[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-All big ideas start with a spark of inspiration.
Add in a dose of imagination and a story begins to evolve.
As a story develops, questions naturally
arise and lead to conversations.
Conversations that explore, enlighten,
and spawn new experiments where we ask: What can happen?
What is possible?
And then share these ideas through compelling stories
to generate a new spark of inspiration
and the next big idea.
Big ideas.
Real science.
Great stories.
That's Project Hieroglyph.
Read the book.
Join the conversation.
And share your ideas for a better future
at hieroglyph.asu.edu.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
ED FINN: Today I'm going to tell you
a little bit about Project Hieroglyph.
We're going to introduce some of the collaborators who
have been working on this product for the past couple
of years.
We're going to talk a little bit about the book.
We have stacks of them somewhere in the back.
We're going to have time for question and answers.
The time for question and answers
will come before the time when many of you
will have to leave for your 2 o'clock meetings.
And we're going end, as we begin, with an invitation.
Hieroglyph is not something that's over.
The book does not memorialize a conversation that has wound up
and finished.
Hieroglyph is very much just starting out,
and we frame the book and this project is an open invitation.
So I hope that this will be the beginning of conversations
with many of you.
What is Hieroglyph?
Let me start with a little origin story.
Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer
who's going to be up here on stage in just a second,
and the president of Arizona State University, a guy
named Michael Crow, were at an event in Washington, DC
a couple years ago, in 2011.
Like everything else, this is on YouTube.
And Neil had recently written an article
called "Innovation Starvation."
It was a polemic, an argument about how
we seem to have lost our ambition to do big stuff.
Going from the Apollo program, grand national infrastructure
projects, really big thinking about the world and the future
to paying other countries and companies to fly stuff
into space for us, watching those same grand national
infrastructure projects crumble around us,
and adopting a much more incremental notion of progress.
Now, I don't blame you guys for this.
One of the reasons that I'm excited to be here
is that I think Google is perhaps the leading-- or one
of the most interested institutions or entities
thinking about the future in a more
creative and ambitious way.
But, by and large, that's not how
we've thought about the future in, say, the past 20, 30 years.
We've become increasingly dystopian in the stories
that we tell about the future.
Increasingly cynical about what we
can do to change the world that we're going to live in.
And so Neal was making this argument
in the context of innovation, technological innovation,
the kinds of research and money that
gets put into different problems;
what problems we choose to work on.
And Michael Crow, being the sort of person Michael Crow is,
said well, Neal, maybe this is all your fault.
Maybe the science fiction writers
have been letting us down because now we
have all of these dystopian stories,
and if we don't have the right kind of optimistic visions
about the future, how are we going to build a better world?
How are we going to build more optimistic realities?
That conversation struck a spark,
and Neal began speaking to friends and colleagues--
science fiction writers, entrepreneurs, technologists,
creative thinkers of many different stripes--
about a direct response.
How would we create a new kind of conversation?
A new set of stories that would be techno-optimistic?
That would take seriously the challenge
of envisioning a future-- and not a distant Star Trek future.
A near future.
An achievable future that advances some kind
of hopeful vision of the world while still
being technically grounded.
I think Neal's ground rules were:
no Holocaust, no hackers, no hyper-space.
And, at the same time, Michael Crow came back to ASU
and we began talking about what a university response might
be to this challenge; what an institutional response might
be.
So the Center for Science and the Imagination
is a platform for this kind of thinking,
and we're the institutional hosts of Project Hieroglyph.
Neal is its founder.
And over the past couple of years,
we've been collaborating on what we think of very much
as a community and a conversation
much more than it is a book project.
So on the inside, Hieroglyph is about these collaborations.
It's about creating a feedback loop
or-- it's about fostering the feedback loop that has always
existed between science fiction and science.
But it's about putting people into direct conversation
and thinking about the outcomes of this process as big ideas,
science fiction stories, but also research
or inflections to ongoing research,
changing curriculum, public debate.
And of course for every new idea, perhaps a hundred
or a thousand others that come out of it.
A hundred or a thousand other questions.
One of the things we quickly realized:
When you begin taking the near future in a science fiction
story seriously is that you can't answer it-- you can't you
can't research that story or address all of its questions
by only speaking to one human being.
Any serious moonshot idea about the near future
requires a whole host of different disciplines
and a really creative approach to what
you're trying to accomplish.
So on the outside, Hieroglyph is something
we're describing as, "Big ideas.
Real science.
Great stories."
Grounded stories.
I often call them "science fiction of the present."
So we had guidelines for our writers,
because if you know writers, you don't really
want to give them rules.
Guidelines are much better.
And one of the guidelines was to write a story
that a young scientist or engineer could read and achieve
within her professional lifetime.
And, by and large, people have followed that.
And our other rules-- well, excuse
me-- our other guidelines, encouraging them
to step outside of their comfort zones and share ideas
before they're ready.
A traditional approach to a science fiction anthology
is to say, hey, we're writing stories
about Topic X. Do you have a story about Topic X?
Why don't you send it to us?
And in a certain sense, the same rules
apply for scientists and engineers, who
are quite happy to talk about published research things that
have been brought out of the lab and vetted,
but it's a lot riskier to talk about ideas
that you will have only explore in the formative stage
or that you don't know if there are some big holes in them yet.
Where you're actually taking a risk just talking about them
before you've really had a chance to think them through.
And Hieroglyph is about trying to create
a safe place for everybody to do that together.
For writers, scientists, and engineers to all
kick around ideas, brainstorm, before they're actually
ready to share those concepts with the general public,
or perhaps to share them within a disciplinary or peer
community.
So not asking writers to write a story and come back to us
in six months, but say, why don't you
write the story with us?
Why don't you collaborate with us online?
And most of it has happened online, on the Hieroglyph
website, and that's where we want
to continue having these conversations in the future.
Neal has engaged in some prior collaborative projects
like this. "The Mongoliad" is one well-known one.
And when I asked Neal how he did the collaborative writing
for "The Mongoliad"-- which is this big, online,
very community-centric narrative universe--
it emerged that there was a big room with whiteboards
and swords in it.
And that's where the writing happened.
If we did that, I think we would lose something of this project.
It would no longer be the kind of broadly public endeavor
that we want it to be.
ASU is an unusual university not just
because it does weird things like this.
It's most unusual because it defines itself
by who it includes rather than who it excludes.
And if you think about it, that's
probably the single-most radical thing
that a higher education institution in the US
could do these days.
And so if we're going to follow that,
then we can't depend on co-location.
We can't depend on personal invitations.
We can't depend on putting people into a room together
who have the time and the energy to be there.
We need to throw open the doors in a much more ambitious,
maybe risky way.
For us, for the Center for Science and the Imagination,
this is about a lot of different objectives.
Getting a book out of there is one thing,
but for us, again, it's really just a beginning.
It's about inspiring broad public conversation.
It's about understanding the circulation of ideas
across very different fields, very different systems
of imagination, which is an ongoing research project.
And it's about changing the world.
Having an impact with ambitious projects and inclusive stories.
Stories that don't depend on a particular
political or technological standpoint.
Stories that envision ambitious, radical change
in near-Earth orbit on a voyage to other stars
but also right here on planet Earth.
Stories about social change, cultural change, as well as
technological and technical change.
So we have a number of new projects kicking around
in Hieroglyph.
We have a collaboration with the World Bank
and other major institutions, called
EVOKE, which is about social entrepreneurship
and getting young people in the developing world
to take a stronger sense of agency,
feel empowered to create a new story in their own lives.
We have an ongoing effort around climate futures
and the imagination, trying to come up
with more optimistic, engaging, exciting, happier visions
of sustainability and what the world might
look like in the near future.
And also, a related project on science and science
fiction-- the feedback loop between popular imagination
and technical progress.
So for the next less than an hour,
we will explore a few of these ideas circulating
through Hieroglyph, and I hope engage all of you
in the conversation.
I'd like to introduce Neal Stephenson and Keith
Hjelmstad to talk about their collaboration
on "The Tall Tower."
Neal Stephenson is an author of historical and science
fiction, a technology consultant, and the founder
and principal provocateur behind Project Hieroglyph.
He's the author of the three-volume historical epic,
"The Baroque Cycle" and the novels "Reamde,"
"Anathem," "Cryptonomicon," "The Diamond Age," "Snow Crash,"
"Zodiac," and coming soon, "Seveneves."
He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Keith Hjelmstad is a professor of structural engineering
in the School of Sustainable Engineering
and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.
He is the author of the book "Fundamentals
of Structural Mechanics" and serves as an associate editor
of the "Journal of Constructional Steel Research"
and the "ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering."
His research focuses on computational mechanics,
earthquake engineering, stability of structures,
non-destructive evaluation of large structures--
which is really less fun than destructive evaluation
of large structures-- and numerical simulation
of complex structures.
Please join me in welcoming them.
NEAL STEPHENSON: Given the audience,
I'm eager to get to the fundamentals
of structural mechanics as soon as we can,
so I'll make a brief introduction.
I actually talked about the "Tall Tower" idea a year
and a half ago at "Solve for X," which
was the first-- as far as I know-- the first conference
that I was told about that was organized by Google X.
And I did that in the world's slowest after-dinner talk.
It's a talk that, if you find it,
you should watch with your thumb on the fast forward button.
Lots of majestic pauses.
I'm going to-- I bolted some coffee before we started here,
and I'm going to try to get through this a little faster.
"The Tall Tower" is both a real idea and a kind of meta-idea.
It's sort of the first idea we wanted to talk about
with Hieroglyph because it's an example of the kind of thing
that makes a good choice.
It's very easy to explain, simply,
"Let's build something really tall."
It's an old idea.
It's not my idea.
It's something very visible that anyone can kind of see in
their minds eye and start thinking about.
For me, it emerged from some papers written about 10 years
ago by Jeff Landis, in which he pointed out
that is should be possible to build really
tall structures out of plain old steel.
And by "plain old," I don't mean, necessarily,
hardware store steel.
But I mean relatively high-quality steel
that is obtainable today.
Not super-fancy new materials.
And so I began doing some work on that,
sort of performing some simple calculations that
were kind of within my comfort zone,
and rapidly reached the limits of what I could really do.
Because when you begin to figure out
the stresses that are involved in a structure of that type,
it rapidly becomes obvious that it has a lot
to do with wind loading and other things that
go beyond my freshman physics level of competency.
So through the good offices of Michael Crow,
I was able to get in touch with Keith Hjelmstad
here, and begin a conversation about actually making
some more legit calculations about what this thing would
have to look like structurally.
So that was probably a couple of years ago now.
Probably exactly a couple of years ago.
And so Keith began with sort of a-- well, maybe
I should-- since I'm starting to falter and stagger around,
maybe I should let Keith take over for a second
and talk a bit about what he did.
KEITH HJELMSTAD: Yeah, so there I
was, minding in my own business, and I get this call
from Neal Stephenson asking about a 20-kilometer tower.
Actually, I think he was worried about the 20
and he asked about a 15-kilometer tower
as if that was going to calm me down at all.
But I've been a structural engineer now
for about 40 years, and frankly, I really
hadn't given a lot of thought to "How tall could we go?"
And I was immediately kind of struck by the idea.
I'm not a real engineer.
I'm an engineering professor.
And so I think that gives me a little bit more freedom
and license to explore crazy ideas.
That's why I didn't hang up on you the first call.
But I started out with a pretty simple model.
At that time, I did not really know
whether this was even possible.
So we've got a pretty hefty gravity well here,
and I looked over the papers-- the Landis papers--
that he sent me, and tried to replicate that calculation
but noticed that the main thing that there was missing
from that calculation was the stability thing.
You can't just make a really, really long, skinny thing
and expect it to stand up.
It's probably going to buckle.
But if you give it some width, then maybe it will stand up.
And so I started out with some pretty simple calculations.
Got
To a certain point where I think I
was convinced that it was possible.
And really it needed more detail to it.
When you get into a structure like that,
there's no precedent.
In fact, that's one of the things that
was quite attractive to me, because
in structural engineering we live in a world of regulation
and building codes.
And in my view, they've all but killed
the creativity in structures.
And here was something that just wasn't
covered by any of those things.
In fact, there isn't even a chapter
in "Fundamentals of Structural Mechanics" that covers this.
It was sort of new ground.
But then I developed a few more models,
some more advanced, detailed models.
We ran into the problem of wind.
For those of you who are structural engineering
interested-- around here, earthquakes
are a pretty big deal.
But when you build high enough, earthquakes
aren't really that much big of a deal.
The wind is really the main thing.
And if you build 20 kilometers high,
you poke up into the jet stream, and the wind
gets pretty intense up there.
We don't know very much about it.
And back to the comment about how one person can't do it--
that's where I got a little bit thin.
Even though in structural engineering for things
that are fairly low, we have mapped the whole world
and we can tell you how hard the wind's going
to blow, or the worst thing we can
happen in the region, and things like that.
Nobody knows, really, what's going
to happen in the jet stream.
And so that was kind of the main thing,
and sort of where we've gotten to.
We did have a model of it, and the designs
were predicated on that basis.
But it's a pretty limited model.
NEAL STEPHENSON: Yeah, there's an interesting problem
you get into with-- what's the granularity away
at which you're sampling the winds.
The data that you can get tends to average over both time
and space, and so you can find a data point
saying that the maximum wind at a certain height
at a certain time of year is such-and-such meters
per second.
But that doesn't tell you anything
about bursts that may occur over a short span of time;
about how it may change dynamically and perhaps get
oscillations happening within the structure.
It tends not to cover vertical movement at all.
And it doesn't cover small cells within the larger structure,
where you may have kind of anomalous conditions.
So the problem begins to turn into a really interesting
problem of: how do you-- first of all,
just how do you get the data?
What would you have to do in order
to obtain enough data about the wind,
to find enough level of spatial and temporal granularity,
to actually be able to build a legit model
of a tower this tall.
And it turns out that we're nowhere near
having the kind of data that we really need for that.
So that's kind of an interesting problem
for potential future exploration.
You can imagine sending up-- you can
imagine sending up small gliders that would just
fly around and gather data.
You can imagine a program using balloons.
Right now, the way we do it is that in about 100 places
in the country, twice a day, they
send up a helium balloon with a sonde on it,
and it records some data as it goes up
and then it falls down again.
So that's the granularity we've got now.
And you can imagine how far that is
from what we would need to actually model this.
So one of the directions that we went
was to think in terms of actually using
the forces of aerodynamic lift in our favor.
The idea being that if all you're doing
is pushing back against the wind with the downwind leg
of the structure, then it gets very heavy, very fast.
And so why not have some lift-generating surfaces
that you could deploy on whichever side happens
to be downwind at the moment that
would use the force of the wind that's trying to knock
the tower over to lift up on that side.
And then of course you get into further discussions of how
quick would that control service have
to respond to changes in the weather,
and so on and so forth.
KEITH HJELMSTAD: And that was actually
kind of a new idea in my field of structural engineering.
Because ordinarily we don't build high enough
and you couldn't make enough use of it
where that would be a factor.
And so this is kind of a-- it's a new concept.
Whether this actually would work or not.
Probably we need to sharpen our pencils a little bit
and figure out a few more things.
But one of the things that's true about the tower-- it's
infrastructure in search of a place to be.
And one of the things that we talked about a fair amount
was where should you site it?
Could you get it out of the path of the jet stream?
And if you did, would you wind up
in a politically unstable part of the world,
like the equatorial regions and things like that?
The other part, which I think is harder
to wrap your mind around, is if you build such a thing
it's going to be there for a very, very long time.
And it has to stand up to absolutely everything that
comes its way for all of that time.
You can't have a burst, then it's like, oh,
we dodged that one.
Mother Nature doesn't ever let you dodge any hazard.
And so thinking about how many years-- a hundred years,
a thousand years-- it's a pretty big investment.
And so it's got to endure all of that.
NEAL STEPHENSON: You want to talk a little bit
about the sort of genetic algorithm stuff you've
got running now, and some of the counter-intuitive
results that you've been seeing from that?
KEITH HJELMSTAD: Yeah, so the design problem
is kind of unprecedented.
And then the question comes up, "What
shape should the tower be?
What should it look like?"
And this was kind of an intriguing thing for me
as well, because we do we train new engineers
but we kind of train them to fall
in the footsteps of everything that's been done.
And the creative process needs to come out somewhere.
And here's a case where we actually
don't know what would be the best shape of this thing.
And it's one of very few structures
that we're really worried about keeping the weight down.
Usually you welcome more weight, because it anchors things.
But this is-- weight's quite a premium.
And so my initial thoughts were: You make it tapered
so it's narrow in the jet stream and broad at the bottom
so it's stable and doesn't want to tip over.
But we've recently done some modeling with shape
optimization, using genetic algorithms,
and we're getting some very interesting results.
Because of that, we envision the design of the tower
as being in sort of this hyperbolic paraboloid shape.
But in order to tie all of that together,
this thing covers about 11 square miles.
All the members have to work together,
so you tie it together with big ring-like structures
at the bottom because the angle of the legs
are starting to splay out a little bit.
They put pretty intense compression into the ring,
and that's unfavorable from a structural engineering design
point of view.
And so the genetic algorithm is starting
to tell us that wouldn't actually
be the best shape, in that it's trying to find a shape that
doesn't cause that unfavorable compression,
working a little bit more toward a tension structure.
And I, frankly, I did not see that coming.
And I have a graduate student who's
been trying to convince me of this for some time,
and the arguments are getting better and better.
ED FINN: So, I think, Keith, you already
answered my next question, which is,
what has this collaboration changed
for you in your own professional practice?
And we've already heard a little bit about your students
and how radically different this problem is
from other problems that are set for undergrad and graduate
engineers.
But Neal, do you want to talk for just a minute as we wrap
up about what was different about this from a writing
perspective, from other projects that you've done?
NEAL STEPHENSON: Well, just whenever
you're writing hard SF, you're typically kind of on your own
in terms of trying to sweat the technical details.
And so sometimes you've got people
you can reach out to who can give advice on that front,
but it frequently is somewhat elicit-- a back room
kind of process.
Because it's, in a sense-- and Kathryn can actually
speak to this a little bit-- it's risky.
It's a career risk to be, say, a junior faculty member who
gets cited by a science fiction writer.
And so here was a case where I had access
to Keith, who was exactly the right guide
to be thinking about this.
And it was OK for him to do it.
It was being directly encouraged by the president
of the university.
And so as you'll see if you read the anthology,
that's a pattern that we tried-- not
"we," but the people that actually
put the book together-- tried to replicate in giving some
of the other writers access as they needed it to people who
could help them with the technical content
of their stories.
So I think that's kind of a new and good thing,
and something that may yield interesting results if we
can keep it going in the future.
ED FINN: So thank you both.
I'm sorry that we have to keep things so short today.
But let me turn things over to my co-editor for the volume,
Kathryn Cramer, and she'll talk a little bit
about this from a science fiction perspective.
And then we'll have a couple of other collaborators come up
to speak as well.
KATHRYN CRAMER: In July of 2011, Neal
asked me whether I was interested in editing
a book like this.
And so here we are three years later.
It took us only three years to do this.
So what Ed asked me to do was to talk about, "Why
optimistic science fiction?"
And this sort of got-- as I was working on it in the wee hours
last night-- it also got a different title, which
is "Why Hieroglyph Is A Verb."
In the 1920s, Hugo Gernsback named our genre "science
fiction."
And he described it as an engaging narrative
that had science and scientific content, and also
visionary prophecies.
And ever since he named it-- in fact,
about the whole time since he named it--
there has been, to some extent, a debate over optimism
versus pessimism in science fiction.
And over that time, many different binary oppositions
have come into play in the discussion.
And I made a list of a bunch of them:
Golden Age SF versus the New Wave.
American SF versus British SF.
Science fiction versus speculative fiction.
Cynics versus Pollyannas-- which comes up
a lot when we talk about the concept of Hieroglyph,
by the way.
Happy endings versus downers.
Sympathetic characters versus unsympathetic.
Ideas-driven stories versus character-driven.
Clear journalistic prose as opposed
to stylistic sophistication.
Populism versus the literary.
Realism versus the fantastic.
And Benford's phrase, "Playing with the net up,"
rather than fanciful fabulation.
Free will versus predestination.
Militarism versus pacifism-- which specifically
comes to bear on the Star Wars defense system;
there was a group of science fiction editors-- hard
SF writers-- who were in favor of it,
and then another group of hard SF writers
that were opposed to it.
Utopia versus dystopia.
Activism vs learned helplessness.
The influence of Henry James versus the influence
of H.G. Wells.
Genre fiction versus stuff supposedly so good
that it's not SF.
What is, contrasted to what could be.
Now that last pair is the one that's
most important to Hieroglyph A lot of them
bear, in one way or another, on the specific stories
in the book, and there's a lot of stories
where you could say, "Well, this is hard SF,"
or, "This belongs in Hieroglyph because of this,
but doesn't meet that criteria."
But where we really live with Hieroglyph
is in the gap between what is and what could be.
Our future is full of possibilities,
and Hieroglyph invites you to explore them.
While as editors, Ed and I want you
to have the best possible time reading our book
and it really enjoy your reading experience, what we really
care about is not so much how you feel as what you do.
In the Gernsback tradition-- in the Gernsbackian tradition,
Hieroglyph is a visionary book.
But Hieroglyph's goal is not so much to predict the future
as to inspire.
To engage writers and scientists,
engineers, and other creative thinkers,
with science and technology's utopian potential.
The future doesn't just happen.
Moment by moment, we invent it.
Some of us invent futures for a living.
And I think it's-- on the one hand,
there's us from the science fiction field,
and those of you from Google who are inventing the future
and a whole different way, which--
I kind of enjoy that moment right now.
But if we don't invent the futures
we want to live in, who will do it for us?
Ursula Le Guin said, "Great artists make the roads."
There are precursors to Hieroglyph
that I feel we should acknowledge.
And this also, by the way, could function
as a recommended reading list for what else
to read other than our lovely book that's
in the back of the room.
Geoff Ryman's anthology, "When It Changed."
Ryman believes that science fiction writers should
rely less on what's called "rubber science"
and he put scientists together with his writers.
Jetse de Vries did an anthology of optimistic science fiction
called "Shine" in 2010.
And then, I'm not sure if you guys
have a subscription to "Nature" here, but now the futures
column in "Nature," founded by Henry Gee.
I've published three stories in it,
and in general it's a terrific series.
And just by coincidence, "Natures 2,"
their second collection, also came out yesterday, in addition
to Hieroglyph.
And then MIT's "Technology Review"
occasionally publishes SF.
And then there's SF short stories sponsored by Intel,
and a program run by Brian David Johnson.
And another precursor to Hieroglyph
is the design fiction movement with which
Bruce Sterling is associated.
And while we were doing this anthology,
Gregory Benford, who's in our book,
was also doing an anthology called "Starship Century,"
which focused on space travel.
That was sort of edited in parallel,
and there is a certain amount of overlap and content
in both stories and, I think, at least one illustration.
And then there is the discipline of Foresight Studies, which
both Madeline Ashby and Karl Schroeder studied
in graduate school.
And then of course there are the individual authors,
such as Kim Stanley Robinson, who've
been writing this way all along, without needing
us to tell them to do it.
In 1978, when I was in high school, my father, John Cramer,
became a science columnist for his favorite science fiction
magazine, "Analog," which was formally known as "Astounding"
when it was edited by John W. Campbell.
"Astounding" was the flagship magazine of Golden Age science
fiction.
And by the way, when Neal was invoking Heinlein, Clark,
and Asimov-- the sort of Holy Trinity of hard SF,
we're talking Golden Age AF.
When my dad was an undergraduate at Rice,
he submitted his first attempt at stories to Campbell.
And this was very meaningful to him
later, when he was nominated for a John W. Campbell
Award for his hard science fiction novel, "Twistor."
And when I became a science fiction editor in the 1980s,
that was the job I wanted.
But unfortunately for me, Stan Schmidt
retained that job from the 1970s up until two years ago.
He only just retired.
So instead, I edited about 30 anthologies,
including two hard SF anthologies,
"The Ascent of Wonder" and "The Hard SF Renaissance."
In August of 1967, my parents through a farewell party
for a man who was leaving Seattle to go to Mars.
Yes, Mars.
I remember the condensation on the glasses of the adults' gin
and tonics, how the condensation bent the light.
And him leaning against the dishwasher,
talking about training to become an astronaut.
I was five years old.
Joe Allen was leaving the University of Washington
nuclear physics laboratory, where
he was a postdoc, to join NASA as one of the first scientist
astronauts.
There would be Apollo missions, which
would be followed by laboratories on the moon,
and then there was to be a mission to Mars.
You know he never got there.
Nor did he get his lunar laboratories.
But he did get to space.
We are asking science fiction to change.
We are asking for a science fiction that
won't hang back and talk to itself,
but instead will leap at the opportunity
to change the world in the future.
Like all writers who come here, we want you to read our book,
and we want you to tell your friends and even your enemies.
But we also want more of you.
We want you to participate in the Hieroglyph community
and imagine better futures.
We want you to think about infrastructure.
Which is, I think, by the way, what
this book is fundamentally about.
Hal Clement, when asked why his stories lacked villains,
replied that the Universe was antagonist enough.
Think long term.
Think survival, not just for us as individuals,
but for humanity as a species and for the species that
are on this Earth with us.
We are on the surface of a planet right now.
And astronomy teaches us how rare and precious
is this Earth.
Let us learn how to remain.
Our book is the beginning of a project, not the end.
We want to do more books, but also we
aim to broaden the project to reach many more people.
We would like to work further with NASA.
We would like to work on subject areas such as climate
change, sustainability, genomics.
We would like to expand to novels, graphic novels, TV
and film, while at the same time producing tangible research
results.
We hope for your help and your support.
Hieroglyph isn't just a book; it's a project.
It's not just a project; it's a process.
And I will go so far as to say, for me,
Hieroglyph has become a verb.
"To hieroglyph": to refine an idea such that
it becomes an icon in a language for solving problems most
in need of solutions.
And I'll repeat that, since it's a little complicated.
To refine an idea such that it becomes
an icon in a language for solving problems most
in need of solutions.
This is what Neal Stephenson does exceptionally well.
It's why you all came here.
You can do it too.
Let us all go forth and hieroglyph.
Thank you.
And now, I will introduce two of our authors.
Rudy Rucker here [AUDIO OUT] short story in 1987.
He's a science fiction, author, philosopher, mathematician,
one of the founders of the cyberpunk--
this is dropping in and out.
Is it going to stay if I talk?
OK-- one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement.
He worked for 20 years as a computer science professor
at San Jose State University and has
published a number of software packages.
His novels include "Turing and Burroughs,"
"Jim and the Flims," and "The Big AHA,"
as well as "The Wetware Tetralogy"
and a four-book cyberpunk series that won two Philip K. Dick
Awards.
Our other author who's going to join us
is Annalee Newitz, who writes about science,
pop culture, and the future.
She is the editor-in-chief of "io9," a publication which
covers science and science fiction.
She is the author of the book "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember."
Is that one book or two? "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember"
is one book?
ANNALEE NEWITZ: All one book.
KATHRYN CRAMER: It's all one book, "Scatter, Adapt,
and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
and Pretend We're Dead."
Oh, no!
ANNALEE NEWITZ: "Pretend We're Dead" is a separate book.
KATHRYN CRAMER: It's not quite all--
there's one-- there's an "and" that's not in italics.
I You fooled me!
ANNALEE NEWITZ: One's about surviving, one's about dying.
KATHRYN CRAMER: OK the other book is "Pretend We're Dead:
Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture."
And she's the co-editor of "She's Such a Geek."
Formerly, she was a policy analyst for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and a lecturer
at the University of California-Berkeley,
where she received a Ph.D. in English and American Studies.
RUDY RUCKER: Hi.
I recently was reading a novel by Charles Stross,
he's one of my favorite science fiction writers,
and he was talking about a guy who
says he has Impostor Syndrome.
And I'd never heard that phrase before, and I looked it up.
And it's something that some well-known people have.
They feel like they're faking.
So I taught software engineering at San Jose State for 20 years
and I don't know anything about programming.
I was faking.
And I've published 20 novels, and I don't know how to write.
I've been faking.
And I'm in the Hieroglyph anthology,
and I'm faking because I'm not making
any constructive suggestions about the future.
I thought I would come up with one specific idea
that, actually, you could implement
using Google's technology.
It would be pretty easy.
It's something I call the lifebox.
And this is an idea I've been talking
about for 20 or 30 years.
Recently some people have tried to commercialize it.
And the idea is fairly simple.
You'd like to have something like a website that
would simulate you, sort of like something
that passes the Turing Test.
So if somebody wanted to talk to me, they'd go to this site
and they would ask questions and the program would answer them.
And it would basically feel as if they were talking to me.
And I realize there's a pretty easy way to fake it.
I have a page called "Rudy's Lifebox."
If you root around on my blog, you can find it:
rudyrucker.com/blog.
And then there's Rudy's hyphen lifebox.
And you can restrict Google Search so it only
searches one website, so it just searches all the files
that are on rudyrucker.com.
And I have a lot of things up there.
I posted a lot of books, a lot of notes.
And one thing I found with the links that you get from that,
if you put up a PDF, it isn't really good,
because-- I don't know why it is, something about Google
versus Adobe or something-- when they return you a link to a PDF
document, it's just a link to the document
and it's not a link down into the site in the document.
So it's slow.
It's not a good interface.
So because of that I've been going
to the trouble of posting things like-- whenever I write
a novel, I post a book-length bunch
of notes about how I wrote the novel.
While I'm writing a novel, I write the notes
so then when I don't want to write, I can write the notes.
And then when I'm done, I put the notes up,
and nowadays I put them up as big web pages
so that you can search into them.
And so that's-- really, you don't need the AI.
You can fake AI if you have enough data.
That's the whole thing.
If you have maybe 10,000 pages that somebody's written,
you can always find the right thing in there.
I think they tried doing this with the fake Phil Dick head
that they made, that they lost on the airplane.
And they had-- it would search through his works
and find phrases.
And I think this could work pretty well.
It'd be a good product.
People would like it.
And there are some sleazebags trying
to monetize this product.
I call them sleazebags because they
don't mention that I had the idea first.
But I don't care enough about it to try to monetize it,
so I'm giving you this.
OK, so that's all I have for right now.
KATHRYN CRAMER: Annalee?
ANNALEE NEWITZ: OK, so, I have some biotechnology here,
by the way.
This is not actually not technology.
I just want to note that about paper.
So my idea for the book, for Hieroglyph,
came out of the book that I published last year,
"Scatter, Adapt, and Remember," which is pretty optimistic
because I talk about humans surviving a mass extinction,
which people seemed to think was radically optimistic
that we would make it through.
And one of the solutions that I proposed,
and that lots of the scientists and engineers I
talked to proposed, was that we'll
survive by creating more sustainable cities.
Bigger, more high-tech, but more sustainable.
So the interesting thing about thinking
about these future cities that would be sustainable
is that, I think when most of us imagine
awesome cities of the future, we picture something
like a city that's like an Apple watch or something
out of Tron Legacy.
Right?
Like curves, and shiny and clean and chrome.
Something with soaring towers.
I actually think that's possible.
But it's also possible that a city of the future that
was sustainable would look like a very ancient city.
So let me give you an example.
Let's talk about St. Louis, because St. Louis
is interesting for a lot of reasons.
For one, its industries are highly
dependent on fossil fuel.
It's a coal-based economy there.
And also, St. Louis is located right across the river
from an ancient city.
It's about 1,000 years old.
It had about 30,000 people that live there
for several hundred years.
And what dominated the horizon of the city-- which
is called Cahokia now, and you can actually
see some of the remains of that city
that weren't knocked down for the freeway-- the city was
dominated by these huge earthen pyramids.
Enormous!
Basically like the pyramids in Egypt,
but made from hard-packed earth.
And so it's my proposal that we think
about that as a kind of a model for how
a city might look in the future.
And I have one magic word for you
about how it's all going to happen.
And that word is "cyanobacteria."
So if you're a scientist, you might call a cyano
if you're working with it.
You might know it as blue-green algae,
and you've seen it all over the place.
It's a model organism that's used a lot in synthetic biology
because we understand a lot of the metabolic pathways.
We understand a lot of the genetic pathways that run it.
And there's actually a lab in St. Louis, run
by a guy named Himadi Pakrasi, that's figured out
a way to tweak the genome of a certain strain of cyano
to produce a lot more hydrogen than it had been.
And this could be used, putatively, for hydrogen fuel.
And so I think that a future that's-- I think that we could
start thinking about a future where instead of investing
in new ways to suck fossil fuels out of the planet,
we start thinking about ways we could use synthetic biology
to alter microorganisms to produce fuel.
And I think that might be-- that killer app, killer
biological app-- might be the way we'd kind of get over
the hump in terms of bringing synthetic biology
into our cities as something that we could
use not just for making fuel, which is awesome,
but also for building with.
So instead of living in houses and buildings
that are made of dead materials like dead trees;
if you're building anything with calcium,
calcium carbonate in it, of course,
you're building with dead bodies.
And so these are dead structures.
But what if we were building out of living structures?
What if we altered plants to do things like filter our air?
Filter our water?
What if we grew cyano not just for energy production,
but to produce other kinds of chemicals as well.
And of course there's all kinds of labs around the country
right now where this stuff is going on.
Where we're altering things like yeast and other microorganisms
to produce chemicals that now are
produced through messy industrial processes.
So the synthetic biology city.
Let's just imagine for minute that mound
that I was talking about.
So you're going into St. Louis.
You're going to work at Google St. Louis let's pretend that
exists.
Does that exist?
I don't know.
Anyway, so, you see this huge mound,
which is basically the equivalent
of a skyscraper in the city.
So first of all, because it's this mound and you've got,
say, shops in it, you have offices, you have living areas.
So it's already well insulated, right?
Because you've got the perfect earthen mound,
so it's going to be cool in the summer and warmer
in the winter.
It's shot through with all kinds of tunnels
that are for bringing in fresh air, which of course is being
filtered by microorganisms.
You've got ways of bringing water into the structure
so that you don't have this problem where you're keeping
water out of the structure and therefore you
get all this water runoff, which is
one of our big problems with ocean acidification,
among other things.
And this mound is covered in plants.
All these biologically altered plants
that might be part of the building's filtration systems
and part of its metabolism.
And so part of what we're thinking about here
is: What would a city be like if it functioned exactly
like, or very similar to, the ecosystem around the city
itself?
The city is becoming its own ecosystem.
A genetically modified ecosystem,
but one that's diverse and in balance
with the life around it.
So say you're coming into work and you see this building.
One of the other things you might see on this mound
is that it's not smooth.
I mean, we've already said it's covered in plants,
it's covered in some grasses that help with water runoff.
But it's also covered in a lot of pock marks and scars.
This doesn't look like the shiny Tron Legacy future
that you might imagine.
And the reason why it looks like that
is because this is a structure that's
being repaired constantly, using bacteria.
So say it develops a crack, or there's
some kind of other structural damage.
You might use a form of bacteria to repair that crack.
The bacteria would go in, replicate,
extrude some kind of glue, and harden into concrete.
And if you sat down at your computer in this building,
which would probably be made with virus shells-- modified
viruses producing shells that produce a computer
monitor for you-- that's, by the way, being done in a lab right
now at MIT-- you might look out the window of your nice office
in this mound, and see something really extraordinary.
Somebody in that future, in this synthetic biology future,
will have taken Stewart Brand's advice
and de-extincted mastodons.
To bring them in to eat grass and to stomp on the roads
to keep the dust down, and maybe trim the bushes.
And all of that, this future where
you have a sustainable building that functions
like an ecosystem, and mastodons outside, will come from a world
where a simple tweak to cyanobacteria
might usher in a future shaped by synthetic biology.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: So this is great, and thanks
for doing this and coming here.
Imma let you finish and all, but I just
wanted to say in a contrary vein,
as a field don't stop doing the pessimistic stuff.
Because I think as engineers our failure mode
is we're too optimistic, and we need somebody
to write the unit tests that we have to pass.
Right?
So I want to know if I'm making a program, what
are all the ways it can go wrong?
I'm not good at thinking of them, but you guys are.
So keep doing that too.
NEAL STEPHENSON: Thanks.
Thanks, Peter.
Kathryn can actually talk to this a little bit,
but I'll say that there's more-- but when
I saw the stories they came out I
was pleased by how much bad was in them.
People didn't go too far in the optimistic direction.
And indeed, my story about the tower enlivened
by a giant lightning bolt strike from a thing
called an upward super-bolt that kills somebody.
So I think the dystopian thing has gone too deep into our DNA
at this point ever to go away.
KATHRYN CRAMER: Yeah.
A touchstone phrase of mine when we were editing the book
is that one wouldn't want to write in an airplane that
had been designed by somebody who had never thought
of the possibility that planes crash.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So I had a question.
You were talking about a very biosynthetic future.
Have you heard anything more recent
about, say, cultured meat, or anything?
Does that come through any of the stories in Hieroglyph?
ANNALEE NEWITZ: I can't speak to other stories.
NEAL STEPHENSON: I don't think we have any meat stories.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: No meat stories.
We also don't have an artificial womb so, what the hell?
But what I will say is that I think
any kind of utopian vision that includes synthetic biology has
to include some kind of synthetic meat.
Tissue-engineered meat.
I love to think about it.
In my story I do talk about a warehouse
where they're growing sort of sheets of meat.
And I think that's-- I mean, it's not just humane,
but it's also a better way to not perturb the carbon cycle.
Because, I mean, frankly, there's
less farting if you have sheets of meat.
Right?
Like it's going to be a better, more sustainable system.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, no, I definitely really
like those properties of it.
It's not cruel.
It's not--
ANNALEE NEWITZ: One day it will be tasty.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: But then you start getting
into problems where it's a monoculture.
You've got this whole sheet, but it's all
weak to the same bacteria or virus.
RUDY RUCKER: I have quite a bit about artificial biology
in my story in there, "Quantum Telepathy."
And that's something that's always interested me.
That we could eventually get rid of all the machines
that we have.
I mean, it would be more natural to have everything be alive.
We used to talk about nanotechnology a lot,
and really biology is the nanotechnology
we've already got.
We've really just haven't even scratched
the surface of what we can do.
Speaking of cultured meat, in my novel "Freeward,"
there's a woman-- and I think she's a senator--
and she produces meat made from her own cells.
It's called "Wendy meat."
She's very popular.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: But I just want to add that I think that as we
think about these features we do have to think about how do we
introduce diversity into our manufactured .
Biology because diversity is what's key to any ecosystem,
so ecosystem engineering has to include a focus on that.
So that you won't have all your meat getting the same disease,
or all your cyanobacteria coming down with some kind of rot.
ED FINN: And of course this is a problem
with industrial agriculture now, right?
We have fewer and fewer species of that plants and animals
that we're relying on to mass produce things.
KATHRYN CRAMER: Actually, I want to point your attention
towards an essay that was posted on the Hieroglyph website
a couple of days ago.
I don't remember exactly the title of it,
but it was the solar punk manifesto
that dealt was the some of the issues in terms
of small-scale infrastructure as a form of resistance
to large-scale infrastructure.
And I think in that framework, diversity in biology
is a key issue.
AUDIENCE: So I was curious about the genesis of the project.
You mentioned that there was a conversation about us
as a society not thinking big anymore.
And it made me think that I feel like around here there
are a lot of people who are thinking big,
but our society has sort of-- we've sort of tied ourselves up
in knots.
So, like, your super-tall tower idea sounds amazing,
but around here it's illegal to build tall buildings.
We have the anti-invention of the high limit to deal with.
So I'm curious why you think the problem is that nobody
has designed the 20-kilometer tower yet, when we can't even
build a 100-story building around here.
NEAL STEPHENSON: I actually don't think that anymore.
I actually-- since we started this project,
my thinking has been going in the direction of, "What
actually is the scarce resource?"
And my first inclination was to believe
that the scarce resource was clever ideas, because I think
of myself as a clever idea kind of guy,
and how flattering it is to think
that I'm what the world needs.
But it turns out that just probably within this room,
there's enough clever ideas to absorb
the gross national product of the United States
for a number of years in R&D.
So the scarce resource turns out to be
the sort of intangible things that we need within a society
to mobilize capital and to get these things
actually moving forward.
And that then turns into an interesting conversation about,
is it regulation?
Is it the legal environment?
Is it something to do with how capitalists
assess risk versus reward?
I wish I could give you a pat answer,
but I bet Rudy's got one.
RUDY RUCKER: Well, nature.
You can always look at what nature does.
There's lots of things competing.
And I certainly agree that we don't want monoculture
with crops.
It's just lots of seething things.
And people worry if you do artificial biology,
there will be some creature you make
that's going to be like this super,
super-slime that's going to eat everything.
But you need to keep in mind that every living
creature on earth has been working
to the very limits of its capability for a billion years
to try to dominate earth.
So it's not that they are not already trying to do it,
but they keep each other in check.
It's not like we're going to do something better
just because we're scientists.
We'll work on something for a week
and we're not going to-- so I think
that we can count on the evolution of nature,
but how to take over politics, I don't know.
I have to ask, as long as I'm here, how many of you
have read "The Circle," by David Eggers?
Not too many people, yeah.
It's sort of a "1984" take on Google.
It's a real page-turner.
Makes you think twice.
But enough said.
[LAUGHTER]
NEAL STEPHENSON: One of the stories
in Hieroglyph, by Karl Schroeder,
actually is about politics.
So he actually went there and addressed the topic
of how might the way that we prosecute politics
change in the future, as a way of actually enabling
it to get things done that we're not getting done now.
ED FINN: Yeah.
Another way of addressing what you guys are talking about
is that this is about frame narratives.
Right?
You can spend all the time in the world having
the battle with the City Council about how tall you
can build stuff.
But if you can come up with a new story that's compelling,
and if the people have a different understanding of what
a building is or what we might do with it.
What if a building is a city?
What if a building is an elevator into space?
Right?
ANNALEE NEWITZ: What if it's a living organism?
ED FINN: What if it's alive?
Yeah.
Well, what if it's a kite?
Then that changes-- you know, learning
to see the frame narrative and figuring out ways
you can change that framing narrative,
that's how you overcome these other problems.
It's a little bit like getting a job in a very specific field.
If you if you keep playing the game by the rules,
you're never going to win the game.
You have to learn how to move the goalposts.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: The good news is politics are always changing.
We think that there's this sort of static narrative
of the bad guys always win, or the powerful people always
crush the powerless people.
But it's not always true.
Things change a lot.
Things have changed a lot just in the past 10 years
that we've seen.
So we can intervene, and things will change.
And so maybe one day, San Francisco
will be a high-density city with tall buildings.
Wouldn't that be nice?
KATHRYN CRAMER: And I should say, on our way here
we saw several large signs that said "Neal for City Council."
So maybe he'll change things.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: As kind of a follow up to the last question,
the sort of canonical example of the last really big, crazy
thing we did was the Apollo program.
That kind of the early '70s, which
coincides with the beginning of the great divergence
and the beginning of the fall of the public's trust
in government.
NEAL STEPHENSON: What's the great divergence?
AUDIENCE: Oh, pardon me.
Between around-- from about the time of the New Deal
until around the 1970s, rising tide really did lift all boats.
Everyone's incomes kind of got closer.
Poor people were better off.
After the 1970s, the gains accrued to the very, very few.
Including the people in this room,
but not very much below here.
So do you see the causality going--
the being interested in doing big things going hand
in hand with her failures a policy and loss of faith?
Which direction you see the causality going in?
NEAL STEPHENSON: Well that's kind
of how this the conversation started,
as a sort of conversation between me
and Crow about which direction the causality arrow pointed.
So I'm not going to tell you that I know what the answer is.
This is one of those "when you have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail" kind of conversations.
So the thing that I've been kind of officially
certified by my civilization as being qualified to do
is to write science fiction.
And so if I'm given an opportunity to do that,
and a university president is telling me
that maybe it'll help, then I'm there.
I'm a happy guy.
I don't know whether-- so, part of what
we're trying to figure out is whether that actually
does have any useful causal effect.
KATHRYN CRAMER: One thing that was interesting about how
the book turned out is-- I mean, there's
the themes we asked for, and then
there was what's common in the stories
we're actually publishing.
And one of the surprise themes of the book is empathy.
There's a lot of stories that are engaged with empathy,
both just sort of thematically, but also in some ways
as a technological problem.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: But also, I just want to add in direct response
to that question, what happens when you have extreme class
divisions in a culture and the middle class is disappearing?
Which has already happened in other parts of the world.
So we're just-- the US is kind of catching up.
That means that fewer and fewer people are allowed
to be authorized, like Neal, to have ideas and participate
in making decisions about what a nation will do next,
or what a university will fund next,
or what a pharmaceutical company will fund next.
And the more homogeneous that group gets,
and the more we exclude people from it,
the fewer and fewer ideas we get.
Because of course, ideas-- we were just
talking about diversity in nature,
and I think the best ideas come from diversity in humans too.
It's just good sense.
And so I think if there is-- I also
think there's no simple causal explanation.
I think that would be silly.
I wish there were.
But I do think that there's a correlation
between a difficulty in coming up
with big ideas and a culture that's strongly class-divided.
RUDY RUCKER: I have one more thing to say about that.
One of the other paradigms, besides getting the public
to chip in a very large amount of money to make a giant tower,
or to map the genome, or to build a highway network,
is more of the indie, do-it-yourself ethic.
It's the old punk thing of turning your back
on the authorities and doing it yourself.
And that was sort of-- that was one
of the elements of cyberpunk, is the concept
that you can have these off-the-grid sorts of people.
Like Blank Reg in "Max Headroom."
And they're doing it and make it happen in their own ways.
That's something Cory Doctorow has
been writing a lot in his recent books, like "Pirate Cinema."
And I think there's some hope with that.
This said, to make a really massive, key technical
scientific breakthrough, it's not clear
that Santa Cruz stoners can do that in their kitchen.
[LAUGHTER] Maybe they can.
Let them try.
NEAL STEPHENSON: So I'll just try
to quickly say there's sort of three general ways-- paradigms
for organizing a bunch of geeks-- that I think of.
And one is the hacker, edge-dwelling kind of people,
exemplified maybe by Linux.
One is the kind of Stalinist government-funded program.
And one is the big company doing it.
One of the interesting things, to me,
about the results of the Hieroglyph experiment
was that there wasn't a lot of the third thing.
There wasn't even a lot of the second thing.
So there was a still a pretty strong reliance on the outsider
hacker-type self-organizing to make stuff.
I thought it was interesting that it seemed
to reflect a kind of lack of vision,
or lack of faith in the ability of big institutions--
be they governments or companies-- to actually
mobilize engineers and get things done.
Which I think is funny, because that's actually
where engineers are employed and do things.
But seen from the outside, there seems
to be a lack of faith or optimism
about the ability of big companies to do stuff.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: I have lots of municipal governments
in my story.
NEAL STEPHENSON: There you go.
ANNALEE NEWITZ: I have faith in the municipal government.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Actually, I want to kind of-- it's rather a specific question
about the tall tower idea.
I mean, in software we kind of are
taught to write code that kind of fails graciously.
So the question would be: How would the tall tower
fall graciously?
NEAL STEPHENSON: Keith's all over that!
KEITH HJELMSTAD: It wouldn't.
There would be a massive catastrophe.
There's no such thing as a large structure falling gracefully.
AUDIENCE: That's an excuse.
You know that, right?
It will fall.
But how do you make it fall graciously?
KEITH HJELMSTAD: It won't fall.
Ever.
[LAUGHTER] After the Earth has banished all species,
there it will be standing.
NEAL STEPHENSON: In the story, just
to avoid worrying about it, I stipulate that downwind of it
there's a big thing that's literally
called "the swath," which-- the billionaire who makes it just
buys all of that land.
And so the way he shuts people up
when they're worrying that the tower's going to fall over,
is that he says, "If it starts to fall,
we'll just dynamite all of the legs on that side,
and the entire tower will just fall like a tree
down the swath, and we'll keep the swath
empty in the meantime, to minimize the fallout."
But that's me.
That's not a legitimate engineering contribution.
AUDIENCE: One thing I've enjoyed,
slash, struggled with in Neal's writing
a lot is that it's really hard to remember what he's making up
and what is factual.
And that delight and frustrates me.
And I'm wondering, how in this anthology
did you-- did the writers manage to walk that line so
closely, where you have to keep track-- wait!
Did I read about that in a novel or a science journal?
NEAL STEPHENSON: Well, that sounds
like what Rudy's been working on with his notes,
his ongoing note-keeping system.
I'm terrible at that.
RUDY RUCKER: I do like to have a coherent theory.
That's one sort of-- you might say
that's one difference between science fiction and fantasy,
is fantasy you're not required to have a coherent underlying
theory of why the events happened.
They're just there.
It's sort of like X-Files.
It's strange!
What if?!
But if you're writing something that's more like hard science
fiction, then you make up-- like, somebody
use the word, "rubber science," or-- that's
a bit denigrating-- nonstandard science.
You add on some extra principles.
I got my Ph.D. in mathematical logics, and as I said,
I taught programming for 20 years.
So I like the idea of having a logical system
and either deducing things or-- it's
like if you have a program, you look at the outputs.
So I like whatever I'm doing in the story
to have an underlying theory.
And I don't actually start with a theory and work out.
I start with the effects I want to see.
I want to see something really cool, like a tower.
And then I want to see people flying.
And I want people to have telepathy with each other.
Then I say, OK, so how are we going to make this happen?
And that's-- the technical term for what you're looking for is
what's called a "bogosity generator."
So you get your bogosity generator, but you make logic.
You build it solid.
You don't just throw together some woo-woo crap.
You've got something-- you make up whatever.
Dark energy is great. you know?
[LAUGHTER] 90% of the universe is dark energy.
That sort of tells you something, doesn't it?
90% of the universe is bullshit!
So it's all about keeping a straight face
when you're writing the story.
You just pile it on and you keep a straight face.
ED FINN: One of the fun things about-- That was a good answer!
But one of the fun things about this project
is that it's not entirely clear whether some of these stories
are really science fiction at all anymore.
There's a story called, "Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA,"
which is about the near future of drones.
And it's not-- there's really nothing,
I think, in the story that's technically impossible now.
And obviously, certain people seem
to be quite interested in drones.
And Cory Doctorow's story for the anthology
also involves an area of research
that NASA and the European Space Agency has funded for, I think,
for several years on what I've recently learned
is called "in situ resource utilization."
What if, instead of carrying everything
you need to the moon, you can use all the resources
on the moon or on Mars?
Other destinations?
To 3D print, or otherwise fabricate the materials
that you need.
The most implausible stuff in Cory's story
is not that, I think.
It's about other social features of the near future society
and economic predictions about how expensive
it will be to launch stuff into space.
KATHRYN CRAMER: One thing about the organization
of Hieroglyph as a book, is there's
a lot more "showing your work" in it.
We have the authors write stuff about where
they got their ideas and how they work them out, and so on.
So in a usual science fiction anthology,
we try to hide all that stuff so that you just believe as much
of it as possible.
But because of the nature of this book,
we exposed a lot more than we otherwise would have.
NEAL STEPHENSON: That's actually sort of a Cramer family
tradition.
KATHRYN CRAMER: Yes!
NEAL STEPHENSON: In "Twistor," at the end,
he adds a little technical appendix
explaining the bogosity part.
He says, well, OK, it's all true up to page 93,
and then he gives a complete sort of physics
explanation of where he departed from something you could
put into a peer-reviewed journal.
MODERATOR: Last quick question.
NEAL STEPHENSON: OK.
AUDIENCE: So I've been told I need to keep this quick.
The thing most like near sci-fi that I've heard of recently
is Bitcoin.
It's kind of crazy.
And I was just hoping that you guys might
give an idea of-- is this a step on the way towards utopia
or dystopia?
Like, I can't--
RUDY RUCKER: Neal has a Bitcoin.
He showed it to me at lunch.
[LAUGHTER]
NEAL STEPHENSON: Someone gave me a Bitcoin.
ED FINN: Let me channel Karl Schroeder for a second,
since his story-- he actually got in touch with us
in the middle of production and said,
"I have to revise my story to include the block chain, which
is the central technology of Bitcoin.
It's something I've become quite interested in recently."
But basically, Karl is taking the lead
of people who are saying Bitcoin-- don't think
about Bitcoin as a system for currency.
Think about it as a system for democracy and authenticating
stuff through a peer-to-peer network.
And so he-- Neal already mentioned
that his narrative is about the political, potential political
impact of technology.
Could you solve consensus-based decision-making
if you just had better Wi-Fi and better interface
tools for getting people to understand issues and make
decisions about them?
And so he really wanted to make sure the block chain was part
of that, as another tool that you
would use to authenticate a consensus-based decision model.
So I'm not so sure, but Karl thinks it's utopian.
Thank you so much.
This was great.
[APPLAUSE]