Candidate statement for National Space Society

For decades, I have worked to make human activity in space economically self-sustaining, with “multiplier effects” which make space more than just a” banana republic.” Space must open up big new markets. We must cut the cost of access to space to $200/pound. (That drives the economics of energy from space and the scale of other markets.) We need dogged efforts to connect the requirements all the way from nuts and bolts to global policies and politics.

In 1972, while getting a PhD from Harvard in Applied Math, I started the Harvard Committee for a Space Economy (HCSE). HCSE stimulated many new ideas. It provided a start for Mark Hopkins, and links to the Princeton group (O’Neill) and Drexler. George Mueller’s vision for the space shuttle inspired us, but Nixon’s response illustrated pitfalls in politics.

Teaching at U. Maryland (1975-1978), I included space in my course on Global Survival Problems, where I met Gary Barnhardt. With another friend, we founded the Maryland Alliance for Space Colonization, which got up to 500 members.

From 1979-1989, I became the DOE/EIA lead analyst for long-term energy futures. As Regional Director for L-5, I worked with chapters from New Jersey to the Piedmont. I served quietly but effectively as L-5’s representative to Congress, helping start the National Aerospace Plane Project (NASP). After my DOE colleague Gary Oleson became representative, I worked with him on a council of pro-space organizations leading to the founding of NSS.

Through 2010, I funded research from the Engineering Directorate of NSF. I funded AAC in Tennessee to apply computational intelligence to problems which plagued NASP. Based on their success, AAC briefly led America’s continuing effort in hypersonics (LoFlyte) after NASP cancellation. I cooperated with McDonnell Douglas, leading to the Handbook of Intelligent Control (White and Sofge), yielding methods to mass-produce materials for hypersonics and reduce the weight of thermal protection systems. I funded efforts to assimilate and improve a Russian approach (“Ajax”) to air-breathing vehicles fast enough to get to orbit. In 2002, I visited John Mankins, who agreed to “JIETSSP” – the last US government funding program for space solar power, which we ran jointly. (To learn more, search on JIETSSP at www.nsf.gov, or visit www.werbos.com/space.htm.) In 2009, I worked at the Senate on climate, energy, defense technology and space. Futures published my paper on a rational strategy to maximize the probability that humans really succeed in settling space.

misconceptions about backpropagation and brain

A friend recently passed on a paper which commented on backpropagation

(see www.werbos.com/Mind#htm) and the brain. Since there is SO much

misinformation out there, it's probably worth posting some comment on the supposedly learned comment....

==========================================

I summarized:

There is a HUGE amount of miscommunication between disciplines on this and many other topics. It's a bit like the wars between Republicans and Democrats which we

need to deal with and adapt to, like it or not.

Most of the people who say these things about backpropagation in the brain/psych world

do not even know what backpropagation actually is.

==================

My friend said:

Just ran across a paragraph in a long paper on other subject that walked into your territory, thought you might like to see it:

Critique of Back-Propagation :

The method of backwards calculation of weights is not biologically plausible. Thus, it cannot be viewed as a model for learning in biological systems, but as a method to design a network with learning features.

Second, the algorithm uses a digital computer to calculate weights. When the final network is implemented in hardware, however, it has lost its plasticity due to preset weights.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's really stupid. Both analog and digital neural net hardware exists with

adaptable weights of various types. 'Way back in 1994, Caulfield (an optical computing guy)

and I published a joint paper on how to do online learning with adaptable hardware weights,

which works in a practical way even with the simple forms of backpropagation that

untrained psychologists know about.

There was a period of lull on the neural net hardware front for a few years. But

on February 3-5, Luda and I are scheduled to go to a conference CNNA 2010

(an easy google) where 680 people are coming, dedicated ENTIRELY to neural network hardware, which is now finally getting to be recognized as the next big wave.

(But I will probably be a day or two late, because I'm supposed to speak at Herzliya 2010,

another conference you might enjoy googling -- especially the program.)

Now if the Pope says that no such chips exist, and Chua and XILINX say they are actually selling them, who do you believe? The Pope has a higher citation index,

so of course the chips do not exist -- if you believe in hermeneutics.

As many now do, as memories of Francis Bacon fade even in large parts of science.

If the humans believe more and more in hermeneutics, perhaps humans will conclude that computers do not exist and perhaps the chips will conclude that the humans need not exist.

I hope not, but things are indeed looking sticky lately.

---------------------------------------------------------------

The commenter went on:

This loss is in contrast with the initial motivation to devlop neural networks that are biologically inspired. If changes are needed, a computer calculates anew the weight values and updates them. This dependence on a digital computer robs the neural network implementation of its spontaneous ability to restructure itself in response to experience and all the complex dynamics that goes with it.

============================================

My response:

Again, this assertion is mainly a matter of ignorance.

In more sophisticated neural network designs, backpropagation is not EVERYTHING!

It is an essential PART of the system.

Rewiring in the brain and rewiring in hardware are complex and important issues.

In fact, in a general system at the level of human brain intelligence or lower, there

are three critical issues at the heart of intelligence: (1) how the "weights" (synapse strengths

and intraneuronal parameters) are adapted or updated, on a continuum of nonzero values;

(2) how they may be set to zero ("nulled out") or reset; (3) how physical rewiring is decided.

In all cases, the important issue is not the physical mechanism (though that's

a key part to figuring out what we really want to know), but the functional

or computational basis for deciding to invoke (with what parameters) the physical mechanisms.

With or without rewiring, it is essential to do and understand both (1) and (2)

to understand normal brain intelligence, as well as to replicate brain-like intelligence

in computers. Backpropagation is an essential part of that. Thus the critic's argument here is a non sequitur.

Just for your edification -- it is unclear whether (3) is really significant in the vast majority of humans above the age of two. Until a few years ago, it was believed that no new higher neurons are created in the brains of humans above the age of two; now we know better, but

the survival and use of the new neurons (sent swimming through the blood from generic progenitor cells without higher intelligence) depends on factors probably calculated as part of the same system which performs (1) and (2), which needs feedback to do its job.

BUT AGAIN: I add these later comments just for your edification. I would say more,

but maybe this is not the right context.)

--------------------------------------------

The commenter went on:

Moreover, despite its popularity, the algorithm suffers from extensive calculations and, hence, slow training speed.

===================

My response:

When some folks try to turn on computers, it may sometimes take takes centuries for them to boot up. That's them.

It is true that valid generalization from complex experience takes a lot of time

even when it is done well, by any means whatsoever. Even human brains sometimes take years to learn the full implications of their life's experience. But for ordinary engineering applications, fast learning methods with feedback have been developed. In operations research (which knows more about these converegnce speed issues than any other disciplines), it would be seen

as a sign of pathetic ignorance or idealistic fantasy to imagine that convergence could be faster without derivatives than with them, if derivatives are used in an intelligent way.

But still, no one on earth can claim to have the optimal design as yet for making

OPTIMAL use of the information we get form backpropagation and from other sources.

(Those who do not even understand this challenge are not likely to contribute to it.)

The time required to calculate the error derivatives and to update the weights on a given training exemplar is proportional to the size of the network. The amount of computation is proportional to the number of weights.

This is again really stupid and ignorant, as a general statement. If neural network designs are emulated on a digital computer, the first sentence is generally true. Thus with a billion neurons

and 10,000 weights each, it would cost on the order of 10 trilllion calculations to calculate all

the derivatives. But it would cost about 10 trillion calculations to run the network itself from its inputs to its outputs.

The reason why brains and brain-like hardware are possible is that they use massively parallel

calculation. I can understand how someone in another field might be unaware of my own work,

but even a sincere high school kid wouldn't make such strong statements about backpropagation without knowing there exists a book called "parallel distributed processing," whose title should make it obvious what's going on.

In fact, results in the lab of Barry Richmond of NIH show that it takes about

30 milliseconds for the cerebral cortex to make a forward pass calculation from

its inputs to its outputs. It takes about the same to make the backwards pass it also

makes in every alpha time interval (anout one-eight of a second). The timing

is no problem. Backpropagation is a parallel calculation just as much as

involking a neural network itself.

===============

The commenter said:

In 1986 Sejnowski and Rosenberg described a simple back-propagation network simulation that reads and properly pronounces unrestricted English text with good accuracy. They named their system NETtalk.Large computer programs exist that accomplish the same task, but these programs, which take many hundreds of hours to write, painstakingly encode each English pronunciation rule and provide lookup tables to cover the many exceptions in the language. The NETtalk simulation program took only a short time to write and contains no explicit pronunciation rules or lookup tables.()

---------------------------------

My response:

I have to admit that I do not know anything about the literature on

practical technology products which try to do what NETtalk did.

Thus I have no basis for verifying or contradicting the claims in the paragraph abovem, except perhaps by analogy with other areas. Certainly I know

of areas where one group used traditional painstaking methods over years to perform

the same task that was performed very quickly (either before or after) by use

of a neural network. But there is also a great diversity of people using neural networks, some trained and some less trained, and some trying hard and others trying to get bad results.

At www.werbos.com/oil.htm, I posted some slides which included examples of applications where people spent MANY millions or billions of dollars using a wide variety of traditional, AI and control theory methods on an important application... where a well-crafted neural network system substantially outperformed them all. Those are for decision applications.

For "prediction" -- at www.werbos.com/Mind.htm#Mouse, I posted some recent slides given at Chile.

It is still a major challenge here how to get the word out, and upgrade the educational

systems.

Best regards,

Paul

What to do about jobs in the US here and now

As millions of people suffer from unemployment, it amazes me how reluctant so many "experts" in the US are to think out of the box. People doing "creative" thinking about jobs in the US still mainly assume that $1 of government funds buys x jobs, if it's spending, and y jobs, if it's a tax cut, period. Why don't we have the sense to ask what KINDS of activities generate much higher x and y? In Japan, by contrast,

(http://www5.cao.go.jp/keizai1/2009/1208_taisaku.pdf) people have carefully tabulated the initial economic stimulus (prior to multiplier effects) versus government expenditure by type of activity. The "three pillars of eco-friendly..." activity was well designed to generate three times the stimulus as ordinary government spending or tax breaks for the same deficit effect. The multiplier effects would also be better than they are for "cash for caulkers" and the like, because the stimulus is all focused on sectors (automobile, construction, steel) where spending generates employment rather than inflation or imports, much more than random spending would achieve. If we really cared about jobs here and now, we would put almost all our new jobs effort into our own version of the "three pillars program" -- perhaps paid for by a gasoline tax, whose effect on US jobs would be far less. One pillar should be: $3000 per car "cash for independence" , for buyers of qualified cars to stay in effect until quarterly data show US car sales back above the rate of 13 million per year; a "qualified car" should be defined as qualified for a credit under section 30B of the IRS code as amended by the proposal at www.werbos.com/oil.htm.

It's important to note that mpg as such is not the best measure of PROGRESS towards the goal of OECD becoming independent of OPEC. In technical terms, a "U" function is not a "J" function; as another example of this principle, the rational market price of oil is not just the marginal cost, because there is a "Hotelling rent" term reflecting the reality that the oil market is not a static system. Like the Japanese, we would also be wise to fund the two other pillars (incentives to encourage purchase of eco-friendly new buildings and appliances).

But -- this is not an endorsement of other aspects of the Japan stimulus package.

=============================

Further details: the distinction between U and J is very fundamental in dynamic systems theory, in "ADP" and

in the field of intelligent systems. For some tutorials and citations, see www.werbos.com/Mind.htm.

Perhaps I will someday post the Japanese web site as amended to include some English translation,

at www.werbos.com/energy.htm.

Copenhagen -- the morning after

Mice learn from their mistakes -- but do humans? The follow on

from Copenhagen will be an interesting test case, with ramifications far beyond

CO2.

In the animal kingdom on earth, humans have a unique ability to say to

themselves "the operation was a success but the patient died." I see

a WHOLE lot of that kind of thinking, in various disguises, in the wake

of Copenhagen. Lots of people who are firm in their convictions that THEY at least

did the right thing, whatever the outcome may have been. But someone

once said: "By their fruits you will know them." Our best hope for gaining from this experience would

be if ALL the major players thought twice about what THEY THEMSELVES could have done better.

Can we remove the beam form our own eye? Are any of us really justified in feeling we did the right thing, after this outcome?

I can imagine Senator Inhofe raising his hand, saying he got exactly what he wanted.

(Putting the kabosh on the whole thing.) But he certainly can't take all or even most of the credit

for the outcome. And does he really believe that the WHOLE reality we now face -- with

serious but unpredictable EPA regulation required by court order, wth a hodgepodge of state regulations, and

an ever less predictable international situation -- is the best outcome we could get here?

Again, even for him, is it not a case where the operation was a success but the patient is dying?

According to the Financial Times yesterday, the head of Shell Oil was very upset at the outcome

in Copenhagen, and very very vocal about that. Shell and BP were supporters of the US

Climate Action Partnership program, which is basically a bit too far to the left for my tastes --

but, like them, I agree it is a great tragedy that the world is basically doing nothing coherent to discourage CO2

emissions as such, and that the failures in Copenhagen and in Washington have left all kinds

of confusion in their wake which get in the way of actions on oil dependency (a far more urgent

threat to the world economy) and investments in electric power and other sectors (important to jobs,

among other things).

Not only Shell and BP, but heads of the largest electric utilities have testified over and over again

that we need some resolution and some action on this issue.

But: did they not all shoot themselves in the foot, to cause this situation?

There are two main problems here -- the problem in the US Senate, and the problem in the

international negotiations. Even the most optimistic gameplan of the international Bali team

required that the US Senate pass a cap-and-trade law before an international treaty could be signed;

thus the Senate side requires analysis first.

Shell and BP SAID that they wanted this certainty here, and some action on a problem they

agree is real... (and maintaining EU-US trade and cooperatoin is also of some importance to them)...

so why the API ads every night telling people to "oppose the tax"? Why do people hear only

one voice from the oil industry? That voice, direct to the voters, had a chilling effect on any

more efficient and more rational response to this issue.

Likewise -- why the threat from the the electric distribution companies that they get their hundreds of billions

of dollars sent direct to pay them off, as part of the deal, or else they run the same kind of ads?

If anyone thinks that that kind of gigantic payoff scheme doesn't lose them a few votes from folks

who remember their principles at least a little... what can one say? There are times when I wonder whether

Exelon is really a member of EEI.

Why is industry channeling so much money to certain integrated campaign funds which turn around

and demand total adherence to extreme ideological positions, positions which are a major source of

the big mess here? (Lack of bipartisan evolution of more moderate ideas on climate is not

ONLY the fault of the Democratic leadership here.)

----------------------------

Roughly speaking, I see four clusters of ideas floating around in the Senate.

There is the ideological right, which holds that it's best to just say no in the purest, most extreme terms --

even if that means nothing rational gets passed at all, and we're stuck with the hodgepodges.

There is the position... I can't help saying Defenders of the Integrity of the Caps (DICs).

That's a lot more precise than the term "ideological left," because it is 'way off to portray

the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) as being to the left of Friends of the Earth (FOE).

There is the highly rational moderate Democratic position, exemplified by Senator Cantwell,

who has (says the press) recently introduced an alternative cap and trade bill, about one twentieth the length

of the Kerry-Boxer or the Waxman bills. I haven't checked to see whether she included a narrow

price collar, as FOE has righly recommended. I haven't checked to see whether her way of sending dividend checks back to ordinary households would include the kind of statistical formula that would exactly compensate for

different impacts on energy bills. (That's easy for people who know algorithms, but not everyone does up there.)

I haven't checked to see whether it would order the executive branch to compute border adjustment taxes

as exactly as possible to maintain a level playing field with producers in natoins with none or much lower

fees for CO2 emissions. I would go to http:/thomas.loc.gov to check right now, if that were still within the scope of my job... But in any case, the Cantwell bill is certainly a much more promising start than Kerry-Boxer, and these

three crucial features would not require 100 pages to add. None of them is a crass payoff, like most of the

free allowances in the older bills; they are all principled ways to maintain some equity and predictability here.

Our best hope to move forward, in my view, would be more support for that kind of moderate position,

from both sides of the aisle, with industry pushing hard to call off their most extreme dogs in both parties.

If I were the President, instead of trying for a rerun of the health care political mess under less advantageous

conditions, I'd be working hard from all sides to try to create advantageous conditions for this best case realistic outcome. I would hope that the unpleasant experience of Copenhagen would help him realize that just going along with an unrealistic game plan does not lead to the best achievable outcome in the end. And I'd certainly

be thinking a whole lot about Senator Baucus... who is not entirely a stranger to Senator Cantwell.

But I'd work hard to keep it balanced, to open the door to principled mainstream Republicans like Murkowski

and Lugar early in the game.

In my view, a rational Republican response would actually be more rational and better than the Cantwell

bill -- in its own right. But the Cantwell bill would be easier to pass (passing a bill IS the only

alternative to all kinds of awful stuff, which I learned more about in my last month up there),

and it would make it easier to ratify a new and better treaty down the pike, if we ever get that far.

What is the rational Republican response? If I were working for a Republican office on the Hill

(as I actually was for a few months at the start of 2009), I would now look to Senator Murkowski as the Great White

Hope. Or else find someone else willing to make similar points.

Murkowski has said many rational things in hearings. She also introduced an amendment to try to eliminate EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources. That amendment failed -- as I would

have expected -- because it was too far to the right; it would have required 51 senators -- including many Democrats --

to take a position which would be rightly seen as opposing greenhouse gas control in general.

But what about the alternative here:

http://www.werbos.com/E/EPA_limitation.pdf ??

This kind of amendment -- like Murkowski's original amendment -- ought to be

a clear step up for any principled Republican in the Senate (given that not

a one of them would vote for Kerry-Boxer). If any Republican wanted to maximize the probability of no federal

discouragement of CO2 emission whatsoever, this bill would give him that. In a way, it is an agreement to

a kind of FAIR COMPETITION -- a Congressional vote on just how high the user fee should be allowed to go,

as an alternative to a murky and less honorable process. And it would be guaranteed to be simpler than Cantwell in any case. I do hope there would be at least ten principled Democrats who would be willing to vote for it too,

since it provides a more efficient market-based discouragement of CO2 than even the Cantwell bill.

But of course, the question is: WHEN? If a Cantwell type bill got to the Senate floor, and did not pass,

that would be the right time for a bipartisan group to put this forward as an alternagtive either to nothing or to even more time spent on this issue (with even more confusion and uncertainty and delay).

---------

In actuality -- neither a Cantwell type resolution or a Murkowski type resolution

will ever be possible in the real world if the groundwork is not well prepared

for them.

===========

AFTER one or the other passes, the best hope for international carbon discouragement

would be a straight US-China treaty, negotiated bilaterally, with provisions to

let others sign on when and as they choose, and pro visions intended to encourage

others to join -- to a REASONAble degree. It would be a simple carbon price to

replace the existing law, and nullify border adjustments between the signatories.

Big parties in Copenhagen DON'T WORK. As predicted.

But must run. Maybe it's premature to say too much right now about realistic

treaty efforts.

Best of luck to us all,

Paul

final inputs to Senate climate bill

Tomorrow (Thursday) will be the last day of fact-finding hearings at the Senate

Environment and Public Works, which will then proceed to debate and vote the

first really official climate change bill from the US Senate.

Today and yesterday, I heard about 40 people (including about a dozen senators) give

their views of all these issues. So many things to think about!

A few days ago, I posted a message "climate deniers and Adam and Eve."

One of you quietly noted that there are true believers on the left, not just the right.

That is absolutely true. I have spent a lot of time on the delusions which threaten useful action from well-meaning people concerned about global warming. I felt I needed to say something about other delusions, simply as a matter of balance.

Should I say that the crazy left is just as much a threat to competent action as the crazy right?

It is not quite so simple. After all, is the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to the left of the Friends of the Earth (FOE)? Many of my friends would be horrified to hear -- I actually feel more in harmony with the recent actions of Friends of the Earth than of NRDC, on the climate change bills. When Lord Monckton and FOE agree on the need to try to prevent dangerous financial manipulation, who is left and who is right?

==============================

I have been pleased to see that more people in Washington understand a key point I have been trying to make:

NET JOB creation in the next 1-3 years depends a whole lot on how much money gets spent on investment in the electric

power sector. That, in turn, depends a lot on CERTAINTY. I have worked with electric power people involved in planning decisions; bnefore making big investments, they have simple models, which lay out future streams of costs and revenues.

IF THEY DON'T KNOW what the numbers are, or what the best technologies are, it's hard to invest. The basic theme seems to be that the greatest job creation would be with a DEFINITE carbon price (combined with eliminating

other EPA and state regulation of CO2); next best a simple cap-and-trade with a narrow hard price collar; worst of all,

nothing passes at all in the Senate this year.

Regarding the collar...

I've had a chance to think still more.

There is still a lot of debate about "technology." To cut CO2 by 80% in electric power and manufacturing (let alone transportation), does the technology exist today to do it, at no more than $30-50? The EPA forecasts basically say no;

they predict that CO2 porices have to rise to $177 per ton by 2050 to meet the targets. I am far more optimistic.

In particular -- I have seen technology from new companies like Calera and Aurotra, which I have great faith in (even being a VERY tough skeptic on unproven individual new technologies, as trained by NSF and sad experience) which could

recycle ALL of our flue gas within the $30-50 rpice range.

IF SO -- why would I support a hard price collar so much?

Several reasons.

One is "political" -- an honest kind of politics where we respect teh fact that other people have other knowledge bases, and we have some obligation to consider their viewpoint/base -- especially when we need their votes. If we can do the job within $30 or $40, why not simmply have a firm permanent simple cap on allowance prices at that level?

(Shoud it be $30 or $40? I hope.. an unconventional idea... that the majority leader could

get unanimous consent to vote on the bill first, and let majority rule choose betwen two collar ranges.

BUt if $30 is all we can get, why not? NOT TO RISE in future, except maybe to $40 over 20 years.)

We lose nothing in the real market... but we suddenly are able to place simple hard upper bounds on the total cost of the

system, which people can verify in simple arithmetic. Baucus yesterday said "we need to limit the potential damage of

global warnming, but also the potential damage of the bill itslef." Exactly. Why not, when we have every reason to believe that $30 or $40 is enough to do the job -- in industry and electric power? (In tranbsportation, even Waxman would not be enough to do much, which is why we need to get past this stuff and move on to www.werbos.com/oil.htm as soon as we can.

Or, better, find a way to do it in parallel.)

There is another reason.

The sad fact is that unbounded government programs have a tendency to create "Jurassic Park" inefficient

systems, which get in the way of the new efficient ways of doing things. And even big companies will often go for

big obsolete nonsense, if hey've been too close to the government trough, if the the nonsense is at least well known,

and if they can get someone else to pay for it. If we don't have a price collar, it may limit the growth of the low-cost safer new alternatives, which we really need to take over the entire market here. Especially if we want China to

have reduced emissions too. Without that, any pretense of sincere environmentalism is phony.

It's not phony to pass a US law, but it is phony to design US actions and international negotiations without

aiming as hard as we can for a situation where US and China pay teh same carbon price, and small efficient US

companies help China process its flue gas inexpensively, far better than our government-based fat cats could ever do.

==========

Dan Reicher of Google testified today that we need BOTH a clear, simple carbon price (worldwide as soon as possible),

ALONG WITH "sectoral measures." I'm glad that that message has been more and more understood and respected.

The kind of "sectoral measures" which make most sense are efficiency standards and such,

special encouragement of renewables (most notably R&D), and really effective action on transportation.

For transportation, Google praised the kind of MPG standards EPA is now putting through... and the cap-and-trade bill..

but said we need new action on (1) incentives; (2) battery research; and (3) smart grid, so that new plug-ins can

interface well with the grid.

Google doesn't know all the most cutting edge technologies I have seen at NSF and such... but they are a whole lot closer to reality than some of the things we hear in Washington! At www.werbos.com/oil.htm, I do include exactly the kinds of incentives which Toyota and flexible vehicle people have asked for. I was glad to hear google and others try to explain

to Washington -- tax incentives renewed every other year simply don't cut it, when it's industry whose investments you are trying to stimulate. IF oil gets permanent incentives, why not the stuff we need most to get new action on?

As a long-time IEEE guy, who worked hard to get the message on plug-ins to DC many years ago...

iI find it embarrasing when people say "why don't we just go all-electric, and make life simple?

Don't you respect those electrical engineers?" That's a weird accusation for an IEEE guy to try to

cope with .. and it really is embarrassing when electrical people, like conservatives and leftists, have to contend with people

out of touch with reality even within our community. We all have to control our true believers.. for even OUR truth can bnecome a lie when it is pushed too far.

In my view, electricity really will take over 75-100% of the market for miles, in time, if we just have a level playing field.

So why fight for a level playing field? Why give equal play and encouragement to biofuels, to shale gas... and even

such odd things as hydrogen fuel cell cars and new coal liquids (the latter subject to some constraints)?

Several reasons.

First, there is some honest politics. Not the politics of a coalition of robbers, trying to divvy up taxpayer money to give gifts to preferred groups. More like a coalition of knights of the Round Table, who support an honest, chivalrous competitoin, where "may the best man win" -- each believing they can prove they are the best man or woman.

Second -- to get the most security and environmental benefit for whatever economic price we pay...

the optimal trajectory between now and 2050 or 2100 is actually quite complex. In a century,

the US shale gas will run out... but in the meantime, it can hjelp us a whole lot to do better with our problems

with the Middle East and the risks of $4 or $8 gasoline. A well-designed market can calculate that trajectory better than even the best of us algorithm people could. Picking JUST ELECTRICITY starting nw is almost certainly not

the optimal trajectory. Energy markets have always been complex ecologies, with many niches, and that's what we should expect EVEN IF we go full speed ahead to minimize OPEC dependency.

Likewise with nuclear, wind and solar.

==============

There was a WHOLE lot more said.. worthy of further comment...

but it's been a long day, and tomorrow will be long too. And who reads this far anyway?

Best of luck,

Paul

P.S. www.werbos.com/oil.htm DOESN'T say much about Google's intelligent grid point...

but it gives a link to a paper which goes 'way beyond what Google is doing there.

But that requires a totally different kind of action. If we can get a carbon price, AND do what's in oil.htm,

maybe then we'd be ready for the totally new set of regrouping and surge needed to reach what we

need in the brain-like intelligent grid area. Not this year, sadly... except for some background engineering eforts and some related prerequisites which are far from sufficient.

Peter Brehm of Infinia had a genuinely interesting talk on the most important source of renewable electricity -- solar thermal using "dish" reflectors and Stirling engines to convert heat to electricity. www.werbos.com/energy.htm has some further information about this technology, which has more hope than anything else to really beat small natural gas units for the daytime peak power market worldwide. I did have some contact with the NASA Glenn people he got teh Stirling from... but I wonder if he knows about the patents out there for preventing hydrogen embrittlement in the engine, key to using new materials to double the efficiency of the Stirling itself and cut costs in half yet again? Sandia claims that their 30.1 percent efficiency in a Stirling is the world's record for solar, so I would imagine we could still benefit from getting it up to 55.

Could Terminator II come true? A true story

Background: a friend on a listserv suggested I should really collect my curious life stories in a book some time. I said I had thought about it, and decided against, in part because no one would believe it anyway...

He asked why, and I replied with an example:

==================================================

===========================================

Thanks much for the flattering comparison, Bob!

But no, I wasn't really thinking about Da Vinci. I was thinking about

hundreds of implausible stories.

So I should give you an amusing example. This story is one I **HAVE**

told to a number of people; it is more normal and mundane than most. But

even so, some would object, and I tend to doubt whether it belongs in

print. (I will not name names, but could. The naming of names is part of

the problem.)

I call it my "Terminator" story.

====================

Circa 1991, the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks

(IJCNN) was held in Seattle. Boeing was a major player,

so they arranged a couple of VIP tours of their aircraft plant with

lunch in the executive dining room.

Prior to that lunch, I was alert for any opportunity to really push

forward the neural network field.

I was delighted when I met a guy from McDonnell-Douglas who was

wrestling with the very tough problem of

how to assign missile interceptors to incoming missiles when there might

be hundreds of both. This was a problem that none of the usual baby

shortcuts could solve... so I spent a few minutes happily showing him

the flowcharts for how it

could really be addressed effectively, and planned to get back to him. I

was also delighted when I met a youngish Afro-American

researcher highly credible in neuroscience, tryuing to make connections

that would help him find real functional explanations of how things work

in the brain; I pointed him towards a new engineering research group I

planned to fund, and again intended to follow up.

Then at lunch -- one of the Boeing guys said: "There have been so many

of these new emerghing technologies like neural

networks down through the years. Someone really ought to do some kind of

study to help us predict which ones will really pan out and deliver and

which ones won't." As it happens -- back in those days I was Program

Director for two areas at NSF, neural networks and Emerging Technologies

Initiation (ETI). So I couldn't help repeating what I had heard from a

previous ETI program director: "Actually, we have done several studies

like that at NSF. One of them found a number of important predictors.

Some were things you would have expected -- like fields based on a new

breakthrough, or new crossdisciplinary connections. But some were a

little surprising -- for example, science fiction. Technologies subject

to good science fiction somehow mysteriously prospered more than you

would have expected. Bad science fiction predicts a strange withering.

By 'good' and 'bad,' I don't measn quality of writing; I mean whether it

is depicted as something good or bad."

Suddenly a loud groan came from one of the Boeing people. Me: "Why did

you just say... UUUUUGGGGHHHH?"

Him: "Talk about bad science fiction... have you seen Terminator II?"

Me: "Not really." (The title didn't sound like my kind of thing.)

Him: "Well, you have to. After what you just said, and what you are

doing, you really have to. It is your professional obligation."

Me: "Well, OK.".... (Then discussion of Star Trek and Data and other

subjects..)

Back in the office on Monday, I was very pleased to start the week by

signing off on an SBIR grant which basically started/created a new

company called "Neurodyne," which would finally create the first firm

base for a new stream of neural network technology, using a robot arm,

as the initial testbed application. And on Tuesday night I saw the movie.

As I saw the movie... it began as the human race was about to be

exterminated all because some yoyo told the missile defense people about

how to use intelligent decision-making neutral networks. Oops. The evil

robot about to destroy our last hope looked like a 50-50 morph between

me and the guy who really set up Neurodyne. Oops. Interesting to see

such a nice familiar face in a different role. And the key Afro-American

scientist working with Neurodyne in the movie was a dead ringer for the

guy I was just putting in touch with them. And it all started with a

ronot arm and a chip, and I just signed off on the robot arm the day before.

One person I told this to last week asked: "Didn't you wonder right then

whether someone was spying on you? It's so improbable?" My reply: "Maybe

for a millisecond.. but of course the movie had to be made long before

the actual events. Yet another major part of the movie was information

being sent back through time, and a woman who had access from the future...

and as soon as I put THAT part together, I really became creeped out."

I was well and truly shaken up for a few days, but gradually calmed

down. I told myself: "There is no way that computers could outsmart

humans to that extent, even using my new designs and methodologies,

without a really huge amount of sheer computing power. Von Neumann

estimated that brains operate at something like 10**15 or 10**18, and it

now looks more like something on the high end. We are 'way away from

that kind of horsepower know, especially when you think of the extra

horspepower needed to emulate variable connectivity." It really would

require a new chip as well as the robot arm project. So I calmed down...

to some degree.

Until about Thursday. On Thursday, I picked up the phone... and heard a

thick Germanic voice which really did sound just like Schwartzenegger.

"Hello, Paul!" (Picture the Schwartzenegger tone of voice.) "I am

calling from LA to tell you some good news.

We have this great new chip, and we are working with Neurodyne. We would

like to come and brief you on the new chip."

I probably need to start censoring at this point, even though it really

becomes much more entertaining and improbable after this point. It's

probably safe to say that I pushed hard for a new effort which funded

this extremely competent group to develop a new more near-term chip, for

use in solving air quality problems in cars, which was almost widely

deployed... until the Bush Administration got rid of the new air quality

regs which drove it. I later ran across a guy from the ballistic missile

defense organization, once by accident while riding the Metro and once

by accident in Circuit City, who happened to have a laptop handy with

powerpoint and video of how they were planning to use the more powerful

chip and showed it to me impromptu

right then and there. (But what I am leaving out...! And how many of

you have been innocently riding a Metro, a bit tired,

on a routine day to work, suddenly seeing a tall guy in a blue uniform

who could be right out of the movie, suddenly pop up a laptop and show

you real world terminator movies there in public?)

By the way, many years later, the guy who really started Neurodyne told

me that they actually intended to name the company "Cyberdyne," but

changed their minds after they saw the movie.

Last I checked, the uberchip and its use in missile defense are all gone

now, and the key guy doesn't even work

for the Air Force any more. Space-based missile defense is itself on a

very far back burner, apparently impossible for economic reasons if

nothing else. I used to think Sarah Connor reminded me a bit of my wife

in some ways... but really, my wife

is far more competent in military matters and training and sheer sanity

and willpower than Sarah Connor.. though I'm not sure how much that

helps. So far as I know, Neurodyne is defunct, with all its principals

scattered to the winds (though doing fine, no

one hurt).

And yet... this week... when I see very, very vividly and directly how

unlikely it is that humans will be able to get their act together on

issues like CO2 (due in great part to sheer mental deficiencies)... or

the threat that some of our cures just might be far worse than CO2

itself... while I see renewed powerful trends that could bring us to

even more powerful uberchips, and resurrect our technical capacity for

space-based missile defense... and all the cyber vulnerabilities

depicted in the final scene of Terminator 3 do seem quite real... as

missile defense people both in the US and China are fully aware of

one-on-one missile interception technology more advanced than what

Neurodyne intended to do with the robot arm (and more advanced than what

computatoinal neuroscience would dare to consider in most cases, with a

couple of possible exceptions in southern California)..

not taught or even hinted at in any computer science program anywhere so

far as I know... there is still some

reason to think that certain possibilities are not entirely off the table.

I don't know whether Dubai's nanoneuro chip program survived the drop in

oil prices. But cheer up, oil prices are well on course to come back...

Even so, my intuition tells me that new nuclear explosions killing lots

of people pose a bigger threat of

human extinction.

------------------------------

Anyway, enough old stories. If you don't believe it... well, you can

understand why I hesitate to consider

throwing in less believeable stories. What good would it do? I wonder.

Best of luck,

Paul

space crises now and in the past

I have heard a lot of people trying, and failing, to "sell space" this past month.
In situations where even if they "succeeded," they would have failed to really advance the cause of human
settlement of space. This reminds me of another life story. Ken Cox has urged me to write up
at least a few of the wild personal experiences which have influenced my life and plans... so OK..
maybe just one more. It's just my point of view of what I experienced.... and then I'll mention
how it shapes my views of where we are today. Please forgive if your experience has been different.

THE SIMPLIFIED VERSION

What I tell children...

(1): NASA once decided it would build the fastest airplane ever in history -- Mach 6 in
a true airplane. But how? One man, who ran an engine department, proposed that we build an engine without a body.
A woman, who ran a body department, proposed that we build a body without an engine. A friend of mine,
whom many called "the last technical guy in NASA headquarters," suggested the esoteric idea that maybe we need an engine and a body both.
Congress chewed him out for trying to micromanage the fine people in the NASA labs, and had him purged.
Then the woman with the body won, and....

(2) At the big AIAA conference on hypersonics, in Chattanooga that year, there was a large but closed meeting
in which the leaders of all the world's hypersonic development programs presented their progress. Most of the national representatives,
like the Germans and French, were very upset that all they had to offer were paper studies or limited experiments; no one had funding still to
actually build an airplane. The great exceptions were the US and Japan. Representing the US was a small local company which
had got started on funding from me at NSF, which had a flyable Mach 6 body -- but no engine. Representing Japan was the "Atrex" engine,
designed by a visiting Russian guy to go from Mach 0 to Mach 6 IN ONE ENGINE. The Japanese in their talk stated that their number
one problem now was: "How to test the engine. Do we put on top of a railroad car, or shoot it out somehow, or put it on a fast moving string?
If anyone has ideas, please tell us; it is a big problem." The US team said: "We have a real problem here with how to test this Mach 6 airframe.
We have found a place in Oshkosh which makes small engines for lawn mowers and model aircraft. We can use it to test stability
and control at low speeds, which is really a central issue with this kind of body, but the special Mach 6 capability is hard to test right now."

So -- sitting in the back of the room, I summoned up the courage to raise my hand: "Please excuse me... I am not an aerospace engineer, but I have a question.
If YOUR big problem (pointing to Japanese) is how to test your engine, and YOUR biggest problem is how to test your body at Mach 6... has anyone
considered putting the engine in the body to test them both?" What a breakthrough! What out of the box thinking! Great excitement in the room.
Everyone adjourns, with some joy, to the restaurant, where members of the Japanese and US teams and I sat in the tables in the front area...
But then, the lead public relations guy for the (then defunct) NASP program strode in with a military bearing and looked down on us all and said...
"You all have been engaging in SPECULATION." (People started visibly squirming and twitching. It reminded me of the Congressman who won an election once by
accusing his opponent of matriculation.) "How do you even know whether this engine would even fit in that body? Until that issue
has been proven, anyone who even talks about this is engaging in SPECULATION, and you know what happens to people who do that..."
(People started looking really terrified, and edged away from me, and looked at me with expressions saying: "Why did you do this to us? We are in trouble...")
Since people were looking at me, I replied: "There is no real need for you to just speculate about this. You say you want to know whether the engine
fits in the body or not. Didn't I just see some exact blueprints, showing just how big the airframe and the engine are supposed to be? Wouldn't it
be posisble just to compare the blueprints, to see if there would be a fit? Don't you have them right here?" Wow -- another breakthrough, and
more excitement. Especially more excitement when it turned out that it would be an exact fit, between the full-scale 23 foot version of the body
and the engine. It would take maybe $3 million, they said, to make the full-scale 23 foot metal version of the airframe (I can't help thinking $30 million
really) ... and then we could have real flights at Mach 6, maybe within a year or two... still in the twentieth century. The Japanese and the SAir Force started to discuss scheduling details to
get this started.

But then another guy stood up... not so military, cooler and suaver, with darker flashing eyes... "Hold on a minute here. You guys are engaging
in international negotiations on a matter of top level importance. You know what that means, don't you? As it happens, I am a Friend of Bill.
The White House is very, very concerned about making sure that we don't just sell our shirt in deals with Japan. In any case, you wouldn't want
to be caught making deals with Japan that haven't gone through White House approval, would you? Before you do anything at all
related to this, you need to wait until we have a meeting at OSTP. And no one (he looks at me) will be invited except at White House choice."
(No red herrings like this to be introduced from outsiders like me. No out of the box thinking allowed.) Out of the closed door
meeting came the verdict -- to use a Japanese engine would be an insult to the fine aerospace companies we have in the US. We will do the project, eventually...
but we will wait for the US companies to develop their own Mach 6 engine. And of course we are basically still waiting....
we successfully defended ourselves against the threat from Japan (??)...

Children wonder: "How could grown adults think it's weird or complicated to put an engine into a body? How could
they miss something so obvious?" Well, folks, I don't see that adults are any more sane today than they were then.

BEYOND THE CHILDREN'S VERSION

Of course, I have left out a lot of details and names here. I don't want to cause more
embarrassment than necessary, and I don't want to bore you with a huge volume of details.
I should note that the Japanese did not have enough knowledge of advanced control to be able to
actually run the Russian design beyond Mach 4; using our technology, we could have run it at Mach 6, but instead they
redesigned it (after the Russian guy left) to run at Mach 4, with their technology. DARPA did have a program to try to get to Mach 6 another way,
but recently cancelled it. The airframe did perform well at low speeds; the control demo was a kind of landmark,
and key technologies developed by that company are playing a major role, quietly, in some operational missions.
The researcher we funded who developed the ideas behind the airframe has done quite well in the meantime -- but more
so last year than this year. The guy who got purged may have been the only front-line serious engineer in HIS DIRECTORATE
at NASA HQ; he still has a job, hundreds of miles away... migrating from bodies to engines...

Earlier, in the early 1990's, I had a lot of contact with the NASP people, and the people working on NASP.
For example, the Handbook of Intelligent Control was edited by two people working at McDonnell Douglas;
see http://www.werbos.com/Mind.htm#mouse. I couldn't post their chapters, by copyright law. One of the areas they studied
was Thermal Protection Systems (TPS). If NASP had lived up to initial hopes, it would have been been a real breakthrough in the cost of access to earth orbit;
however, it never "worked" even in simulation. It failed to "close on mass" because of realistic assessments of the weight of active thermal protection systems.
(NASP planned to use TPS to keep the craft from melting at Mach 20 -- a key issue.)
My friends, White and Sofge, quietly showed how they could solve this problem, by using intelligent control to manage
a lighter weight TPS, with more advanced valves. But the program got cancelled before it was possible to really explore such things,
and White found a better paying job in the microchip industry. Lightweight TPS remains an unproven idea, beyond the reach of the more usual technologies,
and would have posed problems with robustness in any case.

At the two AIAA hypersonics meetings I went to, I also did what I could to scout out who knows what. (For NSF, it is especially important
to know who would be a truly expert reviewer... and of course, it's nice to know where the new ideas can be trusted. And to inform people
of funding opportunities.) At one of these meetings, I met Ramon Chase, who emerged as perhaps the very top thinker in the network
of really serious thinkers... connected, of course, to friends who themselves are important thought-leaders and creative real-world engineers.
Ironically, at our first meeting, he warned me to be on guard with respect to women like a certain woman I was then beginning to
get close to... who is now my wife. That's a fun story too, but neither here nor there. It reminds me that we can disagree with someone on one issue,
without losing general respect or respect for their skills in other areas. (By the way, the Friend of Bill warned me too. "You could have a great job
in our White House group, if you would just give up on her." They even introduced me to a certain beautiful conservative woman in Alaska...)

WHERE WE ARE NOW

We are still stuck with "engines without bodies" and "bodies without engines" even today. Short of hope for "divine intervention," it now looks
more than 90% likely to me now that humans will never be able to settle any part of space because of what this does to us.

Bernard Shaw once said: "The reasonable man adapts to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress depends
on the unreasonable men." Our best remaining hope for humans to ever settle space lies in that small minority who would be willing to buck the
flow of local social pressures (pressures WITHIN the space community) to try to sell engines without bodies and so on. The rational man, unlike the reasonable man,
maximizes the probability that we get where we really need to go, even though it's a lot easier, socially, to join the lemmings headed over the cliff..

Ironically, the real problem is with the bodies.

Folks like SpaceX and Kistler (what's left of them) understand that re-usability is essential to whatever hope we have of getting the cost
of access to Low Eearth Orbit (LEO) down to $200 per pound, without which we simply won't have economically sustainable large-scale
energy from space. If we get all excited and psychopathic, and try to sell the lie that Space BS can be a meaningful part of the world energy economy
based on what we can do with heavy lift expendable rockets alone, we won't get anywhere. Energy economics is not like some kind of Adam and Eve cult.
They know how to do arithmetic. If large parts of the community get great visibility as a kind of Adam and Eve cult... well, I saw what forces led people
to coin the term "space cadet," and it won't do us any good at all to get that term re-invented!!!

But re-usuability and COTs are a great step up from 100% reliance on rockets which have no hope of ever getting us to the price points we need.
George Muller's classic NASA reports from the 1960's remain valid even today... maybe even more valid now than they were then...

The hypersonics community did a whole lot better than the space community in recent years in getting more funding. Mach 6, perhaps a little more
that mach 6, is possible without TPS and without the "hot structures" we need to get to escape velocity (in reusable rockets or airplanes).
But even Mach 6 programs have died ... of political mismanagement and "greedy darts" people outsmarting themselves?
The great white hope and justification for hypersonics remains the hope of really high speeds.. which is impossible without
the advanced type of TPS ('way beyond what they are able to achieve, and risky in any case) or the very best of the old hot structures technology.
In sum -- they are actively selling engines without bodies, and getting away with it in the corrupt world we seem to live in...
even as we are very close to losing BOTH of the two hopes for having the kind of body we would need for fully reusable
airbreathers or rockets.

I am tempted to say more... the present situation also has some comic aspects... but I will refrain at least for now,
until and unless a certain kind of nonconstructive feedback appears...

The weird esoteric concepts we must learn to understand today are just as simple as the idea that we need to
have an engine in the body. We need to understand that energy from space has no hope of being "real" in the mainstream market
if it costs $1 per kilowatt hour. The only halfway serious lifecycle cost estimates say that we can get to the right neighborhood only if access to LKEO
gets to $200 per pound. We need to understand that if we crash out vehicle after just one flight, it can't ever be cheap,
any more than crashing a car after every commuite to work. We need to understand that we can't reuse a rocket or an airplane if it just melts
every time we use it. We need to understand that it WILL melt, if we do not cool it or use a body which can survive at high termpertaure ("hot structures.").

But of course... there are clever industry lobbyists looking for any angle who will try to claim they have it, who don't. The Aerospace Corporation work, for CIA,
which really tested the three leading US candiadtes for full-up hot structures -- in work which Ray Chase had 100% access to --
found that only the Boeing test article really passed all the tests. Ever. And the Wright-Patterson center (the only US place which has full testing
capabilities) confirms what Chase has told me about this. If we lose this Boeing technology -- as we are likely to VERY soon and might have already done --
and if we don't revive the POSSIBILITY of the high-risk advanced lightweight TPS --

then we melt.

And we are already far along with melting... every day that goes by...

If we win the political wars in ten years, and have no physical way to implement what we won in Congress...
we still get nowhere.

All the quantum metallurgy in the world will not help us, if we don't have the structures, and if we lose
the basic foundation which cost us billions upon billions of dollars to get. MANY billions of dollars worth of new 6-1 reserach could get us back..
if the people were honest, competent and motivated enough... but that seems much less likely right now than our remianing hopes
of reviving the Boeing hot structures technology. Not to mention the systems level technology in high-speed aerospace design,
inherited from the successful old black programs, which is also crucial even to reuasble rocketplanes. In my view, reusable
rocketplanes are basically a PREREQUISITE to any hope of reusable airbreathers. (Data and experience turn out to
be important, especially in real-world airfarme design.) And low-cost access to space is probably a prerequisite
to any real hope of (massive) "space elevators" and such.

Best of luck to us all...


=================

Let me add that low-cost responsive space lift requires the same technology...

as does any realistic hope for human activity in space large enough to permit a real economic "takeoff effect." If the US doesn't do it.. India has the most vision of other nations here, but they can't even replicate what White and Sofge did with C-C materials, let alone the advanced Boeing technology