“60 SECONDS!”

The Non-Stop Party roared into a moving countdown, the crowds loud and boisterous and ecstatic, the music frenetic and infused with energy.

“What?” said Lenah, she couldn’t hear the words that Karl spoke so stepped closer to him, her hands on his upper arms, her ear to his mouth.

“I’m leaving,” said Karl.

Lenah pulled back to look at his face and search for some humour.

“Really?”

He nodded his head, his face carefully neutral.

“You can’t,” said Lenah.

“30 seconds!”

“Time to do something else,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But the party needs you. Bernie and I need you.”

“There’s more to life than the party, Lenah. I need to create something worthwhile.”

“The party!”

Karl shook his head slowly.

“10!”

“Come with me Lenah.”

“No, Karl.”

“5!”

“Goodbye then.”

“4!”

Karl kissed her, briefly, on the lips.

“3! 2! 1!”

Reality groaned as the party jumped wholesale, Anywhere orchestrating the hundreds of people in a delicate space–time dance. Lenah’s stomach swirled and churned despite the Anywhere compensation routines. There was no transition. No tunnel or blur or blackness. Just here and there, in an instant transition that Lenah’s brain frantically struggled to comprehend despite experiencing it so many times.

A new venue: the long crescent of a beach, hot hammer blows of sunshine, the crystal clarity of the sea. The party never missed a beat. The music cranked up a notch, the bass deeper, the guitars louder, the drums harder. The crowd swelled in a haze of ecstatic thrills.

Lenah stared at the point where Karl had been standing and saw just the throng of the party, hyped up and crazy. Their party.

There were no lingering long farewells since Anywhere, no watching them walk away and hoping they’d turn back. No one more glance, one more chance. Just gone. In a blink.

“Hey,” said Bernie arriving beside her, a quick touch of his hand on her shoulder. He wore nu-tech clothes out of Berlin, looking sharp and from tomorrow and important. Looking like a founder.

“He’s gone, Bernie.”

“I know.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“The party doesn’t stop, Lenah. That’s the deal. Just like we’ve always said.”

She remembered the day that they had imagined the party, its concept arriving fully formed to the three of them. They had been standing on the fringes of a festival as it fizzled out in a jumble of chaos and dissatisfaction. Had felt the disappointment and an urge to create something better, something with style and poise, something fresh. The exact words escaped her, but the memory of being united together, of the three of them suddenly joined in purpose, remained a strong, delicious memory.

“I can’t,” said Lenah.

“We have to,” said Bernie, “we have a party to keep running.”

#

LENAH LAY ON the ground, spread-eagled amidst the super-wheat in the agri-dome as around her the robo-harvesters buzzed away, lost in their own opaque song.

“What are you doing?”

His voice made her whole body jolt, catching her breath. It took her a few seconds to recover.

“I’m making wheat angels,” said Lenah.

Karl lay down beside her, not touching. She stared at the grey churning sky through the transparent carbon nanotube roof of the dome.

“I like the food production,” said Karl, “neat.”

“Agri clan technology,” said Lenah, “super-wheat, harvesters, multi-fruit trees, lab meat, air-scrubber water condensers, micro mills and bakeries. Nothing new, we just aggregate it.”

Her voice quivered as she spoke, more nervous than talking to a global social, or a fan, or a sponsor, or a whole clan.

“Sustainable,” said Karl.

“Non-stop,” said Lenah. “And you?” She turned to him now, just her face, risking the burn of missing him. He was already watching her between the golden stalks of wheat.

“Diffused a panicked plague of locust hoarders sourced out of Kansas, spent some time with the Angels, a while in the Saharan lakes defeating the desert.”

“Happy?”

“Fulfilled.”

“The same thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Karl, he smiled. “You ready to leave the party yet? Come with me?”

“No,” said Lenah and felt anger, betrayal and insult.

A harvester traced Lenah’s outline, its blades whirring mere centimetres from her body. She didn’t flinch.

“It’s not about being ready, Karl, don’t patronise me. The party is important too, you dismiss it as a crazy summer idea we had, a joke. It’s much more than that. Would you let it just die? Stop?”

“Probably,” said Karl, “sorry.”

Lenah sighed and turned back to stare at the sky.

“Where are you off to next?” said Karl.

“We don’t know, the party management software has a list of locations that we add to, it picks one and feeds it to the Anywhere coordinator, encrypted. It’s a surprise for everyone.”

“Risky?”

“Not so far. Party-goers love it, one of our most popular features.”

“USP,” said Karl with deadpan sarcasm.

“We’re not some fucking capitalist business,” said Lenah, sitting up, glaring at him. “Why don’t you go back to making the world a better place, Karl, and leave us hedonists alone.” She spat the words, full of anger and pain, and then felt a confused mix of spiteful success and aching regret as she saw the look of hurt and confusion on Karl’s face.

“Okay,” said Karl. He paused, a moment for Lenah to take it all back, but she held onto the anger and resisted letting go of the feeling. “Bye.”

Then he jumped. Gone. Anywhere taking him away in a twist of fractured causality.

Lenah stood and looked at the wheat angel she had created, just the outline of her splayed body remaining in long golden stalks. Her after-image. A memento. When the party jumped again the angel would remain, until consumed by the surrounding super fast growing cereal. Slowly fading away, yet a token, a measure of their success and reach. She pinged Bernie, received his location and jumped to him.

“I’ve got a new feature, Bernie,” she said, “mementos. Remind me to explain later.”

“Okay,” said Bernie. “Why later? I’ve got time.”

“Not now,” said Lenah, “I need to get wasted.”

She jumped to a bar tent, downed five shots of ultra-vodka, then waded into the seething mass of bodies and music and lights.

#

“LENAH?”

Lenah heard Karl’s voice but thought she was hallucinating, the Bliss still controlling her, fusing her senses together into a heady cocktail.

“Lenah? Can you hear me? It’s Karl.”

She tried to focus, saw a blur that seemed to be speaking, stared hard, saw his face emerge from the fuzziness. She felt a mellow wash of love, heating her from the inside, making her fingers tingle, dampened by sadness and a sharp memory of him leaving.

“You left me,” said Lenah, “you left the party.”

“Yes,” said Karl. “Sit up.”

She felt with her hands either side of her, found manicured grass, which tickled her palms and sent shivers along her limbs. She remembered lying down on the grass, green green grass, black starry night above her, the universe huge and mysterious beyond their world. The immensity of her situation overwhelming. The party enveloping her. Awash in noise and love. Drifting off.

Karl’s hands maneuvered her upwards into a sitting position. A bright white haze caused her to squint, the dark canopy of the stars gone, replaced by something hot and light.

“Drink this,” said Karl.

She felt a bottle at her lips. Felt cool liquid enter her mouth. Suddenly gasped for it, quenching her parched mouth.

She woke from the narco-haze, suddenly, painfully, as if being resuscitated from drowning. Gasping. Shouting. Crying. She didn’t know what she was saying but Karl held her tight until she managed to calm down and shake away the hysteria.

“Hello,” he said finally, looking into her eyes, holding her cheeks softly with his hands.

“You came back,” said Lenah, and she felt the aching loss of him leaving and longed for a hit of Bliss and a transcendent DJ set to take her away and make her forget.

She looked around. The party was located inside a massive meteor crater in the middle of a desert, beneath huge pale skies, dark jagged mountains in the distance. Perfect isolation. Spread across the land as usual, from the stages to the tents to the logistics cabins to the dorms to the hard shell pop-up tents, but between them the life blood of the party, the essence, the people, did not move. It was as if the party-goers had been slaughtered, lying prone and lethargic. A small band of people stood by the main stage, lost in the rowdy rock music but otherwise the party was dead.

“Bernie called me,” said Karl, “said he’d lost you to narcs.”

“And everyone else by the looks of it,” said Lenah.

“Where’d it come from?”

“Out of Asia somewhere, some island tribal clan.”

“They got an agenda, with something so dangerous?”

“Just to be number one,” said Lenah. She turned back to face Karl. “Like most of us.”

Karl didn’t react.

“How’d you wake me up?”

“Anti-narc, got some friends out of Finland, cutting edge enhancers working on supplements for the space clans. Once we isolated the root it took no time to synthesise. Printed a micro-pharm-factory here, looks like we need to increase production.”

“Do we have the right?” said Lenah. “I was happy.”

Karl’s face broke its mask of calm for the first time.

“Don’t give me that bullshit. You were going to die. Do you want the party to continue?”

Lenah hesitated, looked around. Looked back at Karl.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then party rules, no narcs. Take them elsewhere.”

“Okay,” said Lenah, “and if people disagree? We jump and leave them? The population might dwindle. We’ll suffocate the party.”

“Perhaps.”

“What we need,” said Lenah, her mind suddenly charged with ideas and purpose, “is encouragement to behave a certain way. A game. A purpose. Something that socially negates Bliss. That makes Bliss a losing decision.”

“Like purity credits?” said Karl with disgust in his voice.

“No, more like aggregate emotional state monitoring,” said Lenah. She felt the fire in her now, the gestation of a new project, just like when the three of them had come up with the idea for the party and decided to implement it. Action.

“Know if anyone does that?”

“No,” said Karl shaking his head.

Lenah searched The Hub for associated technology, the lists of clans and ideas and products scrolling down her vision. Lost for minutes in a maze of possibility.

“Here’s something, emotional state monitoring using long range high precision hyper-conducting quantum interference.”

“Okay,” said Karl slowly. He turned around, surveyed the state of the party. Lenah followed his gaze.

“We need to wake everyone up first,” she said, “wash away the drug.”

“It’ll take a while to force feed everyone.”

“Yes, too long,” she looked up, saw clear sky above them whilst on the horizon the grey clouds stacked high around the seed kites, emptying the moisture from the air, away from the party. “Is that anti-narc skin permeable?”

“Not sure,” said Karl, “we could work on it.”

“Do it,” said Lenah, “then bring the seed kites over the party and seed the clouds with the anti-narc. Bernie?” She pinged him over voice comms and he arrived a second later.

“You’re back,” he said, relief in his voice. He hugged her, squeezed her hard, held the embrace for an extra beat. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Thanks Bernie,” said Lenah. “I’ve got a couple of ideas we need to implement.”

It took a day to synthesise the skin permeable anti-narc, after which they moved the huge seed kites which flew high in the atmosphere above the party and coalesced the rain with emitted particles of dust. The clouds grew higher then broke, a cleansing wash, a wake up jolt, crash resuscitation. Clear! Zap!

They woke to a party-wide notification: the creation of a new game called Emo. To find that they had been assigned to a team and that their goal was to change the emotional state of the whole party. Ecstatic Thrills, Introvert Calm, Mellow Bliss, Focused Hyper, Bittersweet Happiness, teams to guide the party-goers’ state of mind. A game to balance the party and discover an acceptable equilibrium, to prevent destructive viral run-away moods and trends.

Within a week Lenah, Karl and Bernie had open-sourced the Emo code and hardware designs, the repo had been downloaded hundreds of times as Emo games sprung up all over the globe.

The party remained balanced and vibrant and relevant.

Karl and Lenah watched the orchestration dashboard of the Emo controller, glancing between the layer on their vision and the pulsing colours of the lights spread around the party which represented the state of the game. Ten days after its introduction and Emo already felt a core tenet of the party.

“It’s working,” said Lenah.

“Yes,” said Karl, smiling, “job done.”

They stood in silence and watched the party splatter off the anti-noise bubble in which they were encased.

“You’re leaving again,” said Lenah, turning to face him, searching his eyes.

“Yes,” said Karl, “other things to do.” He smiled. “I don’t need to say it, Lenah, but I will, come with me.”

She took a deep breath and forced a smile.

“No, Karl. More to do here, the party has more to give. It feels… right. It’s where I belong.”

“You could do more,” said Karl.

“Don’t ever say that again,” said Lenah, “I’m pissed off with you assuming that the party is an insular indulgence. Everything is open, the world is playing Emo, our repos are forked and watched and used. And look at everyone here!”

She turned back to the party, watched a huge inflatable zebra bounce across the heads of the crowd dancing in front of the stage where a band played, thrashing noisily around.

“I’m sorry,” said Karl, “but you could do more, you know that.”

She felt him put his hand gently on her arm but didn’t turn to him, couldn’t face the heartache. Felt the whoosh in her stomach as he jumped away, his warm fingers suddenly gone, leaving her arm cold. Leaving her alone with a hundred thousand people.

#

THE SMALL TANK of water rippled as the amorphous black blob at the bottom grew imperceptibly. Lenah watched it intently, despite the cameras capturing three different angles, despite the myriad of sensors and the ultra-fast real-time analysis engine responding to every nuance. She sat in a cabin that she’d come to think of as her workshop, tucked away in the logistics sector of the party. She’d printed the cabin from scratch, the composite aerogel carbon and graphene walls growing slowly as the scrubbers reclaimed the carbon from the air and fed it as feedstock to the printer. She’d not intended to colonise the space but after spending so much time there it had slowly become hers in a way that only hermits or luddites or stay-behinds ever lived anymore. The cabin was strewn with the physical output of Lenah’s imagination: a batch of single movement kite hinges with a fail time two sigma greater than the mean, a prototype desert track wheel for use on land-clearing robot bulldozers, fifty airtight drinks bottles containing a twenty percent more efficient rehydration liquid, six large screens showing half assembled code and a visualisation of possible outputs, eight large speakers grown from bamboo fibre stock dosed and aerated to lighten them which produced a bass that Lenah had never experienced before. All the clutter of an owned space, all ignored as Lenah focused on the small tank of water.

Bernie arrived beside her, the jump no more than a minor ripple of reality as the new release of Anywhere’s compensating algorithm calmed the reaction of Lenah’s body. She didn’t even look up.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Bernie, his voice efficient and clipped.

“As always,” said Lenah, glancing at the analysis dashboards on the screen beside the tank.

“Serious,” said Bernie. “Another splinter party, took seventy thousand people just yesterday, stormed the top of the league. They have momentum.”

“The league is a distraction,” said Lenah, looking up at Bernie, “which is why we agreed to not be a part of it.”

“But it shows something.”

“Yes,” said Lenah, “*something*. Who cares?”

“It’s the third splinter party this month. We’re losing our edge.”

“Let them splinter and go nova and burnout. This party will still be here.”

Bernie frowned, touched the edge of the tank and then flicked it, producing a pure chiming tone. He watched the ripples in the water, then looked up at Lenah sharply.

“We haven’t released a new feature for weeks,” said Bernie.

“It’s incremental improvement,” said Lenah, “continuous delivery. No big-bang releases.”

“So how come in those weeks you’ve open-sourced seven hardware designs and thirteen software modules?” He waved his arms around the cabin. “None of this stuff helps us Lenah.”

“Not true Bernie, the kite hinges are–”

“No one cares about that, Lenah. We need something new. For the party-goers.”

“Once we increase the efficiency of the party then we can change the focus from sustaining it to innovating.”

“We don’t have time,” said Bernie.

“We don’t have a choice.”

“I need you focused on the party, Lenah,” his voice was raised now, harsh and angry. “I don’t want us resting on our laurels, I don’t want to be an attraction for the things we once did, for our timing and our luck. I want to be the best party in the world. I want to be a legend. I want to be a story that parents tell their children about, the story that’s recounted repeatedly as a vivid memory. The only party worth visiting. The non-stop party.”

Lenah scanned his face as he stood, tense, breathing deeply, looked for a glimmer of irony and found none, then she stood and clapped her hands slowly.

“I vote for you president Bernie.”

“You need to get your shit together,” said Bernie, jabbing his finger at her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Growing land,” said Lenah. “In a tank.”

Bernie shook his head.

“Focus Lenah! We’re jumping in ten minutes. I’m overriding the algorithm, we’re going to a mid-Pacific platform and I want you smoothing the transition and troubleshooting from the moment we arrive. Got it?”

Lenah felt a flare of anger at his order but took a deep breath, controlled it, felt a strange concoction of ambivalence slosh around her.

“Bernie–”

“Start producing Lenah.” Then he jumped. Gone.

Lenah jumped too, to a hill, overlooking the party which nestled on the prairie like a slow churning monster. From a distance she could feel the bass, driving through her, see the fast flicker of party goers arriving and leaving at the edges, hear the buzz, the cheers, the music. Almost taste the food from the serveries with their pseudo-fried doping tastes and sweet fake unhealthiness. But she didn’t feel the joy, the belonging, the pride. She tried to shake off the hollow feeling inside her, the restless ache when she thought about the party.

“Karl?” she pinged him over voice, not knowing where he was, just that he was not there with her, somewhere else, could be anywhere. He arrived two minutes later and she hugged him before he could even say hello, arms hard around him as she fought back the swell of emotion.

“Hello, Lenah,” he said with a smile as they finally parted. He looked fit, lean and muscular, face radiating confidence and purpose. All the things that Lenah felt she lacked.

“Hi Karl, you look well.”

“Thanks. You look…”

“Tired?”

“Anxious.”

She nodded, turned to face the party and tried to coalesce her feelings.

“You’ve been productive though,” said Karl, “I’ve been following your repos. Good stuff.”

“Not according to Bernie.”

“Well,” said Karl, with a light laugh, “he was always single-minded.”

She felt a flutter inside her as he said the words, a moment of acute realisation.

“As was I,” said Lenah.

“Perhaps,” said Karl.

“We built this,” she said, nodding towards the party, sliding her hands deep into her pockets and letting her shoulders slump.

“We did,” said Karl, “pretty cool”.

He smiled at her expectantly.

“It’s all gone wrong,” she said finally, her voice cracking as she said the words, the tears finally breaking loose.

“Hey,” said Karl, encircling her with his arms, bringing her closer, “don’t cry.”

“I just feel so trapped,” she said, sobbing now, “and anxious all the time, and alone. Where did all my friends go, Karl? When did I lose everyone? There’s something broken inside me that I can’t shake loose. I feel stifled. I feel like screaming.”

“It’s okay,” said Karl, “it’s really okay.”

“I just think… I… I don’t know…”

She pulled back

She swallowed hard. Stepped away so that she could look him in the eyes. Fought to control her breathing.

“All those things I’ve been working on, they’ve all got so much potential, or they’re useful now, but nothing seems to fit with the party. I’m trying to squeeze all those ideas in and it just doesn’t work. It’s so frustrating, it’s like I’m cornered and it hurts and my head just feels tight and…”

Karl nodded.

Lenah took another deep breath.

“I’m ready to leave the party,” said Lenah.

“Yes,” said Karl.

They hugged again.

Lenah felt something unlock inside of her. A release. A flood of relief.

“How am I going to tell Bernie?” said Lenah. “He’ll never forgive me.”

“He will,” said Karl, “eventually.”

“I’m sorry, Karl.”

“You don’t have to apologise.”

“I do. I was awful to you. I just didn’t get it.”

“It’s fine. Really. Hindsight makes these things obvious.”

The party moving countdown began, a five minute warning signal broadcast to everyone. The Emo game ended, calculating the final emotional states and flaring the winning team across the vision of all the players to a loud cheer.

“Hyperactive Happiness,” said Lenah. “Again. Second win in a row.”

“The Emo controller needs to generate some more subtle variations,” said Karl.

“Probably,” said Lenah.

“Come on,” said Karl, “let’s be a part of it. Down there.”

She nodded. They jumped, Anywhere synchronising their destinations, managing the proximity overlap and inserting them into the crowd.

They stood and watched the party rise to a crescendo around them, unshackled from the Emo game, excited by the imminent change of location, the DJ hyping them up and up. Screams of joy, dancing bodies, hands in the air, faces of pure happiness, infectious enthusiasm, a lust for now, for life.

Lenah held Karl’s hand as the countdown reached its final minute. They stood still, together, buffeted occasionally, resisting the call of the party, letting it swoosh around them.

“10!9!8!” A proclamation from party control to everyone there.

The chants loud and ecstatic.

“7!6!5!4!”

The party a swirl of static and chopped beats.

“3!2!1!”

The party jumped. Karl and Lenah stayed.

Everything went, leaving them standing on an empty prairie, the grass flattened and worn, tired from the revelry.

The silence enveloped them, pure and still and sweet. Lenah smiled.

“Okay?” said Karl.

“Yes,” said Lenah, “time for something else.”

“Agreed,” said Karl, “where to?”

Lenah checked her repos, overlaying the Hub dashboard on her vision, watched for a few seconds as their usage ticked upwards before dismissing the information and looking around her. Two small white clouds collided above them, merging into one against the backdrop of the cerulean sky.

“I think I’d like to stay here for a while first,” said Lenah. “Just for a while.”

Karl nodded and she grasped his hand tight, standing beside him, observing the rolling landscape before them.

James Bloomer has a PhD in particle physics (he studied Tau Leptons at CERN) and has probably forgotten more physics than most people ever learn. Nowadays he makes his living as a software developer. You can find him on Twitter @bigdumbobject or Github @jamesbloomer.

The post Non-Stop Party appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

THE AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and related genres) community is small but perfectly formed. At Conflux 9, writers, artists, editors, publishers and fans mingled on largely equal footing. It’s Australia’s 52nd such convention, and the ninth in Canberra. Held from 25 to 28 April 2013 with some 270 attendees, it offered insights into the hearts of the genre and its people.

A window into humanity

According to Melbourne-based writer Claire McKenna, “science fiction is technology as a metaphor for the human condition”, and numerous panels explored such themes. ‘Am I not human?’ flitted between discussion of humanity’s biological basis, whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more human than some of the ‘real’ people he encountered, and whether we’ll remain human as we continue to outsource our brains to Google. Here was literature as a window into the depths of psychology – relationships, body horror and fear of mortality.

Fear of death is a recurring theme, reappearing on a panel on ‘The ethics of immortality’. Panellists examined why people desire immortality and the costs of never dying. What might it mean for the planet – or even for science, with the suggestion that it might take one obsessive scientist a hundred years to cure cancer. The consequences of uploading yourself: How many copies should you make? Will you still be human? In place of answers, we had book suggestions; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Iain Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata were two of many.

The once and future genre

A panel on ‘What was great about SF when we were young?’ explored the genre’s future as well as its past. A recurring contention was the notion that science fiction is being displaced by fantasy because we are now living in the technological future of our past. But science fiction (in concert with science itself) is still our best guidebook for the future, and as such retains its value.

In later discussion, Perth-based librarian Grant Stone agreed, noting that Hugo Gernsback included science fiction in his science magazine in the early 20th century because he realised that it was a “nexus to keep the brain active and agile, and thinking about the potential for the future”, and was the only way prepare for the future and turn ideas to reality.

Optimism about the industry was obvious. “This is the most exciting time to be writing science fiction – or any speculative fiction – in Australia; it’s just booming here at the moment,” said Sean Williams, a writer based in Adelaide. “You can tell by walking around Conflux – the number of published authors has got to be at an all-time high.” Stone agreed, and pointed out that there’s quality as well as quantity. “I’ve never been to a con with so many book launches,” he exulted. “The literature is being raised to such a standard, and being praised by people who know. It’s a very healthy time.”

Publisher and editor Russell Farr, of Perth-based Ticonderoga Publications, noted that “people with good science knowledge can write amazing things”, but that Australian sci-fi writers tend to be snapped up by large publishers, mainly overseas, perhaps giving an impression that the nation produces less science fiction. He also pointed to a culture less likely to venerate science and its achievements: “We don’t put up statues of scientists, despite being proud of the things Australians invent. But our science fiction writers put us on the world stage first – people like Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, A. Bertram Chandler.”

We the people

Conflux 9 might have brimmed over with ideas, but the people expressing these thoughts and drinking them in were what made the event. Co-chairperson and writer Donna Maree Hanson noted that what struck her when she was new to conventions was the egalitarian feel; at these events, writers, publishers and fans mix freely at the bar and elsewhere, discussing big ideas and sharing knowledge as friends and colleagues. “Some of us only get to see each other once a year,” writer and COSMOS fiction editor Cat Sparks said. “It’s like a family reunion.”

Con highlights

* On the first evening, COSMOS fiction editor’s first short story collection, The Bride Price, was launched by Sean Williams to a packed-out room. By early accounts, it’s a dark collection of science fiction and some fantasy.

* The Ditmars award ceremony, which featured real-time Lego building, and cheeky hosting and live tweeting.

* The sense of home felt while in a panel where most panellists and audience members seemed to know every Doctor Who episode by heart.

* Some confusion about the difference between science and science fiction – from other hotel guests.

Old fella in the bar: Bloody busy in here. Me: Yeah, sorry. It’s the National Science Fiction Convention. Him: Bloody scientists! #Conflux9

— AlanBaxter (@AlanBaxter) April 27, 2013

The post The state of flux appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

It’s early January 2013, and these experts from across the globe have come to Australia’s southerly island state for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hobart’s weather generally tends toward mild and damp; cold winds from Antarctica regularly bring snow to the rocky peak of nearby Mount Wellington. Over the past century or so, the city’s average January maximum has been just 21°C.

Yet, during the previous week, Hobart had experienced its hottest day on record, with the temperature soaring above 40°C. Instead of clouds, the sky was wreathed in smoke. In the nearby fishing village of Dunalley, 80 homes, some 30% of the town, were destroyed by bushfires. Hundreds of residents were evacuated by boat from the Tasman Peninsula.

The scientists are here to help finalise sections of the IPCC’s latest and massively complex assessment report, the fifth such mammoth document released over the past 25 years. Part of their job is to outline the range of possible future climates humanity can expect over the coming decades.

A few weeks earlier, a draft version of the report was leaked on a blog by a climate sceptic who was also one of the experts engaged in the review process. The report is due to be released in three stages, beginning in September 2013, and wording may change. As it is, the draft suggests that 50 years from now, average surface air temperatures could be between 1°C and 2°C warmer than they were in the early 2000s. This is on top of a warming of about 0.8°C already recorded since the Industrial Revolution.

Other organisations have released more worrying forecasts. In November 2012, a report for the World Bank compiled by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned that, if governments fail to meet current mitigation pledges and commitments, the average global temperature could rise 4°C above pre-industrial temperatures by as early as the 2060s. In line with the IPCC, most of the experts I spoke with for this story said while this kind of hike was possible, by mid century, rises of the order of 1°C or 2°C were more likely, with further increases to follow.

Even this kind of rise approaches a level of warming that governments agree would risk dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. During a coffee break at the Hobart meeting I chatted with Andy Pitman, a climate modeller who directs the ARC Centre for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. A straight-talking man, he’s more than a little exasperated as he explains that much of the fundamental understanding of climate science is settled.

“There is zero disagreement over whether the Earth will warm if we continue to put nine billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” he says. “That’s just not up for discussion, which is why we find the debates with the sceptics so tedious. It’s like arguing the toss over whether the average car has four wheels or not.”

As the scientists begin filing back into their meeting rooms, I ask Pitman how likely we are to stay under the 2°C limit this century. “We’ve got,” he answers quickly, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

A WEEK AFTER THE meeting, I arrange to meet Pitman for a longer talk. He makes me coffee and ushers me into the sort of office that could easily belong to a historian or psychiatrist. Pitman’s experiments take place not in a lab but amid millions of lines of computer code. He uses elaborate climate models to help pose the question: what is our climate future? Based on fundamental laws of physics, these models work at grid-level scales, using a 3-D array of ‘cells’ of regional zones to artificially generate all the complexities of a climate system: the swirling clouds and flooding rivers, dynamic oceans and polar ice caps. These cells and all their variables – including data on the rate of change of temperature, humidity, and the flow of energy in and out of the system – are enmeshed in mathematical relationships played out in supercomputers.

I ask him how these models work on a practical level. “We take the Earth as a sphere, and break it up into a chessboard pattern, and up into multiple levels – like the 3-D chessboard Spock plays on in Star Trek,” he explains. The model maps the climate now and mathematically predicts the next step of progress – perhaps just half an hour later – to see how the whole system changes. The model then solves the equations again for the next half hour – and so on, for however long he wants it to run. Just one of these simulations might take six to nine months in real time, and the output is a mathematical representation of the entire globe, inscribed in perhaps a million gigabytes of data.

Scientific groups around the world operate different versions of these virtual worlds. When several of their models agree, scientists can state with what level of confidence – statistically speaking – they can be sure their model is correct in its predictions. Where more models agree, there’s more certainty.

Among the most certain repercussions of a warming climate is that extremely hot days will become more frequent. So when the Tasmanian emergency services minister reassured Hobart residents that the bushfires of 2013 were the result of catastrophic weather conditions that occur “once in a generation”, he was making an assertion that may not still be true 50 years from now.

In climate terms, 50 years isn’t that far into the future. Chris Field, founding director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California, says much of the change we can expect over the next five decades is already in train.

“We’re looking now at consequences of things that have already been baked into the system, consequences of emissions that have already occurred,” he says. “Even if we started tomorrow with aggressive emissions reductions, it would only mean a few per cent difference the first year and a few more for the second year and so on.” Some of the consequences of today’s emissions won’t even have kicked in by mid century, he adds.

IN THE MIDDLE OF a hot spell in Sydney in the southern summer, when temperatures in the mid 40s have forced many folks into shopping malls and cinemas for relief, I call Lisa Alexander, an expert in extreme weather events at the Climate Change Research Centre at the UNSW, to discuss what ramifications global warming could have over the next 50 years.

“What we consider today to be an extreme of temperature, that’s going to become the norm by the middle of the century,” she says. “The sort of temperatures we’ve had in Sydney this week, rather than happening once in a summer, will start to occur a lot more often.”

In November 2011, consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia compiled a report for the Australian Government, looking specifically at the question of extreme events. “By 2050, an extreme heat event in Melbourne alone could typically kill over one thousand people in a few days if we don’t improve the way we forecast, prepare for and manage these events,” it warned. For Victorian residents who lived through the ‘Black Saturday’ fires in 2009, when drought and temperatures over 45°C led to 173 people dying in bushfires, these are alarming words.

It’s not only Australia that will see these kinds of extreme events more often. By the middle of the century, extreme highs will become more common across the globe, according to a special report released by the IPCC in March 2012. Temperatures historically hit once every 20 years could become 10 times more common in some places. Nearly everywhere on the planet will be hit by heatwaves, says Alexander. Europeans learned the impact such events could have in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 people died during the hottest summer on record since 1540.

AS THE TEMPERATURE rises, it will disrupt patterns of rainfall and snowfall, making heavy downfalls more common on a global scale. Trying to predict what will happen to rainfall at a regional level in the next 50 years is harder. “Broadly, we could say the wet places will get wetter and the dry places will get drier,” Alexander says. “But there are quite a few places where we’re not getting the majority of models agreeing on what will happen in individual regions.” Other areas could change from wet to dry, or vice versa, she says.

In China, for example, “data indicate that some of the traditionally dry areas will actually become slightly wetter, and in some of the relatively wet areas, the precipitation will be reduced,” says Yiqi Luo, co-director of the Fudan Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Shanghai.

Heavy downpours could mean an increased risk of flooding in some areas, perhaps similar to the floods that turned three quarters of the Australian state of Queensland into a disaster zone in 2010. On the other hand, changing rainfall patterns could also lead to an increased risk of drought. The climate change report for the World Bank estimated that a 2°C increase in global average temperatures could cut annual runoff by 20% to 40% in vital river basins such as the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Murray–Darling, while increasing runoff by around 20% in the Nile and the Ganges.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures will also have an impact on the risk of forest fires by 2063, scientists say. In Amazonia, for example, the World Bank report estimates that forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures are also expected to raise sea levels, by melting glaciers and polar ice caps and causing ocean water to expand. The oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb the warming caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and the rise in sea levels is expected to happen slowly, explains John Church, a lead IPCC author from Australia’s national research agency CSIRO. “By 2063, there would be a growing but at this time relatively small impact on sea level change,” he says. He estimates a rise of about 20 to 50 cm from the sea level in 2000.

It’s long been postulated that climate change will also cause more severe storms. “It’s really the intensity of the cyclone that’s the problem, rather than the frequency,” says Alexander. “If you get low-category cyclones, they’re much less of a problem than if you get the large, intense cyclones.”

The costs of such an increase could be enormous. In 2012, the costliest natural catastrophe for the U.S. insurance industry was Hurricane Sandy, which caused overall losses that giant insurer Munich Re put at US$50 billion including in excess of US$25 billion in insured losses. And as Munich Re pointed out in January 2013, recent years have already seen a “strong upward trend in insured losses” related to thunderstorms in the USA.

Yet the cost of Hurricane Sandy could pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars required for coastal defences to protect cities from rising sea levels. “If there is half a metre of sea level rise, followed by 1 m, then, for sure, most of China’s major cities along the coast regions will be affected,” says Luo. “In China, 80% of people live in relatively low elevation areas in coastal regions.”

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, Nick Rowley has had a ringside seat to the bruising politics of climate change. In recent years, the British policy consultant has advised companies and governments on sustainability. Before that, he was a climate advisor to New South Wales premier Bob Carr, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Over that time, Rowley says, he has watched climate experts become resigned to the inevitability of dangerous climate change. “When I was working with Tony Blair seven years ago, there was a level of energy and focus among scientists, advocates and policy professionals addressing the problem.”

Today, that enthusiasm and motivation has been lost, he says. “Their tone is one of accepting that this world is going to change fundamentally over the coming 50 years because of the climate problem.”

Rowley is far from alone in that dismal assessment. David Karoly, a senior climate change researcher at the University of Melbourne, worries that meaningful political action will come about only when the gradual accumulation of disaster upon disaster – floods on fires on ‘Frankenstorms’ – make it impossible for the status quo to continue.

“For there to be a switch from political inaction to political action, there will have to be some very, very major climate-related disasters,” he says. “Many people will call those cataclysmic.” Karoly’s guess is that political change will start happening around 15 years from now. “But my view is that emissions won’t start to fall until 2050.”

An important part of that delay is the economic commitments countries are making right now to build coal-fired power stations. “It’s a kind of inertia that’s really important for the global economy,” says Field. “If we have to start retiring power plants that are only half their retirement age, or 10% of their retirement age, then we’re imposing both the early retirement costs and the extra costs of the renewables. And that’s when it starts getting really expensive.”

IN THIS VERSION OF 2063’s climate, “survival and adaptation would be the name of the game”, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “It would be a world on the edge of despair… but people would still feel they can adapt. A world that would be manageable, but there would still be heavy losses.”

Adaptation would be one priority: adjusting the way we organise our lives, cities and industries to cope with the changed conditions. Another would be fighting to minimise more disruptive change. By 2063, simply cutting emissions may not be enough to achieve this. Indeed, by the middle of the century the world may well have already dabbled with various technological fixes to try to cool the Earth and strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“I think the key point is that we will face continuing impacts and will face even worse impacts after we’ve realised that the problem needs to be solved,” says Field. There are profound issues with the gamut of geoengineering concepts aiming to mitigate climate change, he says. “If we want to know how well any of those things are going to work, and especially how well they are going to scale, we should be studying them real hard, right now.”

The kind of radical schemes that can garner headlines – shielding the Earth from sunlight with giant mirrors in space, or with reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere – may have been tested at smaller scales, but most have failed or been banned because they are too expensive or risky, says Schellnhuber. “Solar radiation management is dangerous nonsense.”

Field, Schellnhuber, Karoly and others are more optimistic that over the next 50 years we will get better at capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, or from the atmosphere itself. Some of the most promising approaches are a return to natural mechanisms, says Schellnhuber. “I would say the natural method of geoengineering would be best: planting trees.” Maintenance of tropical forests and bans on land clearing would also help reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Others think these natural approaches will not be enough and that new technologies will also be needed, some of which may already be on the horizon. In Queensland, for example, a pilot scheme by Australian energy company MBD Energy uses algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions from a power station in the town of Tarong, northwest of Brisbane, and grow feedstock. And in July 2012, global tech company Panasonic said it had developed a relatively efficient artificial photosynthesis system to convert carbon dioxide into fuels.

Fifty years from now, humanity is bound to have tools at its disposal that are just as unimaginable as smartphones and the Internet were in 1963. In predicting the future of climate change, “I think one of the weaknesses we often see is an expectation that in 50 years people are going to be using the same technology we have now,” says Field. “It’s interesting, when you look at 1963, some things have not really changed at all… but other things have changed drastically.”

IF THE CLIMATE OF 2063 does change substantially, it is unlikely to yet be enough to threaten civilisation, or usher in widespread ecosystem destruction. It is likely, however, that both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations will keep rising for another 50 years or more. “We could go to a 3°C increase over current levels by 2100,” says Schellnhuber.

By this time, seas could be a metre higher than they were before the industrial revolution, says Karoly. By 2150, a 2 m rise is possible. If this comes to pass, hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.

The scientists I spoke with worry that the citizens of 2063 will rue our failure to act on climate change today. “Sadly, in 2063 people are likely to look back at this generation and be damning of it,” says Rowley. “They will say that on the basis of the evidence presented to you, by the very best minds who have devoted their lives to understanding this complexity, you as societies were not willing to make the decisions and implement the policies to reduce the climate risks and costs that we now endure.”

After a couple of hours chatting with Pitman, our conversation takes a turn in the same direction. In 2063, he points out, it will be our children and grandchildren left to deal with the consequences of climate change. “I think they will look back and curse the current generation of political leaders. One of the cruel realities is that every one of those leaders will be dead, and not be held accountable.”

Stephen Pincock is a science journalist, editor and author and a regular COSMOS contributor.

The post Another day in paradise appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

But Prabhjit’s next morning ritual is different. Moving into the living room, she passes her henna-tattooed hand over a picture of her 15-year-old daughter. Apoorva’s image dissolves and eight farm grids sprout onto the screen, their colours every bit as vivid as Prabhjit’s sari. Her practised eye homes in on the scarlet dots – in-field sensors, sitting among the crops like tiny one-eyed metal scarecrows – that alert her to two patches on the northwest corner that are in distress. They’ll need a little more water. Then she zooms out to scan the satellite data from the entire area of Odisha state in eastern India. Some other farms have already begun their harvest; Prabjit begins ruminating about the implications. But the sound of an alarm clock pushes these thoughts to the back of her mind. Time for Apoorva to get ready for school.

IT’S 8 AM, AND PRABHJIT is sitting in front of her data screen in the small office to the side of her living room. Her husband has taken their daughter to the village high school, and himself to the office; he is the chief hydraulic engineer at Ganjam city council. Prabhjit calls her foreman to tell him to increase the flow rate in the drippers for fields NW1 and NW2. He also needs to service the rice harvester ahead of next weeks’ harvest, and while he’s at it, the rice-transplanter and tractors, to ready them for leasing to her neighbours. She arranges to meet him for an onsite visit at 11 am.

There’s a knock at her door. It’s expected – the two-monthly visit from Anil, her ‘ag-service’ provider. She puts on a pot of chai and asks politely about Anil’s family before they move on to some local gossip. Who’s planting what, what are the pests like, and what’s his take on the market? Then she steers the conversation to rice. Anil confirms what she already knows. Some farmers have started to harvest a bumper crop. But her crop needs another week to reach its peak. With plenty of rice on offer, will she get still get a good price? Or should she store her rice? Prabhjit weighs Anil’s opinions, and decides to silo her harvest in the village granary and wait for the price to rise.

Then they chat about vegetables. Prabhjit’s three-year contract for lentils and eggplants with the Bhubaneshwar grocery store is about to run out. Again, she gently questions Anil to find out what sorts of deals are being made. She decides to renew her contract, but on Anil’s advice will try the latest variety of Ganesh BT+ eggplant, with its promise of a four-week shelf life.

Anil taps his briefcase, prompting a holographic display of the latest upgrade for satellite and field data. Prabjit can’t resist and signs up. At 10.30 am, she heads to her meeting with the foreman. As she emerges from the cool of her rice husk-cement composite home, the Sun is beating down hard. She unplugs her car from the socket and eases herself into the drivers’ seat… just in time to receive a call from her mother. After inquiring whether Apoorva remembered her morning prayers, Prabjit’s mother reminds her that tomorrow is the anniversary of her grandmother’s death – she and Apoorva should light a special incense stick. Prabhjit signs off a little abruptly. Yes mother – I need to meet with the foreman now. Talk to you later.

Prabhjit had intended to spend the 10-minute trip planning her conversation with the foreman. But as she cruises down the paved road, an unbidden image projects itself onto the swaying green fields on either side of the car. Shin-deep in a muddy paddy, Grandmother and Mother (then just 12 years old) are bent over, shuffling backwards. They are in the Punjab, far from home, labourers in a team of women who spend day after day poking rice seedlings into the mud. Weeks later they will make their way back home, exhausted, huddled under blankets waiting at the foggy, smoke-filled train station in Ludhiana.

Another image replaces this one. Grandmother and Mother are transplanting rice again, but this time it is their own paddy. And this time it is a special crop; it will change their future.

GRANDMOTHER MAY NOT have been able to read, but she could sense the winds of change. Her husband had long ago left the farm to work at a brick factory: the tiny payment the government broker provided for their rice harvest wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Yet, the government was urging farmers in Odisha to plant more rice because the wells of the Punjab, as everyone knew, were running dry. Odisha was usually blessed with ample rain, but there could be drought. Or floods. Both had struck in the year before Grandfather left.

One year, Grandmother was given some seeds when she attended a meeting at the village. The government woman in her fine blue silk sari had explained that the seeds, which had been developed in the Philippines and were called Sub1, were very strong. If a drought came, the seedlings would not shrivel up. And if the floods came, they would extend their tips, reaching up like tiny mouths above the water to breathe.

As Grandmother and Mother transplanted each seedling, they held it as tenderly as if it were a leaf of gold. Their efforts paid off: that first year, the floodwaters covered their crop for two weeks, but the crop had not drowned and, unlike many of the other farmers in Odisha, they had made a nice profit. Three years later, Grandmother went to another meeting. This time, the lady in the fine sari introduced her to a new type of rice – she said it was the daughter of Sub1. But this daughter was ‘smarter’ than her mother, so they called it Super Sub1. Not only would this plant survive drought and flood, but it could also extract phosphate from the soil, so Grandmother would not have to spend so much on costly fertiliser.

Grandmother’s profit rose steadily each year. She decided that, just as Super Sub1 was smarter than its predecessor, her daughter would be smarter than her. She could have put the profits toward her daughter’s dowry as her husband and his family had told her to. But she didn’t. Against their thundering disapproval she used the money to send her daughter to the agricultural college in Bhubaneshawar – the first of her family ever to finish high school, was now being sent for a college degree! Grandmother simply closed her ears to the cries that her daughter would never marry.

They were wrong. Mother married a man she met at the college. While looking after her babies, she also managed the farm accounts and read farming journals, sharing the latest news with father while the family feasted on her delicious curry and chapati. Prabhjit grew up hearing the story of the smart rice that had paid for Mother to go to college.

In Prabhjit’s teens, the winds of fortune brought more changes. One was the land reform. A new law allowed the formation of small farming corporations, up to 40 hectares in size. Prabhjit’s father took his two hectares and joined up with Grandmother’s two. It wasn’t hard to rent more blocks – many of the families had moved to the city, leaving their old folk to work the paddies. It took years to finalise the negotiations; Prabhjit recalled Father tearing his hair and moaning: “It’s just molasses, this Indian bureaucracy.” By the time she graduated from college, Father left the running of the farm to her. She took a loan on microcredit to build up the farm to its present 24 hectares – and took the wheel.

THE OTHER REVOLUTION for Prabhjit was the genetically modified seed that allowed rice to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen from the Earth. She recalled her parents’ eyes glowing as they told her about it. Like Super Sub1, this was a very clever seed. A worldwide project, funded by the legendary Lord Bill and Lady Melinda Gates, had taken nearly 50 years to develop it. As Mother loved telling the wide-eyed young Prabhjit, “these rice grains are the children of Lord Lakshmi, benevolent goddess of light, and Vishnu, the restorer”. When Prabhjit reached high school, her mother gave her the scientific explanation. The rice plants had been genetically engineered to carry the powerful photosynthetic engine of a corn plant. But they also carried the nitrogen-fixing genes of a legume. Truly magical plants, they produced rice grains that were double the size using half the amount of fertiliser.

Vegetable seeds improved too: eggplants, cauliflowers, cabbages like the family had never seen. Best of all, they could throw away the most toxic pesticides because these seeds produced their own pesticides borrowed from the genes of a species of bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT for short. These vegetables were so powerful at resisting pests and raising profits, they earned the name ‘Ganesh’ after the elephant-headed son of Shiva, who was also the god of good fortune. Mother said they could have had Ganesh seeds years before. She never understood why the government delayed them; BT cotton had already saved millions of cotton farmers from pesticide poisoning and raised their yields. And BT was so safe, it was the stock-in-trade for organic farmers who sprayed the bacteria directly on their plants.

Prabhjit never forgot that gleam in her parents’ eyes. And she never forgot Grandmother. She passed away when Prabhjit was 20; a shrunken 57-year-old. Now, not so far from that age herself, the realisation shook her. Grandmother withered from the backbreaking work planting rice and spraying pesticides from a perforated spout of two tin cans yoked across her neck, barefoot. She had told Prabhjit how they would come back from the spraying, sick with headaches and shakes. In her final years, she still suffered from them. Lying on pillows on the cot, she told Prabhjit her stories; the ending was always the same. Prabhjit clearly heard Grandmother’s voice: “You will be like the rice grains that grow smarter in each generation.” Grandmother, I will light the incense stick for you tomorrow and I will tell you how smart I have become, Prabhjit answered silently.

* * * * * * * *
YOU MIGHT SAY Prabhjit’s story is a dream. And you’d be right. It is the dream of plant pathologist Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. It’s a dream that he has spent the best part of his career trying to turn into a reality. Many of Prabhjit’s farming tools are in the development pipeline, and some have already emerged.

The flood- and drought-tolerant rice variety (named Swarna Sub1 by IRRI researchers) is already available. The variety that can mine its own phosphate from the soil (referred to as Super Swarna Sub1) is due for release in the next couple of years. It carries a gene called PSTOL1, which IRRI breeders managed to isolate from a traditional Indian rice variety that performs well in soils with low phosphate levels. Both these new rice varieties were developed through a 20-year process of shuffling genes from semi-wild or old-fashioned farmers’ rice varieties into modern high-yielding ones by conventional breeding techniques.

The next cabs off the rank will take longer. Rice that can double its production by using the supercharged photosynthetic engine that naturally belongs to a corn plant is a tough ask – but one that’s on the cards, and known as the C4 rice project. It involves retrofitting a whole assembly line of corn genes and redesigning the infrastructure of the rice plant to accept them. Another very tough ask is to ferry the genes of a legume into a cereal grass such as rice, maize or wheat, enabling the plant to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen. A crop like this would truly usher in the next Green Revolution; doubling yields but using far less fertiliser than today’s rice requires. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, enamoured of bold challenges, is funding both projects.

What’s the chance of success? I ask Zeigler. “Undoubted,” he says. “When I proposed the flood- and drought-tolerant rice project 20 years ago, I was laughed off the stage. The tools we have now for genetically tweaking plants are vastly superior.”

Not all the tools that might be available to someone like Prabhjit come from the whiteboards of IRRI. The satellite from which she downloads data traces its origin to European Space Agency Sentinel satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2013, and whose microwave beams penetrate through clouds, meaning they can provide data about rice crops in Asia throughout the cloudy monsoon season. But IRRI is developing the software to enable farmers like Prabhjit to benefit. And it won’t just enable individual farmers to maximise their market opportunities – this type of data could help prevent a food price spike, says Zeigler. “With time to adjust to a shortage, they can import ahead of time, avoiding a panic.”

Prabhjit also uses drippers to irrigate and fertilise her fields. Punching tiny holes in tubing to deliver water and fertiliser at a slow rate more than halves a crop’s water requirements. Israeli inventor Daniel Hillel won the 2012 World Food Prize for developing it. Outside water-starved Israel, the fastest adopters to date have been China and India, countries that have increased their usage around 100-fold in the past 20 years.

In 2063, Prabhjit’s world is a happy place. By and large, the Malthusian spectre that haunted the world 50 years before – that the population would outgrow its food supply – failed to materialise. The challenge, then, was to feed an anticipated extra two billion mouths using existing agricultural lands. And it’s quite a challenge. In 2013, 38% of the world’s ice-free surface area is already under the yoke of agriculture, about a third of it for cropping, the rest for grazing. This land is also being lost to erosion and salty soils, smothered by roads, houses and golf courses; and chunks of it are being carved off to grow biofuels rather than food. Add to that the threats to agriculture from climate change, declining water supplies, flattening yields for wheat and rice, dwindling sources of phosphate, rising costs of nitrogen fertiliser, poor commercial incentives for farmers – and it’s clear why many are worried that the mid-21st century will be an age of mass famine.

But in Prabhjit’s world, mass starvation has been averted – and the ecological health of the planet is improving. In 2013, agriculture is the planet’s biggest polluter. Clearing chunks of the Amazon for farming (and losing carbon sinks), burning fossil fuels to make fertiliser (using up to 1% of the world’s energy); methane released by microbes fermenting in rice paddies and belching cows; and the nitrous oxide released by overuse of fertiliser, account for 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The same fertiliser running off fields into waterways causes algal overgrowths, sucking oxygen out of the mouths of the world’s major rivers and creating ‘dead zones’ for fish. This and overfishing threaten the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries.

So can we address and remediate these problems? In October 2011, scientists led by Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, published a manifesto in Nature entitled ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’. Foley’s group offered a five-point plan to feed the planet without destroying it (see ‘Saving the world‘).

As Foley concluded in an article in Scientific American published in November 2011: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world. There is no time to lose.”

IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN the insight of farmers like Prabhjit’s grandmother to bring this vision to a reality. In the scenario painted here, Prabhjit is environmentally aware and government incentives encourage her to employ ‘best-practice’ techniques. For instance, she drains her fields at the midpoint of the growing season rather than the end because (as IRRI research shows) this dramatically reduces methane emissions. For her trouble, she receives a carbon credit.

Elsewhere, highly mechanised and automated megafarms are the order of the day. For a taste of what’s to come, take a look at the rain-fed wheat farms of Western Australia (WA), which stretch over tens of thousands of hectares. Here today, 500 horsepower, GPS-guided harvesters cut 25 m swathes of wheat, measuring the yield in each square metre as they go, and informing next season’s fertiliser requirements. Unskilled drivers simply need to tell the harvester to turn around when it gets to the end of the field. But it’s not hard to see an end to that requirement, says Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute. Like the three-storey-high robot trucks that remotely mine the iron ore of WA, in 2063, robotic harvesters will dutifully bring in the wheat harvest.

Further north, like other countries with vast rangelands, Australia sports thriving cattle farms – because here, the beef and dairy cows graze on lands useless for cropping. Here again, genetic resources could herald a revolution. In 50 years’ time, the cows roaming the vast outback stations of Australia’s northwest won’t look terribly different, except for the tiny chips embedded in their necks to monitor their health and movements. But genetically they will be a breed apart. Improved methods of marking genes and the mapping of the cow genome will lead to breeds that easily withstand heat stress, thrive on grass and belch less methane. Meanwhile, pampered in their barns, healthy herds of dairy cows, freed of mastitis and other diseases of the past, are milked robotically, produce 50% more milk, and deliver a calf each year without birth complications.

Yes indeed, this version of 2063 is a happy place. But there is also a nightmare scenario that many experts fear is equally likely (see ‘The dark side’). Let’s hope the world instead follows Foley’s prescription. There is, indeed, no time to lose.

Elizabeth Finkel is the associate editor of COSMOS Magazine.

* * * * * * * *

SAVING THE WORLD
In 2011, a group of scientists published a bold five-point plan to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs.

1 Stop expanding agriculture
Land that is now covered in tropical rainforest, which is being cleared at a rate of around 5–10 million hectares annually, offers little yield when converted to agriculture. Protecting this crucial carbon sink from slash and burn agriculture for quick gains requires economic incentives such as carbon credits and market certification.

2 Close the yield gap
By bringing under-performing farms in Central America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to speed with judicious use of fertiliser, irrigation and improved seed, Foley estimates that the yield of the world’s top 16 food crops could be increased by 58%.

3 Use resources more efficiently
Employ technologies such as drippers and so-called ‘precision agriculture’ where water and fertiliser are meted out in response to the day-to-day needs of the crop.

4 Eat less grain-fed beef
Thirty-five per cent of crops are grown to feed animals, but when it comes to beef this is a terribly wasteful use of food: every kilogram of deboned steak comes at the expense of 30 kg of grain.

5 Reduce waste
Roughly 30% of food is wasted. In affluent countries, it’s mostly left uneaten on the dinner plate; in poorer countries, food spoils in the fields or in silos. The solution is to reduce portion sizes and improve storage and distribution systems. Smartphones could also help farmers reduce losses. In the past, with their crop in danger of rotting in the field, farmers were hostage to middlemen. With smartphones, they’re free to search out the best price.

* * * * * * * *

THE DARK SIDE

Overuse of fertilisers and pesticides can wreak havoc on nearby ecosystems. Credit: iStockphoto

MANY EXPERTS think food production will keep pace with population growth. What they fear is what will be done to the environment to achieve it.

The worst-case scenario sees large chunks of existing farmlands lost to erosion, salinity and urban development. The Amazon Rainforest will be lost to agriculture, accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases. Farmers will be forced to use ever-higher levels of pesticides to control disease and pest outbreaks worsened by a cooking climate. Waterways polluted by fertiliser and pesticides will cause the collapse of fisheries.

There are plenty of factors conspiring towards this scenario. Despite rising food prices, farmers continue to operate on very slim margins, holding out for that fortunate year when they reap both a bumper crop and a good price. That means they need to keep their costs as low as possible, which means shortcuts. Richard Roush, dean of land and environment at the University of Melbourne frames this problem as “the tragedy of the commons”. Farmers focus on short-term individual gain rather than the long-term common good. It’s a predicament exacerbated by low food prices. Roush and colleagues at the University of California at Davis calculated that if farmers could charge just 10% more, they could afford to use the best environmental practices.

Fixing the economic settings for farmers is a global challenge. Take Australia’s biggest grain farmer, John Nicoletti – long an icon as a successful farmer–entrepreneur. In 2011, he owned 180,000 hectares. In January 2013, it was down to 142,000 hectares and he was angling to sell a further 81,000. “There’s just not enough money in the farming game anymore,” he told Farm Weekly.

Another source of alarm is the declining investment in public sector research – the driving force for technologies that would enable a small-scale farmer like Prabhjit to farm more productively with a smaller environmental footprint. Philip Pardey, agricultural economist and director of the International Science and Technology Practices and Policy Centre at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, is worried that countries such as the U.S. and Australia have cut spending on research and development. “Australia is in trouble,” he says. “Fifty years ago it ranked eighth in the world for R&D spending; now it’s 16th.” Pardy points out that it was the investments of 50 years ago that gave us the Green Revolution and averted the widespread famine predicted in the 1960s by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. His research shows that 50 years is about the lag time before the investment in agricultural R&D fully delivers. In 2063, when climate change and bursting populations will make dire demands of agriculture, he worries we will not have “primed the knowledge pump”. The signs are the pump is already running dry. “For years we saw rice and wheat yields rising,” he says. “Surprise, surprise; now they have almost stopped.”

The post Fields of plenty appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

CAN WE PREDICT the future? According to prognosticators of the 1960s, by now we should all be popping protein pills and commuting in flying cars. But as I sit here in my non-paperless office, typing on a keyboard not much different from a typewriter, eating a lunch that wasn’t made by a food replicator, and preparing to drive myself home in a disappointingly Earthbound car, I wonder what happened to the future portrayed in Star Trek, or 1968’s sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Looking back half a century, have we lived up to the expectations of the likes of John F. Kennedy (who was assassinated in 1963) or Martin Luther King Jr. with his ‘I have a dream’ speech (given on 28 August 1963)? When these iconic influencers looked 50 years into the future, to 2013, could they have accurately foreseen where we would be now?

Predicting things to come is fraught with uncertainty. Nevertheless, for the 50th issue of COSMOS, we decided to try: to commission four of our top writers to look at the best science today, and cast forward to the next 50 years and see what might change our lives, our cities, our economies and the planet on which we live.

How will we feed a world of nine billion – almost three times the number of people alive in 1963? How will we mitigate and adapt to climate change? What innovations are on the horizon that might allow us to live our lives in wealth and comfort, without stripping the planet of resources and damaging it beyond repair? And how will we care for ourselves in a smarter future… where our ageing population is more likely to be treated with an app than an aspirin.

I WASN’T BORN yet in 1963. If I am alive in 2063, I’ll be 87 – one of the estimated two billion people who will be over 60 by the year 2050. In 1950, there were 205 million people over the age of 60: less than 8% of the global population. By 2050, that figure will have risen to 22%.

The world’s population is ageing faster than ever before. It is an enduring phenomenon – according to the United Nations, we will never again return to the young populations our ancestors knew. As contributing editor Robin McKie discovered in our future health special, this ageing effect will have profound consequences, as our stressed health systems balance the needs of larger, frailer populations with the potential benefits of innovations in genetics, personalised healthcare and the increasing global interconnectivity brought by mobile devices.

Suzanne Cory was 21 in 1963. Now an immunologist and molecular biologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne and president of the Australian Academy of Science, ’63 was the year Cory “fell in love with molecular biology”. She has since dedicated her life to understanding the body’s immunological response and to tackling cancer – a series of diseases that is another spectre for the next 50 years of health research, as cancer incidence approaches one in two people in the population.

We should aim to have people remaining healthy right up to the last stages of their life, stresses Cory. “I would like to be as active as I am now and have been all my life until the day I drop dead. I suppose [living to age] 95 is a realistic dream right now; I think that’s certainly within the realms of possibility.”

While we don’t fly our cars, and humans haven’t travelled further than the Moon, there have been transformational leaps in technology in the past 50 years: Cory mentions sequencing technologies, and the ability to ‘knock out’ genes from mice to better understand which genes do what in the body.

“I think it’s very difficult to predict 50 years hence. If I’d asked even the most experienced and brightest scientists around me at that time, in 1963, I don’t think they would ever have predicted we would now be where we are –in terms of understanding or what we were tackling. So I think we can only see a little way forward, and through a glass dimly.”

We can predict some likely research advances, argues Gus Nossal, professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, and a consultant for both the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He cites new anti-cancer chemotherapy involving highly multidisciplinary teams from cell biologists to genomic specialists, proteomic experts, X-ray crystallographers and medicinal chemists, for instance. “This multidisciplinary research will produce results. What needs to be understood is that it will take 12–15 years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

“At the same time, it is the very essence of scientific discovery that there will be unpredictable, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs resulting in advances that we haven’t yet dreamt of,” he adds.

The 1960s saw the dawn of a revolution in immunology and preventative medicine, where we first learned to take care of our health, not just battle our diseases, says Nossal. He was 32 in 1963, and was already working at WEHI, which he directed from 1965 to 1996. In the next 50 years, he says, we can expect to see this same kind of revolution in regenerative medicine, and particularly in stem cell science. The latter is “equally replete with hype and hope”, he adds.

IN 1968, WALT PATTERSON, now a physicist and author, laboriously typed out his first novel and sent six carbon copies to friends. This debut effort led to further attempts and, finally, in 1976, to his first non-fiction book Nuclear Power, which sold some 130,000 copies and is still downloaded from his website around 2,000 times a month. Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, and a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex in Britain, spent the next four decades writing about energy.

“The whole energy scene is changing faster now than I think it’s ever changed, and I don’t think people realise how fast or how far it’s going to change,” Patterson tells me over the phone from his home in the village of Chesham Bois in Buckinghamshire, Britain. “I think the traditional mindset about what people mean by energy and its role in society is just utterly misguided. And provided we manage to get this right and don’t simply trash the planet – and I think the odds are that we are indeed going to trash the planet – but if we manage somehow, at the last minute, to start thinking about it the right way, then the possibility of doing this dramatically differently is just dangling there in front of us.”

The energy mix of today may not have changed much since 1950, as writer and long-time contributor Richard A. Lovett discovers. But as Patterson points out, that’s going to have to change. He envisages a world where each building, perhaps powered by its own fuel cell and a coating of solar panels, becomes effectively its own power station, able if necessary to be completely off-grid. How soon we get to this kind of innovative energy system is a question of how willing our leaders are to confront the traditionalists, the “fossil mongers”, Patterson says.

“The ground rules are wrong. We have to change the ground rules, including the financial ground rules, so that we can take advantage of the different way that you have to buy and pay for infrastructure electricity. You buy it as an investment, not a commodity; it becomes part of the function of the building.”

If Patterson is right, and the “fossil mongers” are wrong, the subsequent decrease in emissions from a slew of innovations may take us partway to mitigating our “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, as writer Stephen Pincock notes in his feature on the future of climate change. Yet, realistically, much of this change is already “baked into the system”. In terms of limiting temperature rise to below the forecast 2°C, we have, as Australian climate change researcher Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science in Sydney, points out, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

“We live on a finite planet that doesn’t have an infinite capacity to support continuous growth in consumption,” says Michael Raupach, from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra. Raupach is one of the authors of a book released in February 2013 by the Australian Academy of Science; Negotiating our Future: Living Scenarios for Australia to 2050. It’s an attempt to “catalyse a scientifically informed national conversation”, says co-author John Finnigan, chief research scientist of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. “As far as knowledge allows, we must work through the consequences of inevitable trends and possible choices and, where the results of these are uncertain, we must try to put honest limits on what we know.”

WHAT STRUCK ME as our four features rolled in – including Elizabeth Finkel’s analysis of the dream of sustainable agriculture – was just how positive scientists were about the likelihood science would come to the rescue in the face of a future rife with challenge. As Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, imagines in Finkel’s narrative, it is entirely possible to create a world where we can have our cake and eat it too. Finkel quotes Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world.” It seems that many experts believe we can, and should, meet such audacious goals.

When I ask Cory if she thinks this positivity is justified, she replies with characteristic candour: “Well, you know, it depends which day you ask me.” So is this a good day or a tough one, I ask?

“I think basically I’m very positive, but I do have concerns. One thing I’d like to say is that humanity shouldn’t look to science to solve problems, because we won’t be able to solve all problems. I hope that humanity uses science to become wiser… to enhance the quality of life, not just to allow us to cope with an increasingly unpleasant world.

“We have an incredibly beautiful and amazing planet. I marvel at it every day: I marvel at evolution, I marvel at the complexity and the diversity in this world. It’s very precious. We must use science to protect it and save it from us; and that requires us becoming much wiser through our knowledge of science and communicating that wisdom and persuading society to take certain decisions.”

With or without flying cars, robot handmaids and food replicators, I think Cory neatly captures the key to understanding and benefiting from science: its ability to both arm us and steel us for change. And that’s a future we can all strive for.

Heather Catchpole is COSMOS’s managing editor.

The post Visions of hope appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Now, suppose you belong to the first generation of scientists who have studied for PhDs in quantum information. This new field combines aspects of computer science, maths and physics, and you find it absolutely fascinating. But launching into an explanation of how all these things come together is not exactly fodder for charming dinner party repartee. The last time you answered that question honestly, the other guests politely endured a five-minute lecture. You can do better this time. So you offer a short, to-the-point answer: “I work in theoretical physics.”

“Really! But what do you do, exactly?” is the reply. Experience has taught you that the most effective answer involves travelling to conferences in exotic locations. But on this occasion, your subconscious rebels. You find that your brain is filling with concepts such as quantum cellular automata and models of computation, concepts at the core of your work. They are what get you out of bed in the morning. So you blurt out something like “models of quantum computation and the consequences for theoretical physics”. From the look on your companion’s face, you know you’ve messed up again.

QUANTUM COMPUTATION is a new, booming field that exploits the magic of quantum theory to the benefit of computing – from faster computer speeds to more secure data transfer. Discussing its importance for theoretical physics at large may not be a subject that fits neatly into a casual dinner-party conversation, but it is an idea that is increasingly having its day. Some physicists argue that physics should shift away from the study of matter, particles and forces, and instead focus on information. The concept of information is already central to physics, via notions such as entropy (fundamental in thermodynamics, entropy is the study of how energy moves in and out of a system), observers and measurements (central to Einstein’s theories of relativity and to quantum mechanics), and information exchange between systems.

But there is a growing opinion that, as these ideas are embraced, physics will become not only informational, but computational. This idea dates back to the 1970s, and states that the entire universe can be considered to be a giant computer. In this universe-computer, in all places and at all times, particles are treated as patterns of information moving across a vast grid of microprocessors, rather than material bodies colliding and scattering – much as a tennis ball can be thought of as a pattern of pixels moving across your TV screen, rather than a lump of rubber ricocheting off a grassy surface during the Wimbledon final. Digital physicists, for their part, are like characters in a video game who are desperately trying to understand the rules.

A striking result to come out of this 1970s work was Robin Gandy’s argument that the universe could be simulated by a computer with unlimited memory. Gandy was a British mathematician, logician and student of the brilliant Alan Turing, whose work on coding laid the foundation for the invention of the modern computer.

Gandy began his argument by noting that all physicists agreed on a few self-evident principles. One is that the laws of physics remain the same everywhere and at all times: if they didn’t, they wouldn’t deserve to be called laws. The second is that there are causes and there are effects; all events must have their causes in the past, and the causal influence can travel at most at the speed of light. That means information, too, can travel from one system to another no faster than the speed of light.

Finally, and somewhat controversially, Gandy stated that it is reasonable for physicists to believe any finite volume of space can only contain a finite amount of information.

YOU MIGHT BE beginning to see why dinner conversations fail to flourish with the gentle banter of theoretical physicists. But, stay with us here, for now we are getting close to the crux of the matter.

From Gandy’s third principle of finite-density information, it follows that if space were, hypothetically, divided into cubes, each cube could be described by the finite information it contained.

Moreover, Gandy’s second principle says that the state of each cube at a particular point in time, call it t+1, is determined by the state of the neighbouring cubes at time t. In other words, the state of a cube at time t+1 is obtained by applying what information theorists call a ‘local rule’, to the state of its neighbouring cubes at time t. Finally, it follows from Gandy’s first principle that this local rule is the same everywhere and at all times. So, the state of the entire universe at time t+1 can be computed by applying some fixed local rule everywhere in space.

The effect of this argument is to reduce the universe to a type of computer called a cellular automaton. You may have played with a simple cellular automaton before, in the form of the popular computer-based ‘Game of Life’, developed by British mathematician John Conway.

The Game of Life comprises a 2-D grid of cells in which each cell can be either ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. Once you have decided which cells will be alive initially, the state of any given cell at a later time will be determined by that cell’s previous state plus the states of its eight immediate neighbours, according to rules that simulate the effects of underpopulation, overcrowding and reproduction (see ‘Conway’s Game of Life’).

These rules are simple, yet it has been shown that the game is universal, meaning that it can be made to compute any known classical algorithm or set of instructions – in much the same way that simple logic gates and wires of a standard desktop PC do.

But is there any chance that the real universe we see and experience could be reduced to such a simple game?

THE PROBLEM WITH Gandy’s model – and the reason why the original digital physics project was doomed to failure – boils down to one thing: quantum physics. To understand why, let us return to our dinner party at the French restaurant, where the food is getting cold.

Against your better judgement, you launch into an explanation of quantum theory using the knives and forks on the table. You hear yourself saying: “Pick a system that can be one of two things – such as an item of cutlery, which can be either a knife or a fork.” You hold up your knife. “Well, in quantum theory, this piece of cutlery does not have to be one or the other. It can be both at the same time, a state known as superposition.” As you start to explain, you sense that your audience may not be grasping the full implications. You ponder the wisdom of an alternative explanation involving salt and pepper shakers, but before you can begin, your waiter arrives with the dessert menu.

The reason we don’t encounter superpositions of knives and forks on a daily basis is that as soon as you observe a quantum system, or take a measurement, it becomes ‘classical’ again. In classical physics, when you observe something you can have only a limited set of results: up or down, knife or fork, alive or dead. Likewise, in classical computing, the smallest unit of information, known as a bit, can take on one of two values, 0 or 1. Quantum physics throws the rulebook out and allows a superposition of states, a concept described by the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment (see ‘The cat paradox’).

So, our smallest unit of quantum information, called a qubit (quantum bit), can only store a single bit of classical information, a 0 or a 1. In that sense, Gandy’s principle of finite information density remains compatible with quantum theory: we cannot effectively store more than a bit of information within a qubit. However, quantum physics says that before one observes a qubit, it is allowed to be in a superposition of states. Hence, quantum physics no longer allows for the case where each cube of space can be fully described by the finite information stored in it, and this is where Gandy’s argument falls down.

The idea of modelling the universe as a computer was resurrected in some form in the early 1980s by American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. His idea was born out of frustration at seeing classical computers take weeks to simulate quantum physics experiments that happen faster than a blink of an eye. Intuitively, he felt that the job of simulating quantum systems could be done better by a computer that was itself a quantum system.

Like their classical counterparts, quantum computers consist of circuits. To construct quantum circuitry you need quantum wires, which are analogues of real wires carrying conventional bits (as voltages), except that they carry qubits. Classical computers are made of logic gates, which take in information (bits) and output new information (new bits). Quantum gates process qubits instead.

OVER THE PAST decade or so, experimentalists in many groups around the world have successfully implemented quantum wires and simple qubit gates. The true difficulties lie with precision of more complex qubit gates and with protecting many wires from the environment – remember, if the environment ‘observes’ the quantum wires, they become classical again.

One of us (Pablo Arrighi), along with colleagues, developed a version of Gandy’s hypothesis that accounts for the complexities of quantum mechanics. Instead of the third principle, which says that a finite volume of space contains a finite amount of information, we state that a finite volume of space can only hold a finite number of qubits.

Considering the implications of the three updated principles, we were again able to reduce the universe to a computer, a quantum version of the cellular automaton discussed earlier. A quantum cellular automaton is very much like a classical cellular automaton, except that now the cells of the grid contain qubits (see ‘How to explain the universe’). The evolution from time t to t + 1 involves applying a quantum gate operation to neighbourhoods of cells repeatedly, across space. But, there are, alas, some subtleties to quantum cellular automata that cannot be explained quite so easily in a picture. For example, the cells can now be in a superposition of states, and they can also be ‘spookily’ entangled with any other cell – the state of a cell doesn’t solely depend on those next to it.

There is, of course, a big gap between constructing a ‘toy-model’ quantum cellular automaton and applying the lessons learned from it to the real universe. But if the updated versions of Gandy’s hypotheses hold true, and we can indeed describe the universe as a gigantic quantum cellular automaton, then studying physics becomes a game of attempting to deduce the ‘program’ of the vast quantum computer that we live in.

The conventional approach to deducing the universe’s ‘program’ is, of course, not to use cellular automata or anything like them, but to probe the ‘rules of the game’ with increasingly refined physics experiments, such as those performed using the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle physics lab. But perhaps there is an alternative computer science-orientated method, one that attempts to find the rules deductively.

SO, WE COME BACK to what quantum information theorists in physics really do for a living. We can begin this deductive process by discarding rules that are too simple, on the grounds that we live in a complex universe.

Next, we note that all sufficiently complex rules can be made to simulate each other. In other words, if the rule of a particular quantum cellular automaton is complex enough, then it can simulate all other quantum cellular automata, even when the other automata have rules that are horrendously complicated. Analogous to the universal nature of Conway’s Game of Life, a quantum cellular automaton that can perform such a simulation is said to have intrinsic universality. If we can find the simplest, intrinsically universal rule for a quantum cellular automaton, we can use it to find the simplest and most ‘natural’ (closest to what we observe in nature) way of implementing or simulating physical phenomena – like the particles and forces that make up the universe.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether all physical phenomena can be ‘encoded’ using the concepts developed here. Many difficulties lie ahead for those of us who are trying to answer the question of how nature computes itself.

The concepts of quantum cellular automata and intrinsic universality are likely to prove key in finding simple, minimal and universal ‘toy models’ to work with in attempting to answer this question. From a computer-science point of view, reaching this goal will amount to a better understanding of physics.

Yet we are obliged to conclude with a word of caution: these ideas may not be all that helpful in a restaurant conversation. Attempting to explain them may end with the other diners deciding that you are the best person to call the next time their (classical) computer breaks down. But on a more positive note, if we can find the rules, everyone will be a winner in this game of life.

Pablo Arrighi and Jonathan Grattage are quantum-information scientists affiliated with the University of Grenoble and ENS de Lyon, France.

The post Living in a quantum game appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

GENEVA: Seven months after its scientists made a landmark discovery that may explain the mysteries of mass, Europe’s top physics lab will take a break from smashing invisible particles to recharge for the next leap into the unknown.

From Thursday, the cutting-edge facilities at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will begin winding down, then go offline on Saturday for an 18-month upgrade.

A vast underground lab straddling the border between France and Switzerland, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the scene of an extraordinary discovery announced in July 2012.

Its scientists said they were 99.9% certain they had found the elusive Higgs Boson, an invisible particle without which, theorists say, humans and all the other joined-up atoms in the universe would not exist.

The upgrade will boost the LHC’s energy capacity, essential for CERN to confirm definitively that its boson is the Higgs, and allow it to probe new dimensions such as supersymmetry and dark matter.

“The aim is to open the discovery domain,” said Frederick Bordry, head of CERN’s technology department.

“We have what we think is the Higgs, and now we have all the theories about supersymmetry and so on. We need to increase the energy to look at more physics. It’s about going into terra incognita (unknown territory),” he told AFP.

Theorised back in 1964, the boson also known as the God Particle carries the name of a British physicist, Peter Higgs. He calculated that a field of bosons could explain a nagging anomaly: Why do some particles have mass while others, such as light, have none?

That question was a gaping hole in the Standard Model of particle physics, a conceptual framework for understanding the nuts-and-bolts of the cosmos. One idea is that the Higgs was born when the new Universe cooled after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. It is believed to act like a fork dipped in honey and held up in dusty air. Most of the dust particles interact with the honey, acquiring some of its mass to varying degrees, but a few slip through and do not acquire any. With mass comes gravity — and its pulling power brings particles together.

Supersymmetry, meanwhile, is the notion that there are novel particles which are the opposite number of each of the known particle actors in the Standard Model.

This may, in turn, explain the existence of dark matter — a hypothetical construct that can only be perceived indirectly via its gravitational pull, yet is thought to make up around 25% of the universe.

At a cost of 6.03 billion Swiss francs (4.9 billion euros, $6.56 billion dollars), the LHC was constructed in a 26.6-kilometre (16.5-mile) circular tunnel originally occupied by its predecessor, the Large Electron Positron (LEP).

That had run in cycles of about seven months followed by a five-month shutdown, but the LHC, opened in 2008, has been pushed well beyond. “We’ve had full operations for three years, 2010, 2011 and 2012,” said Bordry.

“Initially we thought we’d have the long shutdown in 2012, but in 2011, with some good results and with the perspective of discovering the boson, we pushed the long shutdown back by a year. But we said that in 2013 we must do it.”

Unlike the LEP, which was used to accelerate electrons or positrons, the LHC crashes together protons, which are part of the hadron family. “The game is about smashing the particles together to transform this energy into mass. With high energy, they are transformed into new particles and we observe these new particles and try to understand things,” Bordry explained.

“It’s about recreating the first microsecond of the universe, the Big Bang. We are reproducing in a lab the conditions we had at the start of the Big Bang.” Over the past three years, CERN has slammed protons together more than six million billion times.

Five billion collisions yielded results deemed worthy of further research and data from only 400 threw up data that paved the road to the Higgs Boson. Despite the shutdown, CERN’s researchers won’t be taking a breather, as they must trawl through a vast mound of data.

“I think a year from now, we’ll have more information on the data accumulated over the past three years,” said Bordry. “Maybe the conclusion will be that we need more data!”

Last year, the LHC achieved a collision energy level of eight teraelectron volts, an energy measure used in particle physics – up from seven in 2011. After it comes back online in 2015, the goal is to take that level to 13 or even 14, with the LHC expected to run for three or four years before another shutdown. The net cost of the upgrade is expected to be up to 50 million Swiss francs.

CERN’s member states are European, but the prestigious organisation has global reach. India, Japan, Russia and the United States participate as observers.

The post After Higgs Boson, scientists prepare for next quantum leap appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Is there anything we could do if we did discover an asteroid heading for a collision with Earth? Here are some of the proposals dreamed up by scientists to deflect it from its course.

1. Albedo change

Could something as simple as a lick of paint do the trick? Cover one of its sides with a reflective material and, the theory goes, you increase it’s ‘albedo’ – that is, the amount of sunlight it reflects. The asteroid gets a bit of a push from the Sun’s radiation as it reflects off the asteroid’s surface. And, at the same time, the difference in temperature between the ‘reflective’ side and the warmer side is that the radiation would act as a source of thrust, a process known as the ‘Yarkovsky Effect’. The idea is that, while it would only produce a small force, over a long enough time period it could move the asteroid enough to pull it off course.

And how would you give an asteroid a coat of paint? In a proposal in 2008 by Queensland PhD student Mary D’Souza, an orbiting spacecraft would wind a reflective ribbon around the asteroid in order to increase its albedo. Essentially, the asteroid becomes one large Maypole.

But would this idea work? We put it to Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program at NASA, who immediately called it “cute and colourful – but nonsense”.

OK, so on to the next proposal.

2. Solar sail

It seems like an idea straight out of science fiction: attach a giant sail to as asteroid and make it a space-going sailboat. The ‘wind’, in this case, is not a current of air like a sailboat, but the ‘solar wind’: a stream of photons and charged particles emitted by Sun. The ‘sail’ is not made from cloth, but a reflective sheet that uses the momentum of particles in the solar wind to slowly push the asteroid.

The idea of a solar sail was conceived some 400 years ago by astronomer Johannes Kepler. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) was one of the first to demonstrate the technology in 2010 with its IKAROS spacecraft, which deployed a 20 metre solar sail to assist in a flyby of Venus.

Applying the technology to hazardous asteroids, however, still remains a challenge. The biggest hurdles are how to tether a sail and what to do if the asteroid is rotating, Yeomans says.

3. Solar collector

Where some see a pile of rubble, Jay Melosh and Ivaan Nemchinov see rocket fuel. In a 1993 letter to the journal Nature, the pair proposed using giant mirrors to concentrate the Sun’s light onto a hazardous asteroid in order to vaporise the surface. Like some sort of Archimedean Death Ray, the material released may act like the exhaust gases of a rocket, causing a slow and steady change in the asteroid’s course.

But again, Yeomans gives this approach the thumbs down, calling it “too technically difficult”.

4. Solar shield

Why heat the asteroid when you could cool it down? Researchers at France’s Union for the Advancement of Photonics Propulsion proposed an idea called SHADOW, in which a fleet of solar shields would be placed around the sunlit side of an asteroid in order to even out the temperature across its surface. This would reduce the Yarkovsky Effect (see “Albedo change”, above) and dampen the associated thrust. With less thrust, the asteroid may slow down and its orbit becomes wider, potentially missing Earth.

Yeomans, however, does not think the proposal is feasible.

5. Kinetic Impact

Finally, a proposal Yeomans favours. He says that the ‘kinetic impact’ method is the “simplest and easiest – hence the best”. In this proposal, a small kick could be given to an asteroid from a large, high-speed projectile. It would, after several years, change its momentum enough to give Earth thousands of kilometres of breathing room.

But launching a heavy object into space is too hard, so Igor Simonov from the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed that one could be built in Earth orbit from dead satellites and abandoned space stations.

6. Asteroid tug

Many of the asteroids that pose a threat to us are about the size of a cruise ship, so why not move them with a tugboat? A space-going tugboat could grapple to an asteroid and use its propulsion system to give the asteroid the push it needs. To work, this push would have to last for months or years, so conventional chemical rockets will not do -  their fuel requirements are too large. But a highly efficient plasma engine could be used…  but these engines are still in their experimental stage, with no spacecraft yet using such a design.

7. Gravity Tractor

Pull. Push. What’s the difference? In a marvellous application of a simple law of physics, this approach uses the mutual gravitational attraction between a small asteroid and a heavy spacecraft to slowly pull the asteroid off-course. Edward Lu and Staley Love of NASA’s Johnson Space Centre first proposed the idea in 2005.

Here’s the catch to this one: the approach takes a very long time – gravity is the weakest force in the universe – and it would take up to 20 years for an asteroid 200 metres across.

One big advantage of this approach over many other approaches is that there is no physical attachment between the spacecraft and asteroid, so it could be applied to virtually any asteroid, even it is covered in craters and rotating 10 times a day.

8. Mass Driver

As part of research conducted by the U.S. company SpaceWorks Engineering Inc., a fleet of nuclear powered robots could be sent to an asteroid to mine one side of its surface. The mined material would be ejected away from the asteroid so as to impart thrust. The robots are known as Modular Asteroid Deflection Mission Ejector Nodes, or MADMEN for short. Think the researchers are mad? NASA, who contributes funds to the company, certainly doesn’t.

9. Nuclear Bombs

It’s not just Bruce Willis and the crew behind the 1998 blockbuster Armegeddon who think a nuclear detonation could be the answer.

Detonation of one or more nuclear weapons on or near the surface might be enough to change the speed and direction of the asteroid. It is not the explosion itself that does most of the work, but the associated neutron radiation that vaporises the surface and produces a thrust on the asteroid.

But, as Yeomans points out, it won’t work for all asteroids: it is very sensitive to the shape and composition of an asteroid. Place the bomb in the wrong position and the asteroid may fragment into many smaller, still hazardous pieces of debris. If the asteroid is too porous – more like a loosely held pile of rubble than a solid piece of rock – the blast will be dampened and have less of a kick.

And, as astronomer Carl Sagan argued in a 1994 letter to the journal Nature, the risk presented by near-Earth asteroids is far less than the risks brought about by civilisation actually building nuclear weapons in the first place.

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TAIPEI: One of Taiwan’s richest men has launched what has been widely touted as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and it is even more lucrative than the famed Swedish award.

Samuel Yin, head of the sprawling Ruentex business empire that has invested heavily in China, said that by donating Tw$3 billion (A$97.5 million) for the Tang Prize he had fulfilled one of his biggest dreams.

“I hope that the prize will encourage more research that is beneficial to the world and humankind, promote Chinese culture and make the world a better place,” he said in a statement released by the prize foundation.

Prize inspired by imperial Chinese dynasty

The prize is named after China’s Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), which is much admired by Yin, the foundation said.

The dynasty has inspired generation after generation with admiration for its vibrant characteristics of self-confidence and cosmopolitan inclusiveness, which are the qualities that the Tang Prize seeks to promote, it said.

Beginning in 2014, prizes will be awarded every two years in four different categories – sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology and the “rule of law” – to individuals, regardless of nationality.

The winner in each category will receive Tw$50 million (A$1.6 million), compared to the eight million Swedish kronor (A$1.2 million) that comes with a Nobel Prize.

The Tang Prize will help raise Taiwan’s profile in the international scientific community, the statement said.

Nobel Prizes are awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

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