It's a hot Sunday morning in Manhattan -- the beginning of another hot week.  I'm not complaining about the weather.  Summers in Manhattan are traditionally uncomfortably warm -- it comes with the territory.  Quite the contrary, I love Manhattan and that means tolerating, at the very least, the hot summer months.  Global warming might be partially to blame, which means that summers in Manhattan will likely get even worse. But if you live in New York, you know that summer means hot, muggy days and equally uncomfortable evenings.  And this summer is no exception.

Rehearsals for my next film began this past week.  The shooting title for this next one is "Flesh and Blade."  It's based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled "The Birth-mark," about a scientist who marries a young woman, only to become obsessed with perfecting her, fixing her via the removal of a birth-mark on her cheek.  Naturally, all his science fails him as he only ends up killing his young bride in the end.  The story was written in 1843, and while the film will be a "period piece" in a sense, it will be shot in digital video using virtual sets, which is cutting edge film production technology.  The significantly lower costs of digital video should be a tremendous enabler for yet more independent film producers in the future.  It's exciting to be part of a project like this, which will focus on the artistic aspect of film as well as the technical and at the same time pay close attention to important themes of our age, which were eloquently foreshadowed by one of the foremost American writers of the last century.  Not only will this film be a commentary on how our drive to find perfection in our lives actually prevents us from finding true happiness, it is also speaks loudly of the unintended consequences of technology, a theme I am personally drawn to and cognizant of.

Obvious examples of such unintended consequences would be global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, and the Y2K problem. And there are others, I'm quite sure, that are not so obvious but just as serious.  What about the high cancer rates suffered in industrialized nations?  Or America's obesity problems?  Are these too the consequences of technologies which we don't yet completely understand?  What other unintended consequences await?

One news item that caught my eye this past week was published last Sunday in the London Times.  Evidently based on a letter written to Scientific American, the Times article entitled Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth talked about a new toy nearing completion at Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL) on Long Island near here.  The BNL has spent eight years building its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC); a recent successful test firing precedes the first nuclear collisions, which will take place this fall, building up to full power around the time of the millennium.  By sending gold ions around the 2.4 mile twin tubes at relativistic speeds (99.9% of the speed of light), the RHIC will allow physicists to study conditions thought to have not existed since the very early moments after the Big Bang, 12 to 15 billion years ago, when controlled ion collisions should give rise to minuscule fireballs of superdense matter with temperatures of about a trillion degrees.

So far, this is not all that interesting a bit of news.  What makes it interesting is the possibility -- slight though it may be -- that one of two very undesirable unintended consequences could occur when the collisions take place.  One slightly improbable though possible consequence would be the creation of "strangelets" or matter made of strange quarks.  This is not normal matter, and as such, will not behave like normal matter. Some physicists speculate that strangelets near normal matter might behave in a way as to "convert" normal matter into more strangelet matter, resulting in a chain reaction such as to destroy the earth by changing into a huge blob of strangelets, all very quickly.

And the second improbable, though possible consequence might be the creation of a very very small black hole.  But any black hole that close to the earth could effectively swallow the entire planet very quickly -- in the blink of an eye.  To their credit, the BNL are not simply dismissing the Times story outright.  They've published a response to the story, and claim to be proceeding with appropriate caution when it comes to the energy levels that will be used in their studies using the RHIC.

Whether it be man-made black holes, ozone holes, unholy weather, or Y2K bugs, we must always be aware of the sometimes unintended effects our magic can manifest.  In the words of Hawthorne, we cannot fail to "look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and living once and for all in Eternity, to find the perfect Future in the present."  Which is to say we can only find happiness by living in the now.  But we must never stop searching --- never.  It is our nature to learn, to wonder, to search, to dream, to investigate, to create, to produce -- this too is our heritage and our purpose.  And indeed, our hope.  Unintended consequences come with the territory.  We cannot escape that burden.  Most certainly, we must proceed with caution -- it would suck if a black hole swallowed the earth (no pun intended) -- but we must move forward.  In my view, the same arguments hold true for bioengineering of crops , cloning of human beings and, ubiquitous supercomputing capabilities -- all of these have unpredictable possible outcomes.  And all should be pursued in prudent earnest.  If there's hope for humanity, it's in software.  And hot summer day or not, I'm an eternal optimist.

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