Category Archives: Technology and Society

Technology and Society

Cryonics Breakthrough?

I just saw a segment on Fox News (Shepherd Smith’s evening show) that said that Greg Fahy is going to announce the ability to restore animal kidneys to full function after freezing them to deep subzero temperatures. I visted Greg in his lab over a decade ago when he was doing organ preservation research for the Red Cross in Rockville, Maryland, and he was doing some breakthrough work with rabbit kidneys then. According to the report, tests with human organs may commence within two years.

The purpose of the research is to make it possible to preserve organs for transplant for longer periods of time, but the implications for making cryonics ever more viable are obvious. Of course, they had to have the usual “scientist” on as a nay sayer. However, they’re having to cling to straws more as time goes on. They used to talk about making cows out of hamburger. Now they’re reduced to saying, “Well, OK, they can do it with a mouse, but that’s a long way from doing it with a human.”

That’s how science progresses, professor.

Oh, and kudos to Fox for using the correct term “cryonics,” rather than cryogenics.

Technology and Society

Absurd

The authorities in Lansing just figured out, after only a little over a quarter of a century, that there’s a cryonics facility in Clinton Township, Michigan.

Now, of course, they’ve decided that they have to regulate it, but they don’t know how. They think that it’s a combination mortuary and cemetery (which, for some unexplained reason, can’t both legally be done in the same place). Of course, it’s neither, but they can’t suspend any new patients until it gets sorted out.

[via Howard Lovy]

Technology and Society

Desktop Manufacturing

…is getting closer.

Flexonics is still in its infancy, but the technology?s potential raises questions about what it will mean to be a consumer in an era of de-vices-on-demand. You?d no longer pay for a product, Canny says, you?d pay for plans. I look forward then to a generation of do-it-yourself industrial designers, tinkerers who tweak commercial product designs to improve and customize them. How will I access the fruits of their labor? Peer-to-peer plan networks, of course, where designs for blenders and mobile phones and TV remote controls are swapped like so many MP3s.

There was a lively couple of threads here on the ethical implications of this a few weeks ago.

Space, Technology and Society

The Flight Director’s Nightmare

Ever since the Shuttle first started flying, and perhaps even before, I’ve often thought about a nightmare scenario. I’ve even thought about writing a SF short story, or even full-length novel about it, except that I can’t (intentionally) write fiction (though some would say that I do it often in my attempts to write non-fiction).

A Shuttle launches. Once they attain orbit, it is discovered that they have damage to the tiles that will not allow them to safely enter. In the real world as it existed in the early nineteen eighties, this would be a soul-torturing dilemma, and one that would likely be ultimately passed up to the President. Here’s the problem. The Shuttle doesn’t have enough consumables to last long enough to launch another one to rescue them. The Soviets might be persuaded to launch a couple Soyuz’s, but it’s not clear if they can do it in time, either, and there’s no way to dock them (though early on, they had the “rescue ball concept” for transfer).

But assume as a given that they cannot be rescued (which really did correspond to reality). They only have two choices. They can cross their fingers, pray, or do whatever non-technical things they wish to maximize their chances, and attempt to come home anyway, or they can run out of air on orbit (or choose some faster way to go), and the vehicle becomes a flying tomb, to be either repaired and retrieved later, or reenter in a few weeks. The ethical question, related to this post, is should we destroy the vehicle in a futile attempt to save the crew, or should we sacrifice the crew, who will die either way, and at least attempt to salvage the vehicle? How do the politics play? How does the public react? To make it more interesting, assume that there really is a credible capability to do such a repair and retrieval–that the vehicle really can be saved, and that the crew really cannot.

Now realize that we just averted this scenario in real life only because of the ignorance of Mission Control about the true situation. Is it possible that the tile damage was ignored partly out of (perhaps unconscious) wishful thinking, because the alternative to ignoring it was to face exactly that ethical dilemma and public-relations nightmare? The only difference is that the likelihood of repairing the Orbiter is small. But depending on the level of damage, it might have been larger than the prospects for a safe entry.

One more consideration. If this had been an ISS mission, the crew would likely be alive today, and wondering what to do with a broken orbiter. It’s likely that the damage would have been viewable, and even apparent, when approaching ISS, and the crew would have been able to use the station as a safe haven. But once they launched into an inclination different than that of ISS, if it turns out to be true that the tiles were fatally damaged on ascent, then their fate was sealed, as was their inability to know about it.

All of this, of course, points up the folly of the space policy that we have had in place for the past thirty years, in which we have a single, fragile, unresponsive system to get people to and from space.