, the Navy arms deal eventually fell through. But although the US Navy scorned Dr. Bull's wares, others were not so short-sighted. Bull's extended-range ammunition, and the murderously brilliant cannon that he designed to fire it, found ready markets in Egypt, Israel, Holland, Italy, Britain, Canada, Venezuela, Chile, Thailand, Iran, South Africa, Austria and Somalia. Dr. Bull created a strange private reserve on the Canadian- American border; a private arms manufactury with its own US and Canadian customs units. This arrangement was very useful, since the arms-export laws of the two countries differed, and SRC's military products could be shipped-out over either national border at will. In this distant enclave on the rural northern border of Vermont, the arms genius built his own artillery range, his own telemetry towers and launch-control buildings, his own radar tracking station, workshops, and machine shops. At its height, the Space Research Corporation employed over three hundred people at this site, and boasted some $15 million worth of advanced equipment. The downfall of HARP had left Bull disgusted with the government-supported military-scientific establishment. He referred to government researchers as "clowns" and "cocktail scientists," and decided that his own future must lay in the vigorous world of free enterprise. Instead of exploring the upper atmosphere, Bull dedicated his ready intelligence to the refining of lethal munitions. Bull would not sell to the Soviets or their client states, whom he loathed; but he would sell to most anyone else. Bull's cannon are credited with being of great help to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA war in Angola; they were also extensively used by both sides in the Iran-Iraq war. Dr. Gerald V. Bull, Space Researcher, had become a professional arms dealer. Dr. Bull was not a stellar success as an arms dealer, because by all accounts he had no real head for business. Like many engineers, Bull was obsessed not by entrepreneurial drive, but by the exhilirating lure of technical achievement. The atmosphere at Space Research Corporation was, by all accounts, very collegial; Bull as professor, employees as cherished grad-students. Bull's employees were fiercely loyal to him and felt that he was brilliantly gifted and could accomplish anything. SRC was never as great a commercial success as Bull's technical genius merited. Bull stumbled badly in 1980. The Carter Administration, annoyed by Bull's extensive deals with the South African military, put Bull in prison for customs violation. This punishment, rather than bringing Bull "to his senses," affected him traumatically. He felt strongly that he had been singled out as a political scapegoat to satisfy the hypocritical, left-leaning, anti- apartheid bureaucrats in Washington. Bull spent seven months in an American prison, reading extensively, and, incidentally, successfully re-designing the prison's heating-plant. Nevertheless, the prison experience left Bull embittered and cynical. While still in prison, Bull was already accepting commercial approaches from the Communist Chinese, who proved to be among his most avid customers. After his American prison sentence ended, Bull abandoned his strange enclave in the US-Canadian border to work full-time in Brussels, Belgium. Space Research Corporation was welcomed there, in Europe's foremost nexus of the global arms trade, a city where almost anything goes in the way of merchandising war. In November 1987, Bull was politely contacted in Brussels by the Iraqi Embassy, and offered an all-expenses paid trip to Bagdad. From 1980 to 1989, during their prolonged, lethal, and highly inconclusive war with Iran, Saddam Hussein's regime had spent some eighty billion dollars on weapons and weapons systems. Saddam Hussein was especially fond of his Soviet-supplied "Scud" missiles, which had shaken Iranian morale severely when fired into civilian centers during the so-called "War of the Cities." To Saddam's mind, the major trouble with his Scuds was their limited range and accuracy, and he had invested great effort in gathering the tools and manpower to improve the Iraqi art of rocketry. The Iraqis had already bought many of Bull's 155-millimeter cannon from the South Africans and the Austrians, and they were most impressed. Thanks to Bull's design genius, the Iraqis actually owned better, more accurate, and longer-range artillery than the United States Army did. Bull did not want to go to jail again, and was reluctant to break the official embargo on arms shipments to Iraq. He told his would-be sponsors so, in Bagdad, and the Iraqis were considerate of their guest's qualms. To Bull's great joy, they took his idea of a peaceful space cannon very seriously. "Think of the prestige," Bull suggested to the Iraqi Minister of Industry, and the thought clearly intrigued the Iraqi official. The Israelis, in September 1988, had successfully launched their own Shavit rocket into orbit, an event that had much impressed, and depressed, the Arab League. Bull promised the Iraqis a launch system that could place dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Arab satellites into orbit. *Small* satellites, granted, and unmanned ones; but their launches would cost as little as five thousand dollars each. Iraq would become a genuine space power; a minor one by superpower standards, but the only Arab space power. And even small satellites were not just for show. Even a minor space satellite could successfully perform certain surveillance activities. The American military had proved the usefulness of spy satellites to Saddam Hussein by passing him spysat intelligence during worst heat of the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis felt they would gain a great deal of widely applicable, widely useful scientific knowledge from their association with Bull, whether his work was "peaceful" or not. After all, it was through peaceful research on Project HARP that Bull himself had learned techniques that he had later sold for profit on the arms market. The design of a civilian nose-cone, aiming for the stars, is very little different from that of one descending with a supersonic screech upon sleeping civilians in London. For the first time in his life, Bull found himself the respected client of a generous patron with vast resources -- and with an imagination of a grandeur to match his own. By 1989, the Iraqis were paying Bull and his company five million dollars a year to redesign their field artillery, with much greater sums in the wings for "Project Babylon" -- the Iraqi space-cannon. Bull had the run of ominous weapons bunkers like the "Saad 16" missile-testing complex in north Iraq, built under contract by Germans, and stuffed with gray-market high-tech equipment from Tektronix, Scientific Atlanta and Hewlett- Packard. Project Babylon was Bull's grandest vision, now almost within his grasp. The Iraqi space-launcher was to have a barrel five hundred feet long, and would weigh 2,100 tons. It would be supported by a gigantic concrete tower with four recoil mechanisms, these shock- absorbers weighing sixty tons each. The vast, segmented cannon would fire rocket-assisted projectiles the size of a phone booth, into orbit around the Earth. In August 1989, a smaller prototype, the so-called "Baby Babylon," was constructed at a secret site in Jabal Hamrayn, in central Iraq. "Baby Babylon" could not have put payloads into orbit, but it would have had an international, perhaps intercontinental range. The prototype blew up on its first test-firing. The Iraqis continued undaunted on another prototype super- gun, but their smuggling attempts were clumsy. Bull himself had little luck in maintaining the proper discretion for a professional arms dealer, as his own jailing had proved. When flattered, Bull talked; and when he talked, he boasted. Word began to leak out within the so-called "intelligence community" that Bull was involved in something big; something to do with Iraq and with missiles. Word also reached the Israelis, who were very aware of Bull's scientific gifts, having dealt with him themselves, extensively. The Iraqi space cannon would have been nearly useless as a conventional weapon. Five hundred feet long and completely immobile, it would have been easy prey for any Israeli F-15. It would have been impossible to hide, for any launch would thrown a column of flame hundreds of feet into the air, a blazing signal for any spy satellite or surveillance aircraft. The Babylon space cannon, faced with determined enemies, could have been destroyed after a single launch. However, that single launch might well have served to dump a load of nerve gas, or a nuclear bomb, onto any capital in the world. Bull wanted Project Babylon to be entirely peaceful; despite his rationalizations, he was never entirely at ease with military projects. What Bull truly wanted from his Project Babylon was *prestige.* He wanted the entire world to know that he, Jerry Bull, had created a working space program, more or less all by himself. He had never forgotten what it meant to world opinion to hear the Sputnik beeping overhead. For Saddam Hussein, Project Babylon was more than any merely military weapon: it was a *political* weapon. The prestige Iraq might gain from the success of such a visionary leap was worth any number of mere cannon-fodder batallions. It was Hussein's ambition to lead the Arab world; Bull's cannon was to be a symbol of Iraqi national potency, a symbol that the long war with the Shi'ite mullahs had not destroyed Saddam's ambitions for transcendant greatness. The Israelis, however, had already proven their willingness to thwart Saddam Hussein's ambitions by whatever means necessary. In 1981, they had bombed his Osirak nuclear reactor into rubble. In 1980, a Mossad hit-team had cut the throat of Iraqi nuclear scientist Yayha El Meshad, in a Paris hotel room. On March 22, 1990, Dr. Bull was surprised at the door of his Brussels apartment. He was shot five times, in the neck and in the back of the head, with a silenced 7.65 millimeter automatic pistol. His assassin has never been found. FOR FURTHER READING: ARMS AND THE MAN: Dr. Gerald Bull, Iraq, and the Supergun by William Lowther (McClelland- Bantam, Inc., Toronto, 1991) BULL'S EYE: The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor Gerald Bull by James Adams (Times Books, New York, 1992) Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware: Not For Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Dec 1992. F&SF, Box 56 Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr; outside US $31/yr F&SF Science column #4 ARTIFICIAL LIFE The new scientific field of study called "Artificial Life" can be defined as "the attempt to abstract the logical form of life from its material manifestation." So far, so good. But what is life? The basic thesis of "Artificial Life" is that "life" is best understood as a complex systematic process. "Life" consists of relationships and rules and interactions. "Life" as a property is potentially separate from actual living creatures. Living creatures (as we know them today, that is) are basically made of wet organic substances: blood and bone, sap and cellulose, chitin and ichor. A living creature -- a kitten, for instance -- is a physical object that is made of molecules and occupies space and has mass. A kitten is indisputably "alive" -- but not because it has the "breath of life" or the "vital impulse" somehow lodged inside its body. We may think and talk and act as if the kitten "lives" because it has a mysterious "cat spirit" animating its physical cat flesh. If we were superstitious, we might even imagine that a healthy young cat had *nine* lives. People have talked and acted just this way for millennia. But from the point-of-view of Artificial Life studies, this is a very halting and primitive way of conceptualizing what's actually going on with a living cat. A kitten's "life" is a *process, * with properties like reproduction, genetic variation, heredity, behavior, learning, the possession of a genetic program, the expression of that program through a physical body. "Life" is a thing that *does,* not a thing that *is* -- life extracts energy from the environment, grows, repairs damage, reproduces. And this network of processes called "Life" can be picked apart, and studied, and mathematically modelled, and simulated with computers, and experimented upon -- outside of any creature's living body. "Artificial Life" is a very young field of study. The use of this term dates back only to 1987, when it was used to describe a conference in Los Alamos New Mexico on "the synthesis and simulation of living systems." Artificial Life as a discipline is saturated by computer-modelling, computer-science, and cybernetics. It's conceptually similar to the earlier field of study called "Artificial Intelligence." Artificial Intelligence hoped to extract the basic logical structure of intelligence, to make computers "think." Artificial Life, by contrast, hopes to make computers only about as "smart" as an ant -- but as "alive" as a swarming anthill. Artificial Life as a discipline uses the computer as its primary scientific instrument. Like telescopes and microscopes before them, computers are making previously invisible aspects of the world apparent to the human eye. Computers today are shedding light on the activity of complex systems, on new physical principles such as "emergent behavior," "chaos," and "self-organization." For millennia, "Life" has been one of the greatest of metaphysical and scientific mysteries, but now a few novel and tentative computerized probes have been stuck into the fog. The results have already proved highly intriguing. Can a computer or a robot be alive? Can an entity which only exists as a digital simulation be "alive"? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, but it in fact takes the form of pixels on a supercomputer screen -- is it a duck? And if it's not a duck, then what on earth is it? What exactly does a thing have to do and be before we say it's "alive"? It's surprisingly difficult to decide when something is "alive." There's never been a definition of "life," whether scientific, metaphysical, or theological, that has ever really worked. Life is not a clean either/or proposition. Life comes on a kind of scale, apparently, a kind of continuum -- maybe even, potentially, *several different kinds of continuum.* One might take a pragmatic, laundry-list approach to defining life. To be "living," a thing must grow. Move. Reproduce. React to its environment. Take in energy, excrete waste. Nourish itself, die, and decay. Have a genetic code, perhaps, or be the result of a process of evolution. But there are grave problems with all of these concepts. All these things can be done today by machines or programs. And the concepts themselves are weak and subject to contradiction and paradox. Are viruses "alive"? Viruses can thrive and reproduce, but not by themselves -- they have to use a victim cell in order to manufacture copies of themselves. Some dormant viruses can crystallize into a kind of organic slag that's dead for all practical purposes, and can stay that way indefinitely -- until the virus gets another chance at infection, and then the virus comes seething back. How about a frozen human embryo? It can be just as dormant as a dormant virus, and certainly can't survive without a host, but it can become a living human being. Some people who were once frozen embryos may be reading this magazine right now! Is a frozen embryo "alive" -- or is it just the *potential* for life, a genetic life- program halted in mid-execution? Bacteria are simple, as living things go. Most people however would agree that germs are "alive." But there are many other entities in our world today that act in lifelike fashion and are easily as complex as germs, and yet we don't call them "alive" -- except "metaphorically" (whatever *that* means). How about a national government, for instance? A government can grow and adapt and evolve. It's certainly a very powerful entity that consumes resources and affects its environment and uses enormous amounts of information. When people say "Long Live France," what do they mean by that? Is the Soviet Union now "dead"? Amoebas aren't "mortal" and don't age -- they just go right on splitting in half indefinitely. Does that mean that all amoebas are actually pieces of one super-amoeba that's three billion years old? And where's the "life" in an ant-swarm? Most ants in a swarm never reproduce; they're sterile workers -- tools, peripherals, hardware. All the individual ants in a nest, even the queen, can die off one by one, but as long as new ants and new queens take their place, the swarm itself can go on "living" for years without a hitch or a stutter. Questioning "life" in this way may seem so much nit-picking and verbal sophistry. After all, one may think, people can easily tell the difference between something living and dead just by having a good long look at it. And in point of fact, this seems to be the single strongest suit of "Artificial Life." It is very hard to look at a good Artificial Life program in action without perceiving it as, somehow, "alive." Only living creatures perform the behavior known as "flocking." A gigantic wheeling flock of cranes or flamingos is one of the most impressive sights that the living world has to offer. But the "logical form" of flocking can be abstracted from its "material manifestation" in a flocking group of actual living birds. "Flocking" can be turned into rules implemented on a computer. The rules look like this: 1. Stay with the flock -- try to move toward where it seems thickest. 2. Try to move at the same speed as the other local birds. 3. Don't bump into things, especially the ground or other birds. In 1987, Craig Reynolds, who works for a computer-graphics company called Symbolics, implemented these rules for abstract graphic entities called "bird-oids" or "boids." After a bit of fine- tuning, the result was, and is, uncannily realistic. The darn things *flock!* They meander around in an unmistakeably lifelike, lively, organic fashion. There's nothing "mechanical" or "programmed- looking" about their actions. They bumble and swarm. The boids in the middle shimmy along contentedly, and the ones on the fringes tag along anxiously jockeying for position, and the whole squadron hangs together, and wheels and swoops and maneuvers, with amazing grace. (Actually they're neither "anxious" nor "contented," but when you see the boids behaving in this lifelike fashion, you can scarcely help but project lifelike motives and intentions onto them.) You might say that the boids simulate flocking perfectly -- but according to the hard-dogma position of A-Life enthusiasts, it's not "simulation" at all. This is real "flocking" pure and simple -- this is exactly what birds actually do. Flocking is flocking -- it doesn't matter if it's done by a whooping crane or a little computer-sprite. Clearly the birdoids themselves aren't "alive" -- but it can be argued, and is argued, that they're actually doing something that is a genuine piece of the life process. In the words of scientist Christopher Langton, perhaps the premier guru of A-Life: "The most important thing to remember about A-Life is that the part that is artificial is not the life, but the materials. Real things happen. We observe real phenomena. It is real life in an artificial medium." The great thing about studying flocking with boids, as opposed to say whooping cranes, is that the Artificial Life version can be experimented upon, in controlled and repeatable conditions. Instead of just *observing* flocking, a life-scientist can now *do* flocking. And not just flocks -- with a change in the parameters, you can study "schooling" and "herding" as well. The great hope of Artificial Life studies is that Artificial Life will reveal previously unknown principles that directly govern life itself -- the principles that give life its mysterious complexity and power, its seeming ability to defy probability and entropy. Some of these principles, while still tentative, are hotly discussed in the field. For instance: the principle of *bottom-up* initiative rather than *top-down* orders. Flocking demonstrates this principle well. Flamingos do not have blueprints. There is no squadron-leader flamingo barking orders to all the other flamingos. Each flamingo makes up its own mind. The extremely complex motion of a flock of flamingos arises naturally from the interactions of hundreds of independent birds. "Flocking" consists of many thousands of simple actions and simple decisions, all repeated again and again, each action and decision affecting the next in sequence, in an endless systematic feedback. This involves a second A-Life principle: *local* control rather than *global* control. Each flamingo has only a vague notion of the behavior of the flock as a whole. A flamingo simply isn't smart enough to keep track of the entire "big picture," and in fact this isn't even necessary. It's only necessary to avoid bumping the guys right at your wingtips; you can safely ignore the rest. Another principle: *simple* rules rather than *complex* ones. The complexity of flocking, while real, takes place entirely outside of the flamingo's brain. The individual flamingo has no mental conception of the vast impressive aerial ballet in which it happens to be taking part. The flamingo makes only simple decisions; it is never required to make complex decisions requiring a lot of memory or planning. *Simple* rules allow creatures as downright stupid as fish to get on with the job at hand -- not only successfully, but swiftly and gracefully. And then there is the most important A-Life principle, also perhaps the foggiest and most scientifically controversial: *emergent* rather than *prespecified* behavior. Flamingos fly from their roosts to their feeding grounds, day after day, year in year out. But they will never fly there exactly the same way twice. They'll get there all right, predictable as gravity; but the actual shape and structure of the flock will be whipped up from scratch every time. Their flying order is not memorized, they don't have numbered places in line, or appointed posts, or maneuver orders. Their orderly behavior simply *emerges,* different each time, in a ceaselessly varying shuffle. Ants don't have blueprints either. Ants have become the totem animals of Artificial Life. Ants are so 'smart' that they have vastly complex societies with actual *institutions* like slavery and and agriculture and aphid husbandry. But an individual ant is a profoundly stupid creature. Entomologists estimate that individual ants have only fifteen to forty things that they can actually "do." But if they do these things at the right time, to the right stimulus, and change from doing one thing to another when the proper trigger comes along, then ants as a group can work wonders. There are anthills all over the world. They all work, but they're all different; no two anthills are identical. That's because they're built bottom-up and emergently. Anthills are built without any spark of planning or intelligence. An ant may feel the vague instinctive need to wall out the sunlight. It begins picking up bits of dirt and laying them down at random. Other ants see the first ant at work and join in; this is the A-Life principle known as "allelomimesis," imitating the others (or rather not so much "imitating" them as falling mechanically into the same instinctive pattern of behavior). Sooner or later, a few bits of dirt happen to pile up together. Now there's a wall. The ant wall-building sub-program kicks into action. When the wall gets high enough, it's roofed over with dirt and spit. Now there's a tunnel. Do it again and again and again, and the structure can grow seven feet high, and be of such fantastic complexity that to draw it on an architect's table would take years. This emergent structure, "order out of chaos," "something out of nothing" -- appears to be one of the basic "secrets of life." These principles crop up again and again in the practice of life- simulation. Predator-prey interactions. The effects of parasites and viruses. Dynamics of population and evolution. These principles even seem to apply to internal living processes, like plant growth and the way a bug learns to walk. The list of applications for these principles has gone on and on. It's not hard to understand that many simple creatures, doing simple actions that affect one another, can easily create a really big mess. The thing that's *hard* to understand is that those same, bottom-up, unplanned, "chaotic" actions can and do create living, working, functional order and system and pattern. The process really must be seen to be believed. And computers are the instruments that have made us see it. Most any computer will do. Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has created a simple, popular Artificial Life program for personal computers. It's called "The Blind Watchmaker," and demonstrates the inherent power of Darwinian evolution to create elaborate pattern and structure. The program accompanies Dr. Dawkins' 1986 book of the same title (quite an interesting book, by the way), but it's also available independently. The Blind Watchmaker program creates patterns from little black-and-white branching sticks, which develop according to very simple rules. The first time you see them, the little branching sticks seem anything but impressive. They look like this: Fig 1. Ancestral A-Life Stick-Creature After a pleasant hour with Blind Watchmaker, I myself produced these very complex forms -- what Dawkins calls "Biomorphs." Fig. 2 -- Six Dawkins Biomorphs It's very difficult to look at such biomorphs without interpreting them as critters -- *something* alive-ish, anyway. It seems that the human eye is *trained by nature* to interpret the output of such a process as "life-like." That doesn't mean it *is* life, but there's definitely something *going on there.* *What* is going on is the subject of much dispute. Is a computer-simulation actually an abstracted part of life? Or is it technological mimicry, or mechanical metaphor, or clever illusion? We can model thermodynamic equations very well also, but an equation isn't hot, it can't warm us or burn us. A perfect model of heat isn't heat. We know how to model the flow of air on an airplane's wings, but no matter how perfect our simulations are, they don't actually make us fly. A model of motion isn't motion. Maybe "Life" doesn't exist either, without that real-world carbon-and-water incarnation. A-Life people have a term for these carbon-and-water chauvinists. They call them "carbaquists." Artificial Life maven Rodney Brooks designs insect-like robots at MIT. Using A-Life bottom-up principles -- "fast, cheap, and out of control" -- he is trying to make small multi-legged robots that can behave as deftly as an ant. He and his busy crew of graduate students are having quite a bit of success at it. And Brooks finds the struggle over definitions beside the real point. He envisions a world in which robots as dumb as insects are everywhere; dumb, yes, but agile and successful and pragmatically useful. Brooks says: "If you want to argue if it's living or not, fine. But if it's sitting there existing twenty- four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days of the year, doing stuff which is tricky to do and doing it well, then I'm going to be happy. And who cares what you call it, right?" Ontological and epistemological arguments are never easily settled. However, "Artificial Life," whether it fully deserves that term or not, is at least easy to see, and rather easy to get your hands on. "Blind Watchmaker" is the A-Life equivalent of using one's computer as a home microscope and examining pondwater. Best of all, the program costs only twelve bucks! It's cheap and easy to become an amateur A-Life naturalist. Because of the ubiquity of powerful computers, A-Life is "garage-band science." The technology's out there for almost anyone interested -- it's hacker-science. Much of A-Life practice basically consists of picking up computers, pointing them at something promising, and twiddling with the focus knobs until you see something really gnarly. *Figuring out what you've seen* is the tough part, the "real science"; this is where actual science, reproducible, falsifiable, formal, and rigorous, parts company from the intoxicating glamor of the intellectually sexy. But in the meantime, you have the contagious joy and wonder of just *gazing at the unknown* the primal thrill of discovery and exploration. A lot has been written already on the subject of Artificial Life. The best and most complete journalistic summary to date is Steven Levy's brand-new book, ARTIFICIAL LIFE: THE QUEST FOR A NEW CREATION (Pantheon Books 1992). The easiest way for an interested outsider to keep up with this fast-breaking field is to order books, videos, and software from an invaluable catalog: "Computers In Science and Art," from Media Magic. Here you can find the Proceedings of the first and second Artificial Life Conferences, where the field's most influential papers, discussions, speculations and manifestos have seen print. But learned papers are only part of the A-Life experience. If you can see Artificial Life actually demonstrated, you should seize the opportunity. Computer simulation of such power and sophistication is a truly remarkable historical advent. No previous generation had the opportunity to see such a thing, much less ponder its significance. Media Magic offers videos about cellular automata, virtual ants, flocking, and other A-Life constructs, as well as personal software "pocket worlds" like CA Lab, Sim Ant, and Sim Earth. This very striking catalog is available free from Media Magic, P.O Box 507, Nicasio CA 94946. Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Feb 1993. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other F&SF Science Column #5 INTERNET Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any conceivable network to tatters. And how would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The center of the network would be the very first place to go. RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy, and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first place, the network would *have no central authority.* Furthermore, it would be *designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters.* The principles were simple. The network itself would be assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each packet would wind its way through the network on an individual basis. The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant. Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the usual sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) -- but it would be extremely rugged. During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized, blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines which were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of national research-and-development projects. In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high- speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the early '70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972, thirty-seven nodes. And it was good. By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post- office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing. Instead, it was news and personal messages. Researchers were using ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work, and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than they were about long-distance computation. It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers. Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF- LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from happening. Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant. The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol," converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or "Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard, but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25. As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled, at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it was growing, became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the vastly growing galaxy of other linked machines. As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of- networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain, and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which came to be known as the "Internet." Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources. A fax machine is only valuable if *everybody else* has a fax machine. Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET, too, was a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became an utter necessity. In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. And other government agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy in the Internet confederation. The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied up into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones, chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were grouped by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu, com, org and net. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted governmental, military and educational institutions, which were, of course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as a high-tech research exercise in national security. Com, however, stood for "commercial" institutions, which were soon bursting into the network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as gateways between networks.) ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a mere twenty-one years ago, there were only four nodes in the ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks. The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is probably the most important scientific instrument of the late twentieth century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it provides to specialized data and personal communication has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously. The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular, almost ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster than fax machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of twenty percent a *month.* The number of "host" machines with direct connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since 1988. The Internet is moving out of its original base in military and research institutions, into elementary and high schools, as well as into public libraries and the commercial sector. Why do people want to be "on the Internet?" One of the main reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy. There is no "Internet Inc." There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders. In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or political. (There has been some struggle over commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as businesses supply their own links). The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike the phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service. And unlike most commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for access time, either. In fact the "Internet" itself, which doesn't even officially exist as an entity, never "charges" for anything. Each group of people accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine and their own section of line. The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the "anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching English, "English" as an institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English be improved if the "The English Language, Inc." had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a President and a Congress? There'd probably be a lot fewer new words in English, and a lot fewer new ideas. People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own institution. It's an institution that resists institutionalization. The Internet belongs to everyone and no one. Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business people want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spy-proof and secure. And so on and so on. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance today, and the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical condition. Once upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-capacity lines were known as the "Internet Backbone," and their owners could rather lord it over the rest of the Internet; but today there are "backbones" in Canada, Japan, and Europe, and even privately owned commercial Internet backbones specially created for carrying business traffic. Today, even privately owned desktop computers can become Internet nodes. You can carry one under your arm. Soon, perhaps, on your wrist. But what does one *do* with the Internet? Four things, basically: mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file transfers. Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several orders of magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by Internet regulars as "snailmail." Internet mail is somewhat like fax. It's electronic text. But you don't have to pay for it (at least not directly), and it's global in scope. E-mail can also send software and certain forms of compressed digital imagery. New forms of mail are in the works. The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their own. This world of news, debate and argument is generally known as "USENET. " USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the Internet. USENET is rather like an enormous billowing crowd of gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering in and through the Internet on their way to various private backyard barbecues. USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social conventions. In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500 separate newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions generate about 7 million words of typed commentary every single day. Naturally there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing larger all the time. USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and publications. Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even outside the high-speed core of the Internet itself. News and e-mail are easily available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe- realms like BITnet, UUCP and Fidonet. The last two Internet services, long-distance computing and file transfer, require what is known as "direct Internet access" -- using TCP/IP. Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for ARPANET and is still a very useful service, at least for some. Programmers can maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, run programs there or write their own. Scientists can make use of powerful supercomputers a continent away. Libraries offer their electronic card catalogs for free search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs are increasingly available through this service. And there are fantastic amounts of free software available. File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers -- some two thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge. This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through direct Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for them (and many more millions of files are available to people with accounts). Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been developed to catalog and explore these enormous archives of material. The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000 and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network, designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child the Internet, which is thoroughly out of control, and spreading exponentially through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of the Internet in the 90s resembles the spread of personal computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is truly planetary in scale. The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information- service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet "backbone." NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high- definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it's hoped -- and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's post- holocaust command grid. It's a fine and happy irony. How does one get access to the Internet? Well -- if you don't have a computer and a modem, get one. Your computer can act as a terminal, and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an Internet-linked machine. These slower and simpler adjuncts to the Internet can provide you with the netnews discussion groups and your own e-mail address. These are services worth having -- though if you only have mail and news, you're not actually "on the Internet" proper. If you're on a campus, your university may have direct "dedicated access" to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines. Apply for an Internet account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be able to get those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer functions. Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply "freenet" community access. Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and are willing to sell it to subscribers. The standard fee is about $40 a month -- about the same as TV cable service. As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, "network literacy," like "computer literacy" before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life. For Further Reading: The Whole Internet Catalog & User's Guide by Ed Krol. (1992) O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. A clear, non-jargonized introduction to the intimidating business of network literacy. Many computer- documentation manuals attempt to be funny. Mr. Krol's book is *actually* funny. The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide. by John Quarterman. Digital Press: Bedford, MA. (1990) Massive and highly technical compendium detailing the mind-boggling scope and complexity of our newly networked planet. The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (1992) Addison Wesley. Evangelical etiquette guide to the Internet featuring anecdotal tales of life-changing Internet experiences. Foreword by Senator Al Gore. Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide by Brendan P. Kehoe (1992) Prentice Hall. Brief but useful Internet guide with plenty of good advice on useful machines to paw over for data. Mr Kehoe's guide bears the singularly wonderful distinction of being available in electronic form free of charge. I'm doing the same with all my F&SF Science articles, including, of course, this one. My own Internet address is bruces@well.sf.ca.us. Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, April 1993. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other F&SF Science Column #6: "Magnetic Vision" Here on my desk I have something that can only be described as miraculous. It's a big cardboard envelope with nine thick sheets of black plastic inside, and on these sheets are pictures of my own brain. These images are "MRI scans" -- magnetic resonance imagery from a medical scanner. These are magnetic windows into the lightless realm inside my skull. The meat, bone, and various gristles within my head glow gently in crisp black-and-white detail. There's little of the foggy ghostliness one sees with, say, dental x-rays. Held up against a bright light, or placed on a diagnostic light table, the dark plastic sheets reveal veins, arteries, various odd fluid-stuffed ventricles, and the spongey wrinkles of my cerebellum. In various shots, I can see the pulp within my own teeth, the roots of my tongue, the boney caverns of my sinuses, and the nicely spherical jellies that are my two eyeballs. I can see that the human brain really does come in two lobes and in three sections, and that it has gray matter and white matter. The brain is a big whopping gland, basically, and it fills my skull just like the meat of a walnut. It's an odd experience to look long and hard at one's own brain. Though it's quite a privilege to witness this, it's also a form of narcissism without much historical parallel. Frankly, I don't think I ever really believed in my own brain until I saw these images. At least, I never truly comprehended my brain as a tangible physical organ, like a knuckle or a kneecap. And yet here is the evidence, laid out irrefutably before me, pixel by monochrome pixel, in a large variety of angles and in exquisite detail. And I'm told that my brain is quite healthy and perfectly normal -- anatomically at least. (For a science fiction writer this news is something of a letdown.) The discovery of X-rays in 1895, by Wilhelm Roentgen, led to the first technology that made human flesh transparent. Nowadays, X-rays can pierce the body through many different angles to produce a graphic three-dimensional image. This 3-D technique, "Computerized Axial Tomography" or the CAT-scan, won a Nobel Prize in 1979 for its originators, Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack. Sonography uses ultrasound to study human tissue through its reflection of high-frequency vibration: sonography is a sonic window. Magnetic resonance imaging, however, is a more sophisticated window yet. It is rivalled only by the lesser-known and still rather experimental PET-scan, or Positron Emission Tomography. PET- scanning requires an injection of radioactive isotopes into the body so that their decay can be tracked within human tissues. Magnetic resonance, though it is sometimes known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, does not involve radioactivity. The phenomenon of "nuclear magnetic resonance" was discovered in 1946 by Edward Purcell of Harvard, and Felix Block of Stanford. Purcell and Block were working separately, but published their findings within a month of one another. In 1952, Purcell and Block won a joint Nobel Prize for their discovery. If an atom has an odd number of protons and neutrons, it will have what is known as a "magnetic moment:" it will spin, and its axis will tilt in a certain direction. When that tilted nucleus is put into a magnetic field, the axis of the tilt will change, and the nucleus will also wobble at a certain speed. If radio waves are then beamed at the wobbling nucleus at just the proper wavelength, they will cause the wobbling to intensify -- this is the "magnetic resonance" phenomenon. The resonant frequency is known as the Larmor frequency, and the Larmor frequencies vary for different atoms. Hydrogen, for instance, has a Larmor frequency of 42.58 megahertz. Hydrogen, which is a major constituent of water and of carbohydrates such as fat, is very common in the human body. If radio waves at this Larmor frequency are beamed into magnetized hydrogen atoms, the hydrogen nuclei will absorb the resonant energy until they reach a state of excitation. When the beam goes off, the hydrogen nuclei will relax again, each nucleus emitting a tiny burst of radio energy as it returns to its original state. The nuclei will also relax at slightly different rates, depending on the chemical circumstances around the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen behaves differently in different kinds of human tissue. Those relaxation bursts can be detected, and timed, and mapped. The enormously powerful magnetic field within an MRI machine can permeate the human body; but the resonant Larmor frequency is beamed through the body in thin, precise slices. The resulting images are neat cross-sections through the body. Unlike X-rays, magnetic resonance doesn't ionize and possibly damage human cells. Instead, it gently coaxes information from many different types of tissue, causing them to emit tell-tale signals about their chemical makeup. Blood, fat, bones, tendons, all emit their own characteristics, which a computer then reassembles as a graphic image on a computer screen, or prints out on emulsion-coated plastic sheets. An X-ray is a marvelous technology, and a CAT-scan more marvelous yet. But an X-ray does have limits. Bones cast shadows in X- radiation, making certain body areas opaque or difficult to read. And X- ray images are rather stark and anatomical; an X-ray image cannot even show if the patient is alive or dead. An MRI scan, on the other hand, will reveal a great deal about the composition and the health of living tissue. For instance, tumor cells handle their fluids differently than normal tissue, giving rise to a slightly different set of signals. The MRI machine itself was originally invented as a cancer detector. After the 1946 discovery of magnetic resonance, MRI techniques were used for thirty years to study small chemical samples. However, a cancer researcher, Dr. Raymond Damadian, was the first to build an MRI machine large enough and sophisticated enough to scan an entire human body, and then produce images from that scan. Many scientists, most of them even, believed and said that such a technology was decades away, or even technically impossible. Damadian had a tough, prolonged struggle to find funding for for his visionary technique, and he was often dismissed as a zealot, a crackpot, or worse. Damadian's struggle and eventual triumph is entertainingly detailed in his 1985 biography, A MACHINE CALLED INDOMITABLE. Damadian was not much helped by his bitter and public rivalry with his foremost competitor in the field, Paul Lauterbur. Lauterbur, an industrial chemist, was the first to produce an actual magnetic- resonance image, in 1973. But Damadian was the more technologically ambitious of the two. His machine, "Indomitable," (now in the Smithsonian Museum) produced the first scan of a human torso, in 1977. (As it happens, it was Damadian's own torso.) Once this proof-of- concept had been thrust before a doubting world, Damadian founded a production company, and became the father of the MRI scanner industry. By the end of the 1980s, medical MRI scanning had become a major enterprise, and Damadian had won the National Medal of Technology, along with many other honors. As MRI machines spread worldwide, the market for CAT-scanning began to slump in comparison. Today, MRI is a two-billion dollar industry, and Dr Damadian and his company, Fonar Corporation, have reaped the fruits of success. (Some of those fruits are less sweet than others: today Damadian and Fonar Corp. are suing Hitachi and General Electric in federal court, for alleged infringement of Damadian's patents.) MRIs are marvelous machines -- perhaps, according to critics, a little too marvelous. The magnetic fields emitted by MRIs are extremely strong, strong enough to tug wheelchairs across the hospital floor, to wipe the data off the magnetic strips in credit cards, and to whip a wrench or screwdriver out of one's grip and send it hurtling across the room. If the patient has any metal imbedded in his skin -- welders and machinists, in particular, often do have tiny painless particles of shrapnel in them -- then these bits of metal will be wrenched out of the patient's flesh, producing a sharp bee-sting sensation. And in the invisible grip of giant magnets, heart pacemakers can simply stop. MRI machines can weigh ten, twenty, even one hundred tons. And they're big -- the scanning cavity, in which the patient is inserted, is about the size and shape of a sewer pipe, but the huge plastic hull surrounding that cavity is taller than a man and longer than a plush limo. A machine of that enormous size and weight cannot be moved through hospital doors; instead, it has to be delivered by crane, and its shelter constructed around it. That shelter must not have any iron construction rods in it or beneath its floor, for obvious reasons. And yet that floor had better be very solid indeed. Superconductive MRIs present their own unique hazards. The superconductive coils are supercooled with liquid helium. Unfortunately there's an odd phenomenon known as "quenching," in which a superconductive magnet, for reasons rather poorly understood, will suddenly become merely-conductive. When a "quench" occurs, an enormous amount of electrical energy suddenly flashes into heat, which makes the liquid helium boil violently. The MRI's technicians might be smothered or frozen by boiling helium, so it has to be vented out the roof, requiring the installation of specialized vent-stacks. Helium leaks, too, so it must be resupplied frequently, at considerable expense. The MRI complex also requires expensive graphic-processing computers, CRT screens, and photographic hard-copy devices. Some scanners feature elaborate telecommunications equipment. Like the giant scanners themselves, all these associated machines require power-surge protectors, line conditioners, and backup power supplies. Fluorescent lights, which produce radio-frequency noise pollution, are forbidden around MRIs. MRIs are also very bothered by passing CB radios, paging systems, and ambulance transmissions. It is generally considered a good idea to sheathe the entire MRI cubicle (especially the doors, windows, electrical wiring, and plumbing) in expensive, well- grounded sheet-copper. Despite all these drawbacks, the United States today rejoices in possession of some two thousand MRI machines. (There are hundreds in other countries as well.) The cheaper models cost a solid million dollars each; the top-of-the-line models, two million. Five million MRI scans were performed in the United States last year, at prices ranging from six hundred dollars, to twice that price and more. In other words, in 1991 alone, Americans sank some five billion dollars in health care costs into the miraculous MRI technology. Today America's hospitals and diagnostic clinics are in an MRI arms race. Manufacturers constantly push new and improved machines into the market, and other hospitals feel a dire need to stay with the state-of-the-art. They have little choice in any case, for the balky, temperamental MRI scanners wear out in six years or less, even when treated with the best of care. Patients have little reason to refuse an MRI test, since insurance will generally cover the cost. MRIs are especially good for testing for neurological conditions, and since a lot of complaints, even quite minor ones, might conceivably be neurological, a great many MRI scans are performed. The tests aren't painful, and they're not considered risky. Having one's tissues briefly magnetized is considered far less risky than the fairly gross ionization damage caused by X-rays. The most common form of MRI discomfort is simple claustrophobia. MRIs are as narrow as the grave, and also very loud, with sharp mechanical clacking and buzzing. But the results are marvels to behold, and MRIs have clearly saved many lives. And the tests will eliminate some potential risks to the patient, and put the physician on surer ground with his diagnosis. So why not just go ahead and take the test? MRIs have gone ahead boldly. Unfortunately, miracles rarely come cheap. Today the United States spends thirteen percent of its Gross National Product on health care, and health insurance costs are drastically outstripping the rate of inflation. High-tech, high-cost resources such as MRIs generally go to to the well-to-do and the well-insured. This practice has sad repercussions. While some lives are saved by technological miracles -- and this is a fine thing -- other lives are lost, that might have been rescued by fairly cheap and common public-health measures, such as better nutrition, better sanitation, or better prenatal care. As advanced nations go, the United States a rather low general life expectancy, and a quite bad infant-death rate; conspicuously worse, for instance, than Italy, Japan, Germany, France, and Canada. MRI may be a true example of a technology genuinely ahead of its time. It may be that the genius, grit, and determination of Raymond Damadian brought into the 1980s a machine that might have been better suited to the technical milieu of the 2010s. What MRI really requires for everyday workability is some cheap, simple, durable, powerful superconductors. Those are simply not available today, though they would seem to be just over the technological horizon. In the meantime, we have built thousands of magnetic windows into the body that will do more or less what CAT-scan x-rays can do already. And though they do it better, more safely, and more gently than x-rays can, they also do it at a vastly higher price. Damadian himself envisioned MRIs as a cheap mass-produced technology. "In ten to fifteen years," he is quoted as saying in 1985, "we'll be able to step into a booth -- they'll be in shopping malls or department stores -- put a quarter in it, and in a minute it'll say you need some Vitamin A, you have some bone disease over here, your blood pressure is a touch high, and keep a watch on that cholesterol." A thorough medical checkup for twenty-five cents in 1995! If one needed proof that Raymond Damadian was a true visionary, one could find it here. Damadian even envisioned a truly advanced MRI machine capable of not only detecting cancer, but of killing cancerous cells outright. These machines would excite not hydrogen atoms, but phosphorus atoms, common in cancer-damaged DNA. Damadian speculated that certain Larmor frequencies in phosphorus might be specific to cancerous tissue; if that were the case, then it might be possible to pump enough energy into those phosphorus nuclei so that they actually shivered loose from the cancer cell's DNA, destroying the cancer cell's ability to function, and eventually killing it. That's an amazing thought -- a science-fictional vision right out of the Gernsback Continuum. Step inside the booth -- drop a quarter -- and have your incipient cancer not only diagnosed, but painlessly obliterated by invisible Magnetic Healing Rays. Who the heck could believe a visionary scenario like that? Some things are unbelievable until you see them with your own eyes. Until the vision is sitting right there in front of you. Where it can no longer be denied that they're possible. A vision like the inside of your own brain, for instance. Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us LITERARY FREEWARE: NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, June 1993. F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other F&SF Science Column #7: SUPERGLUE This is the Golden Age of Glue. For thousands of years, humanity got by with natural glues like pitch, resin, wax, and blood; products of hoof and hide and treesap and tar. But during the past century, and especially during the past thirty years, there has been a silent revolution in adhesion. This stealthy yet steady technological improvement has been difficult to fully comprehend, for glue is a humble stuff, and the better it works, the harder it is to notice. Nevertheless, much of the basic character of our everyday environment is now due to advanced adhesion chemistry. Many popular artifacts from the pre-glue epoch look clunky and almost Victorian today. These creations relied on bolts, nuts, rivets, pins, staples, nails, screws, stitches, straps, bevels, knobs, and bent flaps of tin. No more. The popular demand for consumer objects ever lighter, smaller, cheaper, faster and sleeker has led to great changes in the design of everyday things. Glue determines much of the difference between our grandparent's shoes, with their sturdy leather soles, elaborate stitching, and cobbler's nails, and the eerie-looking modern jogging- shoe with its laminated plastic soles, fabric uppers and sleek foam inlays. Glue also makes much of the difference between the big family radio cabinet of the 1940s and the sleek black hand-sized clamshell of a modern Sony Walkman. Glue holds this very magazine together. And if you happen to be reading this article off a computer (as you well may), then you are even more indebted to glue; modern microelectronic assembly would be impossible without it. Glue dominates the modern packaging industry. Glue also has a strong presence in automobiles, aerospace, electronics, dentistry, medicine, and household appliances of all kinds. Glue infiltrates grocery bags, envelopes, books, magazines, labels, paper cups, and cardboard boxes; there are five different kinds of glue in a common filtered cigarette. Glue lurks invisibly in the structure of our shelters, in ceramic tiling, carpets, counter tops, gutters, wall siding, ceiling panels and floor linoleum. It's in furniture, cooking utensils, and cosmetics. This galaxy of applications doesn't even count the vast modern spooling mileage of adhesive tapes: package tape, industrial tape, surgical tape, masking tape, electrical tape, duct tape, plumbing tape, and much, much more. Glue is a major industrial industry and has been growing at twice the rate of GNP for many years, as adhesives leak and stick into areas formerly dominated by other fasteners. Glues also create new markets all their own, such as Post-it Notes (first premiered in April 1980, and now omnipresent in over 350 varieties). The global glue industry is estimated to produce about twelve billion pounds of adhesives every year. Adhesion is a $13 billion market in which every major national economy has a stake. The adhesives industry has its own specialty magazines, such as Adhesives Age andSAMPE Journal; its own trade groups, like the Adhesives Manufacturers Association, The Adhesion Society, and the Adhesives and Sealant Council; and its own seminars, workshops and technical conferences. Adhesives corporations like 3M, National Starch, Eastman Kodak, Sumitomo, and Henkel are among the world's most potent technical industries. Given all this, it's amazing how little is definitively known about how glue actually works -- the actual science of adhesion. There are quite good industrial rules-of-thumb for creating glues; industrial technicians can now combine all kinds of arcane ingredients to design glues with well-defined specifications: qualities such as shear strength, green strength, tack, electrical conductivity, transparency, and impact resistance. But when it comes to actually describing why glue is sticky, it's a different matter, and a far from simple one. A good glue has low surface tension; it spreads rapidly and thoroughly, so that it will wet the entire surface of the substrate. Good wetting is a key to strong adhesive bonds; bad wetting leads to problems like "starved joints," and crannies full of trapped air, moisture, or other atmospheric contaminants, which can weaken the bond. But it is not enough just to wet a surface thoroughly; if that were the case, then water would be a glue. Liquid glue changes form; it cures, creating a solid interface between surfaces that becomes a permanent bond. The exact nature of that bond is pretty much anybody's guess. There are no less than four major physico-chemical theories about what makes things stick: mechanical theory, adsorption theory, electrostatic theory and diffusion theory. Perhaps molecular strands of glue become physically tangled and hooked around irregularities in the surface, seeping into microscopic pores and cracks. Or, glue molecules may be attracted by covalent bonds, or acid-base interactions, or exotic van der Waals forces and London dispersion forces, which have to do with arcane dipolar resonances between magnetically imbalanced molecules. Diffusion theorists favor the idea that glue actually blends into the top few hundred molecules of the contact surface. Different glues and different substrates have very different chemical constituents. It's likely that all of these processes may have something to do with the nature of what we call "stickiness" -- that everybody's right, only in different ways and under different circumstances. In 1989 the National Science Foundation formally established the Center for Polymeric Adhesives and Composites. This Center's charter is to establish "a coherent philosophy and systematic methodology for the creation of new and advanced polymeric adhesives" -- in other words, to bring genuine detailed scientific understanding to a process hitherto dominated by industrial rules of thumb. The Center has been inventing new adhesion test methods involving vacuum ovens, interferometers, and infrared microscopes, and is establishing computer models of the adhesion process. The Center's corporate sponsors -- Amoco, Boeing, DuPont, Exxon, Hoechst Celanese, IBM, Monsanto, Philips, and Shell, to name a few of them -- are wishing them all the best. We can study the basics of glue through examining one typical candidate. Let's examine one well-known superstar of modern adhesion: that wondrous and well-nigh legendary substance known as "superglue." Superglue, which also travels under the aliases of SuperBonder, Permabond, Pronto, Black Max, Alpha Ace, Krazy Glue and (in Mexico) Kola Loka, is known to chemists as cyanoacrylate (C5H5NO2). Cyanoacrylate was first discovered in 1942 in a search for materials to make clear plastic gunsights for the second world war. The American researchers quickly rejected cyanoacrylate because the wretched stuff stuck to everything and made a horrible mess. In 1951, cyanoacrylate was rediscovered by Eastman Kodak researchers Harry Coover and Fred Joyner, who ruined a perfectly useful refractometer with it -- and then recognized its true potential. Cyanoacrylate became known as Eastman compound #910. Eastman 910 first captured the popular imagination in 1958, when Dr Coover appeared on the "I've Got a Secret" TV game show and lifted host Gary Moore off the floor with a single drop of the stuff. This stunt still makes very good television and cyanoacrylate now has a yearly commercial market of $325 million. Cyanoacrylate is an especially lovely and appealing glue, because it is (relatively) nontoxic, very fast-acting, extremely strong, needs no other mixer or catalyst, sticks with a gentle touch, and does not require any fancy industrial gizmos such as ovens, presses, vices, clamps, or autoclaves. Actually, cyanoacrylate does require a chemical trigger to cause it to set, but with amazing convenience, that trigger is the hydroxyl ions in common water. And under natural atmospheric conditions, a thin layer of water is naturally present on almost any surface one might want to glue. Cyanoacrylate is a "thermosetting adhesive," which means that (unlike sealing wax, pitch, and other "hot melt" adhesives) it cannot be heated and softened repeatedly. As it cures and sets, cyanoacrylate becomes permanently crosslinked, forming a tough and permanent polymer plastic. In its natural state in its native Superglue tube from the convenience store, a molecule of cyanoacrylate looks something like this: CN / CH2=C \ COOR The R is a variable (an "alkyl group") which slightly changes the character of the molecule; cyanoacrylate is commercially available in ethyl, methyl, isopropyl, allyl, butyl, isobutyl, methoxyethyl, and ethoxyethyl cyanoacrylate esters. These chemical variants have slightly different setting properties and degrees of gooiness. After setting or "ionic polymerization," however, Superglue looks something like this: CN CN CN | | | - CH2C -(CH2C)-(CH2C)- (etc. etc. etc) | | | COOR COOR COOR The single cyanoacrylate "monomer" joins up like a series of plastic popper-beads, becoming a long chain. Within the thickening liquid glue, these growing chains whip about through Brownian motion, a process technically known as "reptation," named after the crawling of snakes. As the reptating molecules thrash, then wriggle, then finally merely twitch, the once- thin and viscous liquid becomes a tough mass of fossilized, interpenetrating plastic molecular spaghetti. And it is strong. Even pure cyanoacrylate can lift a ton with a single square-inch bond, and one advanced elastomer-modified '80s mix, "Black Max" from Loctite Corporation, can go up to 3,100 pounds. This is enough strength to rip the surface right off most substrates. Unless it's made of chrome steel, the object you're gluing will likely give up the ghost well before a properly anchored layer of Superglue will. Superglue quickly found industrial uses in automotive trim, phonograph needle cartridges, video cassettes, transformer laminations, circuit boards, and sporting goods. But early superglues had definite drawbacks. The stuff dispersed so easily that it sometimes precipitated as vapor, forming a white film on surfaces where it wasn't needed; this is known as "blooming." Though extremely strong under tension, superglue was not very good at sudden lateral shocks or "shear forces," which could cause the glue- bond to snap. Moisture weakened it, especially on metal-to-metal bonds, and prolonged exposure to heat would cook all the strength out of it. The stuff also coagulated inside the tube with annoying speed, turning into a useless and frustrating plastic lump that no amount of squeezing of pinpoking could budge -- until the tube burst and and the thin slippery gush cemented one's fingers, hair, and desk in a mummified membrane that only acetone could cut. Today, however, through a quiet process of incremental improvement, superglue has become more potent and more useful than ever. Modern superglues are packaged with stabilizers and thickeners and catalysts and gels, improving heat capacity, reducing brittleness, improving resistance to damp and acids and alkalis. Today the wicked stuff is basically getting into everything. Including people. In Europe, superglue is routinely used in surgery, actually gluing human flesh and viscera to replace sutures and hemostats. And Superglue is quite an old hand at attaching fake fingernails -- a practice that has sometimes had grisly consequences when the tiny clear superglue bottle is mistaken for a bottle of eyedrops. (I haven't the heart to detail the consequences of this mishap, but if you're not squeamish you might try consulting The Journal of the American Medical Association, May 2, 1990 v263 n17 p2301). Superglue is potent and almost magical stuff, the champion of popular glues and, in its own quiet way, something of an historical advent. There is something pleasantly marvelous, almost Arabian Nights-like, about a drop of liquid that can lift a ton; and yet one can buy the stuff anywhere today, and it's cheap. There are many urban legends about terrible things done with superglue; car-doors locked forever, parking meters welded into useless lumps, and various tales of sexual vengeance that are little better than elaborate dirty jokes. There are also persistent rumors of real-life superglue muggings, in which victims are attached spreadeagled to cars or plate-glass windows, while their glue-wielding assailants rifle their pockets at leisure and then stroll off, leaving the victim helplessly immobilized. While superglue crime is hard to document, there is no question about its real-life use for law enforcement. The detection of fingerprints has been revolutionized with special kits of fuming ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate. The fumes from a ripped-open foil packet of chemically smoking superglue will settle and cure on the skin oils left in human fingerprints, turning the smear into a visible solid object. Thanks to superglue, the lightest touch on a weapon can become a lump of plastic guilt, cementing the perpetrator to his crime in a permanent bond. And surely it would be simple justice if the world's first convicted superglue mugger were apprehended in just this way. |