Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 187

Here are some excerpts from a book I recently read, "Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith.



Frankly, it’s really freakin’ hard to tell you whether any of the technologies in this book will be realized in their fullest form in any particular time frame. New technology is not simply the slow accumulation of better and better things. The big discontinuous leaps, like the laser and the computer, often depend on unrelated developments in different fields. And even if those big discoveries are made, it’s not always clear that a particular technology will find a market. Yes, time travelers from the year 1920, we have flying cars. No, nobody wants them.

The Earth was once a whole lot hotter. Long story short, that’s why you can’t have a house made of gold. 

See, when you have a big, hot melty ball (like primordial Earth) in space, gravity tends to shift the heavy elements (like gold and platinum) toward the core, while sending the lighter elements (like carbon, silicon, and various gases) to the surface. The process isn’t perfect, which is part of why you can find seams of heavy metal and metal ore near the surface. But by and large, the really fun stuff is hard to get. And the more we dig up, the harder it gets to find more. This is where asteroid mining starts to look interesting. Asteroids are basically the junk that goes into making a planet, but they never permanently coalesced into giant space balls. 

This means they either never underwent the heating process when all the fun metals go to the core, or they did go through that process only to be blown apart later. So, just beyond Mars, there’s this giant pile of planet rubble, with vast riches of metal and other resources that we might like back on Earth, or might use to build settlements in space.

If only we could find some slightly crazy people, with heads like engineers and hearts like pioneers. 

Daniel Faber runs a company called Deep Space Industries. He has been a spacecraft engineer, the director and president of the Canadian Space Society, and has set up broadband in Antarctica. 

According to Mr. Faber, there are enormous resources in asteroids just waiting to be mined: “There are asteroids that are made completely of metal, like natural stainless steel, nickel, and iron and . . . the smallest one we know in a near-earth orbit is 2 kilometers across. It goes by the glorious name of 1986 DA and it contains in it more than thirty times the amount of metal that humanity has ever mined on earth. And that’s one. And then, there are thousands of those. That’s the smallest one that is in a near-earth orbit.”

One of the (few) convenient things about open space is that, once you get away from heavy objects like planets and stars, you can get almost anywhere for cheap. Think about it: There are two main reasons it’s expensive to fly from Los Angeles to Japan. (1) You have to climb over 30,000 feet against gravity and then fight gravity for the whole trip, and (2) there’s a bunch of air slowing you down en route. Once you’re in space, both these problems go away. 

Thus, if you’re planning to ship stuff back to Earth, the ideal place for a space base is somewhere with high resources and low gravity. Consider, for example, Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Phobos is very small, so its escape velocity is a mere 25 miles per hour. This means you could set up a ramp on Phobos, drive a motorcycle up it, and fly off into space. 

Earth’s own moon has an escape velocity that’s about 200 times greater than Phobos’s. The result is that, in energy terms, it costs less to send a package from Phobos to Earth than from Earth’s moon to Earth. 

Asteroids are even better. A typical big asteroid has an escape velocity of about half a mile per hour. This means that if you succeed in creating an asteroid mining base, you can pitch refined asteroid contents back to Earth at very low cost.

We’re going to tell you about a bunch of “-omes” in this chapter, so here’s a quick definition—when a scientist adds “-ome” to the end of a word, she means “like . . . all of it.” So a geneticist studies particular genes while a genomicist studies all of the genes.  Like . . . all of them.

And it’s not just your personal genetic information. You get half of your genome from your mom and half from your dad.* So if you make your genome public, you’re sharing half of each of your parent’s genomes. In fact, whenever you share genetic information, you are to some degree compromising the anonymity of all people in your kin group. Imagine you have a twin who is in political office, and you find out that you carry a genetic risk of schizophrenia. Do you have a social obligation to share that information? Do you have a filial obligation to hide it? 

The potential benefits of precision medicine are vast, but so are the potential costs. As we move inexorably into the era of precision medicine, we should think deeply about what privacy means in an ever more technological society.