Failures of Nerve and Imagination

How should we think about the probability that we will be able to revive biostasis patients and other futuristic propositions?

[LLMs are getting ridiculously good at generating still and moving images — apart form weirdly morphing lips — yet still add text to them that is some insane form of English. Strange. Hence “NASA Technology Relevance Level” becomes “ASA Technollogsy Rearness Livel.”]

This essay may not flow as smoothly as usual. If so, that’s because it is made up of material for a different blog piece that I found fascinating but not essential to an already-long essay – “Rationality, Repair, and Revival: Exposing the Argument from Lack of Imagination.”

The core idea of that essay for The Biostasis Times was to point out the differences between the part of the biostasis or cryonics process that we can achieve today and the part that will come some decades in the future when repair and revival of patients may be possible. We can examine the reasonableness of current practices using existing science and technology and existing evidence. But it is much harder to evaluate the plausibility of repair technologies that are decades from being feasible.

In the BT Times piece I noted that biostasis – in the most common form which is cryonics or in the form of chemical preservation – involves two quite distinct groups of methods and technologies. One group includes the methods used to get patients preserved under conditions as good as possible. This uses currently known and tested technologies and procedures – emergency medicine protocols and devices, ischemia mitigation drugs, vitrification solutions, and so on. The other group of methods and technologies are what we will need decades from now to repair and revive biostasis patients.

Repairing cells? Bringing back people from death? Reversing aging? You are mad sir, quite mad. Humans will never travel more than 15 mph, will never fly, will never reach the moon, and will never create artificial minds that do anything useful. Your wild speculations, sirrah, are an embarrassment.

Future repair and revival technologies are, obviously, far more speculative. We will not be able to prove conclusively that the goal is achievable until we achieve it. Much like space travel. It was common practice for people – even experts in relevant areas – to take a large, smelly dump on the idea that humans would one day be able to fly, get into space, and land on the Moon. Today, we know those people were wrong. Enough independently-thinking souls soldiered on, setting aside these arrogantly ignorant nay-sayers. If we dig deeper, we can see that not only were they wrong – not an offense in the least – they had no justification for their dismissal.

Critical thinking is essential and poorly practiced by the vast majority of humans, and not always consistently by the best. We need more of it. We also need better imagination – not fantasizing, not unlimited and free floating imagination — but thinking about possibilities that respects physical limits but also adopts humility about what we can know about what is and is not impossible.

In my BT essay I present the tendency to dismiss bold claims about future technological capabilities in the form of the Argument from Lack of Imagination. Arthur C. Clarke, author of the extremely relevant Clarke’s Laws 1-3, argued that there was a frequent failure of nerve and imagination.

That essay bloated up to over 8000 words. Not all the content was really necessary to the main point. All of the extraneous material is, however, completely relevant to what I write about here in Extropic Thoughts. So, that essay (now slimmed down to under 6000 words) is the context for the pieces that follow.

Don’t fret, pet. You don’t need to read my BT piece to enjoy and perhaps learn from this piece. But please read it anyway. The first chunk looks at the incredible advances in microchips and their fabrication to make the point that “I can’t imagine how it could be done” is worthless as a serious argument.

Today’s microchips are obviously impossible!

We quickly become so used to new technologies that we rarely stop to consider how implausible they would have seemed a few decades earlier. We walk around blithely with our portable supercomputers, hang high resolution screens on the wall, choose from an endless supply of information and entertainment at close to zero cost, and get our organs scanned by invisible waves.

Shift your perspective back to the first half of the 20^th century. Imagine someone describing today’s microchips and the sophistication of their fabrication plants. If we could send back a detailed description, it would be considered science fiction. Probably even Jack Kilby, who invented the first microchip in 1958, the integrated circuit, would struggle to comprehend how these chips are possible.

Since the 1950s the cost of a transistor has fallen by about a factor of 300 million. In 1954 the first transistor radio had 4 transistors which cost $2.50 apiece ($29.03 in 2024 dollars). Today, an AMD Ryzen processor with 9.9 billion transistors is on sale for $650, or about $0.000000066 per transistor.

The cost of a semiconductor fabrication facility (“fab”) has increased from about $31 million in 2024 dollars to 10-$20 billion or more today. That’s around 300 to 600 times as expensive. (Rock’s Law, says that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.)

A current microchip has features around 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter, duh) wide. That’s about 1/2000^th the width of a human hair. Layers are only a few atoms thick.

Layers can be added to the wafer surfaces of a microchip that are no more than a nanometer thick. That’s 1/100,oooth the thickness of a human hair.

Chip manufacturing requires processes that are hundreds of thousands of times more accurate than conventional manufacturing.

For much more, see Brian Potter’s excellent blog essay from which the above points are derived.

What we can build today would seem inconceivable not so long ago. And yet we did it by gradually building innovation on top of innovation, driven by market incentives.

Today’s familiar example is LLM AI models. Not long ago it would have seemed highly implausible (to almost everyone) that in six years we would see an increase in petaFLOPs by 6,800 in six year, to 50 billion (50 quadrillion) petaFLOPs.

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Following a much-compressed version of the above, my BT Times essay looks at the spectrum from advanced design to exploratory engineering, considers the differing kinds of possibility, and then delves into technical possibility and exploratory engineering. The following section was another cut.

What if physics is wrong?

Here is one complication that I am going to leave aside but for a brief comment: If empirical possibility depends on the fundamental laws of physics, what happens if our physics turns out to be wrong or incomplete? This is almost certainly the case. Newtonian laws of motion stood for almost a quarter of a millennium and excelled at explaining and predicting a vast range of phenomena. Finally Newton’s view was overturned by special and general relativity. You could say it was falsified or you could say that it was shown to be an approximation valid in limited (but still myriad) conditions.

Currently, relativity and quantum mechanics both produce incredibly precise and testably correct predictions. Yet they do not cohere together. The hunt is on to develop a more comprehensive theory that incorporates them both into a more general and powerful framework.

I am not going to delve further into this because a revision of our understanding of fundamental physics could cut either way in terms of empirical possibility. Under Newton’s laws, we could in principle travel faster than light without limit. After Einstein, accelerating past light speed appears to be an absolute limit for particles with mass. That obviously limits us. If theories positing an accelerating expansion of the universe are correct, it may never be possible for us to develop a universal civilization capable of communicating with all other parts. On the other hand, new physics may open up new possibilities. For instance, some physicists believe that wormholes in spacetime may enable faster than light travel.

What about travelling back in time? There has been attempts to show that this could be achieved under extraordinary circumstances but generally it is thoughts to be impossible. Is it logically impossible or physically impossible? I leave this as an exercise for the reader.

You can’t do that!

[An expanded version of the text in my BT Times blog essay.]

Clearly, you should be extremely cautious before declaring that something will remain technically impossible forever if it cannot be shown to be physically impossible. Even things that are considered to be physically impossible may turn out to be possible. One fascinating area that makes this point vividly is materials science. Materials such as graphene and quasicrystals were thought to be physically impossible before they were created.  

We have already noted Richard Feynman and Eric Drexler’s thoughts about exploratory engineering. Here are some other classic examples of goals that are physically possible but technically impossible with current technology. The most popular area of application has been space structures and propulsion systems. These are ideas sufficiently well worked out that no clear barriers exist to making them eventually technically possible:

Geosynchronous satellites: Almost 600 geosynchronous satellites hover about our planet, the first being Syncom 2, launched on July 26, 1963. Herman Potočnik seems to have originated the idea in 1928. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke popularized it in a paper in Wireless World in 1945.

New nuclear fusion designs: A rapidly growing field moving beyond magnetic confinement approaches.

Solar sails: Solar sails – or light sails or photon sails – propel spacecraft using radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. In a 1610 letter to Galileo, Johannes Kepler (having suggested that comet tails point away from the Sun due to light pressure) wrote: “Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void.” In his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne speculated that light or electricity will enable us to travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed in 1921 using the pressure of sunlight to propel spacecraft through space and suggested, “using tremendous mirrors of very thin sheets to utilize the pressure of sunlight to attain cosmic velocities”. Friedrich Zander 1925 technical paper included technical analysis of the idea, and in 1927 JBS Haldane speculated that “wings of metallic foil of a square kilometer or more in area are spread out to catch the Sun's radiation pressure”.

J.D. Bernal presented similar thoughts in 1929. Fictional accounts followed from Cordwainer Smith in his 1960 story, “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul.” Jack Vance’s 1962 story, “Sail 25” revolved around a training mission on a solar-sail-powered spaceship. Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan also explored the idea. The first spacecraft to make use of solar sails was IKAROS, launched in 2010. In 2022, two 100-foot lightweight composite booms unfurled the 4,300-square-foot sail quadrant – the largest solar sail quadrant ever deployed.

Mini-magnetosphere plasma propulsion: M2P2 is an advanced plasma propulsion system enabling spacecraft to attain unprecedented speeds with minimal energy and mass requirements using a large scale magnetic bubble around the spacecraft to ride the solar winds.

Space elevator: Also referred to as a space bridge, star ladder, and orbital lift. By coincidence, both Charles Sheffield in his 1979 novel, The Web Between the Worlds and Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise presented this idea. Considerable thought has been devoted to considering how this could be made to work. Currently available materials are too weak and heavy to make the concept practical. Solutions could come from advances in carbon nanotubes, boron nitride nanotubes, diamond nanothreads, and macro-scale single crystal graphene. Engineer David Smitherman of NASA/Marshall's Advanced Projects Office organized a workshop at the Marshall Space Flight Center to turn the idea into a practicable project.

Dyson sphere: Physicist Freeman Dyson declared in 1960 that “It is possible to take planets apart.” The Dyson sphere would harness much of the energy output of our sun by surrounding it with a kind of cocoon. Dyson was inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel, Star Maker. Dyson saw such structures as able to meet the eventual energy needs of a vast technological civilization. More recently, astronomers have searched for signs of extraterrestrial life by looking out for signatures created by such spheres. There is current speculation that one good candidate has been identified in Tabby’s Star. The concept has unfolded into other possible constructs including rings, bubbles, and swarms.

Alderson disk: An Alderson disk is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure akin to Niven’s Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk has a thickness of several thousand miles with the Sun in the hole at the center. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be similar to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. If you thought Saudi Arabia’s The Line city project was ambitious, this ups the ante by several orders of magnitude.

Jupiter brains and matrioshka brains: A Jupiter brain is a hypothetical computational platform comparable in mass and size to the gas giant planet of that name. A Jupiter brain is made of computronium, an ultra-dense material that can execute calculations at the molecular level. Fans of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy may recall Marvin the paranoid android (really more depressed than paranoid) who complained that he was treated badly despite having a “brain the size of a planet.” Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo mission to the Moon. (Impossible, obviously!) A Jupiter brain is optimized for computational speed. Any plausible design for a Jupiter brain must grapple with the requirements for heat dissipation. The idea was examined closely by transhumanist (and my friend) Anders Sandberg in his 1999 paper.

The term “matrioshka brain” was coined by Robert Bradbury in 1997 and presented on the Extropians email list – an email list overseen by my organization, Extropy Institute –perhaps the first serious discussion forum on the Web (participants including Marvin Minsky “the Father of Artificial Intelligence”, several of the originators of Bitcoin, and other farsighted folk). Bradbury also presented his thinking at my Extro-3 conference on August 10, 1997. (See also Bradbury’s contribution to the anthology Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.

While a Jupiter brain is optimized for computational speed, a matrioshka brain operates on a smaller scale and is optimized for capacity and minimal signal propagation delay. The matrioshka brain is classified as a class-B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. The name of this concept derives its name from nesting Russian matryoshka dolls.

More exemplary examples exist than I can cover here. You might check out Adrian Berry’s inspiring 1974 book, The Next Ten Thousand Years, which covers Dyson sphere, space habitats, the economics of abundance, and other applications of exploratory engineering. There is the work of Robert L. Forward (a fitting surname) whose research focused on the leading edges of speculative physics and included space tethers, and space fountains (extremely tall towers extending into space), solar sails (including Starwisp – using microwaves instead of solar radiation), antimatter propulsion, and other spacecraft propulsion technologies. Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic.

There is Hans Moravec’s 1988 book, Mind Children, which delves into the limits of computation. In his introduction to Far Futures, physicist and SF author Gregory Benford outlines stellar engineering to extend the life of our sun to 100 billion years. Physicist Frank Tipler has speculated in detail how we might extend life indefinitely in a finite universe.

Mind-blowing as many of these idea are to most people they are all grounded in and limited by an advanced understanding of physical limits.

Exploratory engineering may be too conservative – it specifies a limit to new technologies based on physics but sometimes the physics is wrong – or the interpretation of the physics is wrong. A good example is the creation of graphene (see Appendix 1). Considerations of thermal fluctuations, structural integrity, edge instability, and principles derived from the Mermin-Wagner theorem and others seemed to imply that such materials could not exist stably in nature. Experimentation demonstrated that physical understanding to be incorrect.

Unforeseen “impossible” materials

Originally, I included the following in my BT Times essay, then as an appendix, and then I cut it in the interests of focus and brevity. I include it here because it provides a concrete and relatively recent set of examples of discoveries and inventions that were considered impossible or extremely unlikely until they happened.

We have discovered or created new materials that no one expected and – in some cases – were considered to be impossible. These are not examples of exploratory engineering but do illustrate how the supposedly impossible sometimes happens.

Graphene: Discovered in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester, graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Its discovery was unexpected because it was previously believed that truly two-dimensional materials could not exist stably in nature due to the principles derived from the Mermin-Wagner theorem and related theories in physics. These principles suggest that two-dimensional crystals are inherently unstable and would either curl up or disintegrate under normal conditions. The reasons for this belief are rooted in thermodynamics and materials science:

1. Thermal Fluctuations: In a two-dimensional crystal lattice, atoms are restricted to a plane, and thermal fluctuations (vibrations of atoms due to temperature) are expected to be more pronounced because the atoms have less constraint compared to those in three-dimensional structures. According to the Mermin-Wagner theorem, long-range ordering in two dimensions is disrupted by thermal fluctuations at any finite temperature, leading to the presumption that a flat, two-dimensional material would not be thermodynamically stable.

2. Structural Integrity: Without the support provided by a third dimension, two-dimensional materials were thought to lack the necessary structural integrity. It was assumed that they would not be able to maintain a stable, flat structure and would tend to form tubes or wrinkles or even crumble under normal conditions.

3. Edge Instability: Two-dimensional materials have edges that are only one atom thick, which could make them chemically reactive or structurally unstable. This edge reactivity was expected to lead to further complications in maintaining a stable two-dimensional structure.

It was found that graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, is not only stable but also exhibits exceptional strength, electrical conductivity, and thermal properties. Stability is now attributed to the strong covalent bonding between carbon atoms in the graphene sheet and the specific electronic properties of carbon, which help stabilize the structure despite the theoretical predictions.

The discovery of graphene opened the door to further research into other two-dimensional materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides and black phosphorus, which have since shown that two-dimensional materials can be both feasible and useful for a variety of applications.

Quasicrystals: First identified in 1982 by Dan Shechtman, who later won the Nobel Prize for his discovery, quasicrystals are structured materials that exhibit a form of symmetry that was once thought to be impossible. They are ordered but not periodic and have unique thermal, electrical, and mechanical properties.

Aerogels: While the first forms of aerogel were developed in the 1930s, significant advancements and variations have been made in the past 50 years. Aerogels are the lightest solid materials and are composed of up to 99.8% air. They have exceptional thermal insulating properties and a high surface area, making them useful in applications ranging from thermal insulation in spacecraft to the next generation of consumer electronics.

Metallic Glasses: These amorphous metals, developed in the late 20th century, are formed by cooling molten metal so quickly that crystals do not have time to form. Metallic glasses have higher strength and resistance to wear and corrosion than crystalline metals of similar composition. Their discovery opened up new applications in various fields including aerospace, medical devices, and sporting goods.

Topological Insulators: Discovered in the 2000s, topological insulators are materials that act as insulators in their interior while conducting electricity on their surface. They have unique electronic properties that make them potentially useful for quantum computing and spintronic devices.

Perovskite Solar Cells: First developed for solar applications in the last decade, perovskite materials have shown great promise in photovoltaic cells due to their high efficiency and lower production costs. Their rapid development from initial discovery to high-efficiency cells was unexpected and they are considered a breakthrough in solar technology.

Carbon Nanotubes: First observed in 1991 by Sumio Iijima, carbon nanotubes are cylindrical molecules that consist of rolled-up sheets of single-layer carbon atoms (graphene). They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, making them potentially useful in a wide range of applications from electronics to composite materials.

Materials science continues to yield surprising insights and novel materials with unique properties that enable new technologies.

Failures of nerve and imagination

In Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke considers how prognosticators go wrong in two big ways: A failure of nerve and a failure of imagination. To sum up his discussion, peppered by examples of both failures, Clarke offers his now-famous First Law: “When an elderly and distinguished scientist tells you that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.” An expert can quickly identify all the difficulties in achieving something but may lack the imagination or vision to see how they may be overcome.

Clarke’s Second Law says: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” This is well illustrated by many examples. I have dozens of them. Here are a few from two books. Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, which I read sometime in the early- to mid-1980s, and Adrian Berry’s superb The Next Ten Thousand Years, which I read in 1987. These books further opened my already hungry mind to possibilities.

Auguste Comte – we will never know anything about the composition of stars. We will never know anything about planets except their geometry and dynamics.

Julius Frontinus, Rome’s leading military advisor in the time of Vespasian: “I will ignore all new ideas for new works and engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvement I see no further hope.”

Napoleon refused to hear out American engineer Robert Fulton who argued that the blockading British fleet could be defeated by steamships. The first steamships appeared soon after Napoleon’s death.

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” The Quarterly Review, 1825.

Governor Martin van Buren of New York complained to President Andrew Jackson in 1829 about railroad coaches being pulled at the “enormous speed of 15 mph.” “The Almighty never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.”

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London. (Not much joy from this particular Dionysus.)

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” –Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895.

Astronomer Simon Newcomb in 1903: “Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.” “The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second. It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?” — Simon Newcomb, in The Independent, 22 October 1903. This was just a few months before Orville Wright flew the first powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was then authoritatively declared that no plane would ever take the weight of a passenger, an assertion quickly disproved when Orville took his brother Wilbur as a passenger on his next flight.

I must confess that in my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea. H.G. Wells, in Anticipations, 1901.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. — Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science, 1906

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to life but doomed to failure from an engineering standpoint. — editor of The Times of London, 1905.

Okay, but that’s as far as it goes! The engineer Octave Chanute wrote in Popular Science Monthly that “the machines will eventually be very fast… but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.” Eleven years later in 1914, the first air passenger service was opened between two Florida towns.

Before World War 1, astronomer William H. Pickering dismissed the idea of “gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic carrying innumerable passengers.”

Then critics claimed that no plane would ever fly faster than 600 mph. In 1947, Chuck Yeager flew Glamourous Glennis at 670 mph.

Similar dismissals followed concerning the possibility of space travel. “[Space travel] is utter bilge. I don't think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing… It is all rather rot.” Sir Richard van der Riet Wooley, on assuming the post of British Astronomer Royal, Time magazine, 16 January 1956.

“Space travel is bunk.” Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik I, 1957.

“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the Moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Dr. Lee DeForest, The New York Times, 25 February 1957.

“This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal, For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories… . The energy of our most violent explosive—nitroglycerine—is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth… . hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible.” — A. W. Bickerton, Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Canterbury College, Christchurch, 1926 (and a popularizer of science). Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future p.22) said of the quote, “It should be read carefully, for as an example of arrogant ignorance it would be very hard to beat.”

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961. The first commercial communications satellite became operational in 1965

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. — Albert Einstein, 1932.

After helping split the atom, Lord Rutherford announced (1933) that he could see no practical value for his discovery. “He who talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial basis is talking moonshine”.

That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives. Admiral William Leahy. [Advice to President Truman, when asked his opinion of the atomic bomb project.]

In 1899, the director of the U.S. Patent Office urged President McKinley to abolish the Patent office and his own job – in what must be a unique demand from a bureaucrat – because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Marconi was derided when he claimed that radio messages could cross the Atlantic. After all, this would clearly require a radio reflector as large as the North American continent. “Radio has no future.” - Lord Kelvin  British mathematician and physicist, 1897. Lee de Forest was prosecuted for mail fraud for making this claim. De Forest didn’t learn from this and went on to assert in 1926: “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads.

My conclusion in the BT Times piece:

Unlike those other important advances that turned out to be real, our lives depend on life extension and biostasis. A very strong burden of proof lies on those who dismiss the idea that we can drastically extend human lifespans and repair and revive well-preserved patients.