Stark Raving Fanboy

Warning: The Following Blog Post May Contain Traces Of Hyperbole.

WatchmenFirst, if you haven’t read Watchmen, go, buy it, read it. It is one of the best things I’ve ever read, unquestionably the finest ‘comic book’ I’ve ever laid hands or eyes on.

Second, if you’re not familiar with the recent work of Zack Snyder, I recommend 300. Note that this is also a treatment of a ‘comic book’.

Third, and where I find myself descending repeatedly into cackling fits of demented fanboy anticipatory glee: Have you seen the trailer for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen?

OMG! I find myself at a total loss to say anything coherent about it. No, wait, it’s a fabulous example of a movie trailer: It’s set to original music (not recycled O Fortuna or similar), they call it a teaser yet it introduces lots of central characters and some actual spoken lines. It manages to convey the scope in space and time of the plot, and it characterizes the mood and feel of the story fairly well.

But mostly, I keep watching it because it’s full of fan-food eye-candy. Visible proof that some difficult bullets have been bitten, just right.

Dr Manhattan
…now I just have to wait a year.

A YEAR??? AAAAAAAAAARGH!! 

…CHANGE THE WORLD…

Screen-capture from YouTube: Google Tech TalksI am frequently guilty of ranting, panic, and gross hyperbole on this blog. I get carried away with some ideas, especially political ones, and make a bigger noise than is in any way warranted. I’m not sorry: This is my blog and I’ll rant if I want to, because it’s fun.

In my opinion, this post is not hyperbole and not a rant:

In my considered opinion, I honestly believe that I have just watched the dawn of a new age.

WARNING: This video is blurry footage of a wizened old physicist with lots of charts and diagrams and high-energy-physics jargon. If you’re not into the physics (which are seriously funky if you are into that kind of thing) then the ramifications of this system are beautifully summed up in the ten minutes from 59:30 to 1:10:00, and the practical considerations and somewhat embarrassing politics of the matter are well discussed in the questions after 1:10:00.

For those disinclined or unable to do the streaming-video thing for ten minutes, I would sum it up thus:

Dr Robert Bussard’s research group have been looking at a lateral approach to the magnetically confined fusion problem for the past eleven years. They have been doing this in a DARPA-funded laborotory in relative secrecy because their approach is practical, feasible and relatively cheap, making it anathema to the dual vested interests of conventional Tokamak-based fusion research and fossil-fuel economics.

Their system uses a spherical magnetic containment field to produce a clean (radiation free) fusion reaction, without molten lithium or multi-billion dollar building-sized toroids.

The important point of the video is that they’ve already done it. They made it work in a machine the size of a domestic oven, on a shoestring budget, with a team of five people.

Some weeks ago, when I started reading Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla I was struck by the attitude of the great minds of the time, one which saw physical science as malleable and controllable, a field in which one brilliant idea in one ordinary human mind in one brief human lifetime could reshape the world.
This attitude, I recall saying to PFH at the time, is something which seems to be missing in modern science: That kind of glory is seen as being firmly beyond the reach of individuals, or even individual research groups. Everything is to be refined and tested in infinitesimal steps, and there will never be another great revolution like Tesla’s AC power system, or so our scientific community is expected to believe.

Seeing this talk has convinced me that I was wrong, or at least partly wrong. A lot of Dr. Bussard’s concluding comments say exactly the same thing: he’s been closeted with his research group behind closed doors for eleven years, and now it’s very rare to find anyone experienced in this kind of science.

I was wrong though, because Bussard and his team exist. As he says during the questions, somewhere, somehow, the concluding research is being done. A viable fusion power source is being perfected, and I will probably live to see it come to fruition.

It’s hard to be calm in the face of such things.

Are you an Invalid, citizen?

For those who haven’t seen seen Gattaca:DNA image licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr

  1. Go see it, it’s a great film.
  2. Skip this post if you don’t want to be spoiled.

For those who have, be very, very afraid: It has begun.

To sum up: Two companies in the USA are now offering to do you a gene-scan, scanning “about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome” (sic) to look for known genetic illnesses, potential susceptibilities and predispositions, and even more broadly, just ‘traits’. You can buy this service for about USD$1000 from deCODEme or 23andme. If you can buy it for $1000, it’s not implausible that you could get one done to add it to your resume: after all, if it says good things about your health and life expectancy, eyesight, maybe even your intelligence, dilligence or honesty, why wouldn’t you? If it says bad things, you can just leave it out…

…except that someone, somewhere, is going to get a scan that is unarguably better than yours, and they might include theirs with their resume. Then you may well be screwed. After all, who’s going to employ you with your predispositions to diabetes and heart failure when they could get someone with similar skills and no such genetic issues?

The next step, as explored in Gattaca, is kind of inevitable too: If you have the choice of guaranteeing no genetic defects in your child, why on earth wouldn’t you? If it costs $1000 to do a scan for 600,000+ known defects on a single genome, how much would it cost to scan half a dozen eggs and a dozen or more sperm? $20,000? I don’t know if this kind of thing is subject to economies of scale, but it seems plausible, especially when all the eggs and all the sperm are respectively from the same two donors. $20,000 is less than a university degree. I know people who spend more than this getting a single child’s teeth straightened. In today’s money, my own teeth probably come close to it. What if my parents had had the option of ordering ‘straight teeth that fit’ pre-conceptus?

In the simplest case, ask yourself how much you would pay, just to rule out the possibility of down syndrome in your child, a 1-in-1000 chance? This is a genetic test which already exists and is carried out in-utero.

Now look forward thirty years to a world that might resemble that portrayed in Gattaca very closely: Your child is applying for a job. As a routine part of this process, they have to have a genetic scan, or else their resume simply won’t be taken seriously. You either have, or haven’t, had your child through a genetic screening process. If you have, their scan can be assured of being better than average, an asset to their employability. If you haven’t, it’s the luck of the draw, but in a world where screened children are more and more common, your chances are less than 50/50.

The obvious question is: How severe can this really get? Obviously it’s a risk we can see coming, and there’s plenty of robust legal impediment already in pace to stone-wall this kind of discrimination, not to mention the technical barriers that make this kind of commonplace IVF unlikely for the time being. Then again, the average age of parenthood is still going up, bringing exponential increases in both genetic defects and infertility. Demand for IVF and genetic screening is already high. The likes of deCODEme and 23andme promise to supply it.

If this is a good thing, why does it scare me so much?