30 November 1999

An engineer at a recent conference (in London, as a matter of fact) recommended a book, which he said bore an interesting resemblance to some of the themes I'd been preaching, no doubt. I wrote down the name of the book and its author on the back of one of my business cards, "After the Clockwork Universe" by S.J. Goerner. Within a few days of my return, one of my normal decompression activities is to catch up on any paperwork including books I've made note to purchase, so I set out to by the title.
My first stop was amazon.com. I was able to find an author by the name of Sally J. Goerner, who had written a book entitled "Chaos and the Evolving Ecological Universe," I figured I'd found my author, by no sign of the title I'd seen in London at that site. My next stop: barnsandnoble.com. Same results. I found Sally, but no title. If I hadn't seen the book myself in London, I might have given up the search. But I knew it existed. And I knew if it existed, I could find it on the web.
At length it dawned on me to try and find Sally J. Goerner herself and ask her. It was a long shot, but perhaps it would lead somewhere. I went to the yahoo people lookup site and entered her name. As luck would have it, the only Sally J. Goerner registered with yahoo had two phone numbers listed in North Carolina. It being a civil hour on the east coast, I deigned to dial and actually spoke with Sally J. Goerner about her work, her antecedent publication, and where I could source the title I sought (buy it at amazon.co.uk), which arrived via UPS within 72 hours of me placing the order.
When the book arrived, I reflected on the series of events leading to me holding my own copy in my hand. From my perspective, it began with a conversation at a technical conference in London. Using the net, I spoke with the author and ordered my own copy from a UK supplier, which arrived via a global carrier, quickly, easily and without unwarranted costs. How quickly memes can spread....

I finished Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time" in the past few days. It's a remarkable read which I highly recommend. One tidbit that caught my attention was this: Some years ago, scientists working for the U.S. government conducted a simple experiment. They sprayed harmless bacteria into the departure lounge of Washington National Airport. Hitching rides on the passengers and transferring onto others at their destinations, the bacteria spread from person to person. Within three weeks, they were to be found in nearly every part of the U.S. How quickly genes can spread...

In this past week I also came across a primer on nanotechnology which naturally made reference back to the primordial work on the topic, Drexler's "Engines of Creation." In Chapter 11 of that book, Drexler makes references to the "gray goo problem" inherent in any theoretical design of nanotechnology-based robots. One of the fundamental components of any useful nanotechnology system would be a nano-assembler: something that can make a copy of something (including itself) from available elemental material. The problem with creating such an assembler that creates a copy of itself is the possibility of an "out of control" scenario. Imagine an extremely tiny robot that could do only one thing very well: it could create a copy of itself from the mung around it, from atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, silicon, etc. Let's call our little machine a nanite. Given the material, because it does its work on such very small scales, it can duplicate itself very quickly, let's say about once every second. If only one of these little guys was set loose on the planet, within a little over 72 hours, the entire planet would be a homogenous gray goo made up of nothing but our nanites. Even the deep earth bacteria and cockroaches that would survive a nuclear extinction would not survive our nanite invasion. How quickly n-genes can spread...

There is only one more month left in the 1990s....Y2K is just around the corner, and the weather's getting chilly in Manhattan. It looks like winter might make it to the Big Apple after all this year, something which I think pleases the average New Yorker since we haven't seen winter for the past couple of years. It's almost like an old friend who's been away too long. It will be good to have some winter for the new Millennium celebrations. I hear we're going to call the next decade "the Naughties." It sounds aptly named in any event... :)