I said a holiday in orbit, not three minutes in a supersonic vomit-comet.

SS1 managed to reach, oh, almost 20% of orbital velocity. To get the remaining 80% of the way will require a heat shield and a buttload more fuel, driving up costs. And Branson is talking about that three minute boak-bounce he's going to sell costing $120,000. Yes, there's room for prices to fall -- but I'm an SF writer, not a venture capitalist or a captain of industry, and I am very unlikely to have a spare $240K to drop on a glorified roller-coaster ride any time in the next 25 years.

Actually, SS1 managed more like 12% of orbital velocity (for a sensible orbit) but that's not the real problem. It might be 7/8 times the velocity required, but that's 50 times the energy needed. Makes for a hell of a scale problem when you look at it.

I think the orbital tower is looking far far more interesting. I'm just hoping that nothing crops up to spoil carbon nano-tubes like it did for long chain ceramic fibres in the late 80s.

"..not three minutes in a supersonic vomit-comet." Absolutely. Seriously Charlie, track down a copy of the DVD. What they've done is recreate some of the capabilities of the X-15, from 30+ years ago, on the cheap. What they want to do, the dream, is real space tourism, orbital hotels, the works, and at this point they've got a more impressive track record than any of the beanstalk people. It's far too early to say they'll pull it off, especially at a price point you and I can afford, but the dream is very clear.

"I hit Dublin last Friday, with a somewhat sore chest, only to discover that none of the local cellphone carriers provided GPRS service"

Yes they do. I used the bluetooth connection to my mobile phone to surf the Web with my Powerbook during Phoenix Con. - David

PS: Got the Atrocity Archive in London. Great stuff.

David -- which network? I tried O2 (ack, spit), got nowhere. Tried Meteor, got nowhere. Not sure if I tried Vodafone, but I don't remember seeing any GPRS signal on my Treo. Any hints would be useful for next time I visit ...

I use O2. You need to set your access point to open.internet and set the Treo to dial *99# The user name and password are both 'gprs'

Check out http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html for information on other networks.

"Dave . . . What are you doing, Dave?" HAL asks.

Well, we might have cold sleep tech on the way. But I don't worry about that so much as I do the overpowered, souped up autopilot/alarm clock that is supposed to wake me up.

Still, it is good news.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

Wow, things are moving along so quickly. Now only if we could get that cloning in order.
About the "clone aging issue" I think that is might be related to a genetic fault where the genes mutate as we age. So if a clone was taken from a person of about 40 that mutation would be inherant in the newly cloned object.

Mark: It's fairly clear that this ageing process is either not occurring or is somehow reversible in sex cells, so it's just a matter of duplicating that on demand.

more generally, I really wonder what's going to happen when they do the hibernation thing to higher animals where they can really test what it does to various longer-term life processes and more particularly cognitive function. Anyone want to bet that they're /not/ going to find all sorts of odd corner cases, broken memory circuits, or personality disorders? At first, anyway.

Edited by author 04-22-2005 12:56 PM
The aging process isn't really reversible in sex cells. They suffer DNA damage and related problems, just like any cell.

But because DNA damage can lead to cancer, the body has certain defense mechanisms. One of these is a "countdown timer", which causes cells to self-destruct after some number of replications. Since cancer cells multiply far more often than normal cells, they tend to encounter this limit far earlier than normal cells.

This "countdown timer" is implemented by chopping a few base pairs off the end of DNA strands on each replication.

This is an ingenious anti-cancer mechanism, but it won't work for sex cells, which are passed from generation to generation. So the body has an enzyme called "telomerase", which replaces the missing bits of DNA. But telomerase can't fix other DNA damage, so sex cells tend to accumulate damage as you age. This is why the rate of birth defects rise as parents age.

Sure, you could activate telomerase in other body cells, but it's a bit like replacing a blown fuse with a copper tube--you haven't fixed the underlying problem; you've only removed a safeguard. You'd greatly increase your risk of cancer.

This isn't to say that we won't eventually be able to reverse aging. But there's no magic bullet--fixing age will be like restoring an old Model T to mint condition, except we'll need to deal with a few trillion(!) parts.

On the other hand, we could conceivably have nanotechnology and AI before 2050, which would let us perform the necessary repairs. We live in a pretty fast-moving world, as Stross's post on hibernation indicates...

Two significant announcements recently. The previously mentioned hibernation research and also the story that Cyc, a "hard AI" database will be released onto the net soon (hopefully to learn and grow, but probably to become a victim of the new net game--Poison Cyc :-)

Now, if only SMART-1 can find a monolith on the Moon...

Bruce: "more generally, I really wonder what's going to happen when they do the hibernation thing to higher animals where they can really test what it does to various longer-term life processes and more particularly cognitive function."

I suspect there'll be a bit more to human hibernation than merely huffing H2S while enduring low body temperatures, else by the law of averages (hydrogen sulfide is quite common) we'd have had a fair number of cold-sleep people by now.

And there are all kinds of interesting developments if you google for "fusion rocket". The papers tend to indicate flight times to Jupiter could be reduced from years to months, so now it's whether hibernation or fusion is made to work first. Some authors have already used the idea of fast ships overtaking slow boats - here's a non-spacewarp way it could happen.

Eric: If sex cells don't suffer different levels of damage than do other cells (and I'm thinking specifically of males ones here, since female ones are fixed from birth) then what happened to Dolly the cloned sheep w.r.t premature aging would happen to offspring of older males, which does not appear to be the case.

It is entirely possible that this will have been a result of either 1) butchering the cell during the currently incredibly crude cloning process or 2) non-nuclear DNA, which really isn't terribly well understood. In either case, all bets are off as far as knowing what cloning can actually do.

Now that Dr. Robert Forward has passed away, I'm one of the few science fiction authors to have been paid to research Fusion Drives and interstellar missions and, for that matter, writing software for Galileo to Jupiter. See, for instance,

http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures...ations/210Ways.html

I happen to recall, while at Rockwell International (which shares the blames with Morton Thiokol and NASA for killing astronauts in batches of 7), I know that we officially proposed hibernation as a technology supportive of manned Mars missions. The project manager who submitted the paperwork was Edward McCullough. he was a big Jack Chalker fan. So, I guess, people will go to the planets in cryosleep if and only if the science fiction writers who inspire the aerospace engineers don't die off too fast.

And, as someone who worked on half a dozen Space Shuttle safety projects, each of which was ruined by criminal fraud, and as someone who testified about that to the NASA Inspector General, I sadly report the inevitability of another Space Shuttle failure fairly soon. At which point Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and India can go to the planets without the USA.

Wow -- doesn't it strike you how simple the experiments are that led to some of the most important recent biological discoveries? Ian Wilmut's team starved cells, arresting them mid-cycle and that made nuclear transfer (cloning) possible. The phenotype of nematodes is being unravelled by _feeding_ them short bits of double stranded RNA and then observing the effect of silencing the corresponding genes (hey, you don't actually have to do this at the bench any more, you can just determine the phenotype by database search these days) -- and now this!

Of course, doing something "simple" and expecting a good result leads to, for example, the fad of surgically transplanting ram testicle tissue into human testicles, to treat impotence. There was (many a year ago) a 250 Kilowatt pirate radio station broadcasting Howling Wolf and others into the southern USA from Mexico, sponsored by a doctor who did just that. His ads promised that men who went to Mexico for his operation would become: "The Ram what Am for any Lamb."

Doing something simple, but ahead of its time, is ure to be ignored by The Eastblishment, especially if one is politically suspect. For instance (skip this if you're Math challenged):

members.fortunecity.com/jonhays/clifhistory.htm

"I found reference to Rodrigues in Rotations, Quaternions, and Double Groups, S. L. Altman, Clarendon Press, 1986. Altman is an Oxford University crystallographer, who taught rotational theory for a decade before writing this book. On p. vii, '... rotation operators are often obtained as by-products of the angular momentum operators in quantum mechanics. Partly as a result of this approach, rotations are then parametrized by means of the familiar Euler angles, which suffer from three defects: they are not always unique, they are very cumbersome to determine in the finite rotation groups (point groups), and they do not provide a scheme for the multiplication of rotations. An entirely different approach to rotations is possible, which was introduced by Olinde Rodrigues in 1840 but which has never been used. The rotation operators in this approach are obtained by an entirely geometric method, which ... leads most naturally to the parametrization of rotations by parameters that coincide with quaternions. These parameters are unique, exceedingly easy to determine, and -- because they are quaternions -- they provide an algebra that permits the multiplication of rotations in a simple way. At the same time, and most importantly, these parameters determine unambiguously the phase factors that appear in the angular momentum representations for half-integral quantum numbers. [Quaternions discovered independently, and spinors in 1840!] This result leads to a rigorous formulation of the representations of the rotation group, either as projective representations or by means of double groups.'"

{in our world, Spinors were popularized by Roger Penrose a couple of decades ago.}

There is so little about Rodrigues in The Literature that many misconceptions are said about him. Elie Cartan (1869-1951), who is credited with discovering the spinor, invented a nonexistent collaborator for Rodrigues by the name "Olinde" (Rogridgues' middle name), a mistake repeated by Temple. Others misspelled his name as "Rodrigue" and "Rodrigues". Altman refers to the familiar "Euler parameters for rotation" as "the Euler-Rodrigues parameters".

Rodrigues became the patron and financial supporter of Count Louis Saint-Simon (1760-1825), founder of French Socialism. After the death of Saint-Simon, Rodrigues became head of The Socialist Party. So religious and ethnic discrimination, political discrimination, and the discrimination of Mainstream mathematicians contributed to the present obscurity of this creative man.