Just Carbon Baby

what will I make today?

Just Carbon Baby is VERY EXCITING. Every living thing on earth is DIRECTED to its diversity by DNA. We've only known about it for about 75 years. We've been pushing the envelope with faster and faster computing systems now far exceeding the capacity of the human mind in terms of raw calculations. We are now at the dawn of harnessing DNA with our near unlimited compute capacity. Since DNA directs the building of carbon-based life, why not redirect our enormous hardware capacity to make things out of carbon and leverage the incredible accuracy of this wonderfully evolved process. The biological age and Human 2.0 are upon us!

Humankind spent centuries assuming the only forms of pure carbon were graphite and diamonds. It is a tribute to how we are often NOT VERY INQUISITIVE to have considered how this MAGICAL element carbon in its PURE form could simultaneously be soft enough to break while shading in a circle with a pencil and in another form be the hardest substance on earth! In the last thirty years, we have DISCOVERED three additional ways that carbon can bond and make wonderful things. One is a part of today’s post called carbon nanotubes. Another is the shape above that is named fullerene. It turned out a creative architect was designing geodesic domes using this shape (before scientists discovered the fullerene molecule). This, by the way, is the shape we now use to make soccer balls, (20 hexagons and 12 pentagons). The stability of the shape above and the fact that it is carbon makes it ideal as a means to carry things inside our bodies. These new forms of carbon will transform health in unimaginable ways in the future. This provides a molecular way to deliver things in our body!

The Inspiration

The coming age (which has already begun) has not even been named or acknowledged formally yet. I believe, nevertheless, it has begun. Two companion developments, the speeding of computing in the information age, coupled with the fundamental understanding of the structure and deciphering of life (genomics and DNA) will combine to create the merger of machine and living intelligence. Some futurists call this Human 2.0.

The Setup

We don’t get to choose the age we live in. The forces it sweeps into power affect everyone whether they acknowledge, desire, or neglect it. In past ages, new objective truth might take centuries to resolve. Changing eight billion people’s minds about any matter is a lot of angst. While this seems to happen in our current world in about thirty years, some hardened personal truths are very hard to shake.

As recently as the 1860s when slavery was abolished in the United States, it was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (100 years) that the next baby step forward was taken. The amount of human suffering, protest, and discrimination seems hard to fathom fifty years later. Women got the right to vote in the 1920s and by the 1970s we went forward to argue the merits of an Equal Rights Amendment. The concept of gay liberation and eventual access to marriage caused a tremendous challenge to social mores. Nevertheless, the speed to compromise and the change of heart have been closer to thirty years. I am hopeful, and hence an optimist that as new challenges to thinking from “the good old days” get presented, humans will continue to improve in their ability to re-examine what they believe. Watching how my adult children adapt informs me it is likely they are not willing to usher in 100-year consideration periods. Faster adaptation is a GREAT THING and bodes well for humanity.

The Details

So what am I talking about when I say “just carbon baby”? The combination of new knowledge and capacity is the key. So here I go with my thesis. It is hard to fairly grasp or estimate human intelligence. By evaluating the number of neurons and their speed, a gross estimate is 10 million billion calculations per second is a reasonable estimate for our brains. For the pessimists who understand computing software has not kept pace with the hardware, the most wonderful software known to humankind is DNA. We will discuss that in the next paragraph.

Modern computers for about $1000 can deliver this volume of calculation (one of us). While there is still so much to learn about how the human brain works, we have largely exceeded human capacity in many of its senses. As I have described in telescope discussions (I See and JWST), we surpassed human vision 500 years ago. What happens as we surpass human intelligence on a computing basis? The sheer volume can be applied to a class of problems and challenges hard to envision. The last ten years have introduced us to the hobbyist 3D printing craze. Imagine a replication technology based upon DNA-inspired recipes that could be “printed”. What becomes possible in such a world? Many believe this ability becomes reality in the next 15-20 years.

With the human genome project and continued exponential growth in DNA mapping, the understanding of life is rapidly becoming just another domain of knowledge. The example of DNA is an elegant mechanism for making things in an error-free way like nothing else in this world. The idea of making something in modern manufacturing and expecting an error only once every one hundred million attempts seem like sci-fi yet that is the reality of us when we need another skin cell. Imagine making 100 million toasters and expecting only one of them to have an error. For those of us that spent portions of our careers in manufacturing, such a concept is mind-bending in terms of costs, productivity, and quality.

We are carbon-based life forms as is every living thing on this earth. DNA is constructed as a recipe book for making every carbon-based life-form that ever lived on this planet. DNA recipes were described in a long-ago post “Nature’s Cookbook”. DNA mapping is the definition of instructions (recipes) to make everything on earth. New species can emerge. Modern crop science intervenes DIRECTLY in this magical recipe book. Do not pretend that it is “many years off”, we have been doing it for decades. Also realize that despite your nostalgia, the truth is we already stood by while world population grew from 1B to 8B the last two hundred years.

We only discovered carbon nanotubes even exist in the last twenty years. We used to think carbon was either graphite (soft) or diamonds (hard). Carbon nanotubes are rings of carbon hexagonal rings that are strong and flexible

So what is next that leads to “Just Carbon Baby?”. Construction based on carbon could mean the end of ALL BUILDING MATERIALS and industries that use aluminum, steel, cement, and all sorts of other things. A new form of carbon referred to as carbon nanotubes is all the rage. We all lived blissfully unaware that there was something more than graphite in pencils and diamonds. Carbon nanotubes are a specific carbon structure that looks a bit like a mesh pipe that is measured in nanometers. Lest you believe this is hobby talk, the tensile strength of carbon nanotubes is 100X the strength of steel. The revolution will not begin with a full replacement but rather the inclusion of nanotubes in other materials, greatly increasing their strength.

The inspiration of DNA allows us to create recipes BEYOND nature. Advanced research at MIT has even explored IMPROVING on DNA. Earth DNA operates with four base pairs and has resulted in all of the diversity of life on the planet. The architecture of the DNA molecule can support six base pairs and this has been done in the laboratory. This would mean a much broader range of instructions in manufacturing that has led to all living things on earth! Recipes have been created and for now, when we “see the new base-pair” we do nothing. Work continues to add a new operation for this new and improved DNA. Once we harness and define what happens when we direct a given step in a recipe, the ability to create our recipes we will be able to harness the near-perfection of nature, make near-perfect copies of anything and eliminate manufacturing steps prone to error. If you wish to imagine a sci-fi movie, imagine bringing a pile of carbon to a construction site and manufacturing a power pole out of carbon nanotubes on-site. This, I believe is the not-too-distant future. It is a brave new world and will change everything.

While I am repeating myself from a previous post, in “Nature’s Cookbook” the big takeaway is that EVERYTHING our body ever does or makes all comes down to a pantry of ONLY TWENTY INGREDIENTS (amino acids), and from that pantry, every variation in every cell through the construction of protein recipes is all written down. All of this, from a lowly blade of grass to a Nobel-prize winner comes from the same humble DNA molecule. This is the whole story as incredible as it may sound. While we can rightfully be inspired and even awed by the “perfection of nature”, of the twenty ingredients (amino acids) our bodies have evolved ONLY to know how to make 11 of the 20. As wondrous as we may seem, that puts us about halfway there to “perfection” as the other 9 we need to strip out amino acids from proteins in the food we eat. We are beautiful and wondrous, but the observation of perfection is far from complete.

How will humans respond to this sort of change? When our fundamental beliefs are undermined, we never seem to accept the feeling very well. I recently read a story about a little-discussed chapter of World War II. It is a sobering tale. As the end of World War II neared, a REMARKABLE NUMBER of German mothers and their children willingly embraced and committed mass suicides by the tens of thousands as German resistance collapsed at the end of World War II. Such an unimaginable outcome is instructive about how hard changing a group of people’s minds can be when propaganda or disinformation is involved. I consider this a useful metaphor for how rejecting something you may have embraced previously as a core belief. Once our minds become set, even if the basis is nonsense, changing our direction is very difficult. It is not surprising that the Nazi regime is credited with perfecting the microphone and applying it quite well to indoctrination and propaganda.

I believe that only a small number of the people who might have looked the other way when it was said after the Charlottesville, VA protests a few years ago that there are good people on both sides genuinely believe that. They all heard a rag-tag group of Confederate-flag-bearing, neo-nazi individuals chanting “The Jews will not replace us!”. Instead, I believe that making such an admission is akin to a concession about their horse in the race and people resist that at the very end when some of their beliefs begin to crumble. I am optimistic that only a small group of people believe what exists on the extremes of political dogma. I hope they can turn back before they let such beliefs destroy them. I also believe the only path to ridding ourselves of such a blight, is to NOT SAY “yeah, but they have some good points” but rather realize that evil can only flourish when people of goodwill stand by and say nothing.

Whether we are comfortable with the changes it brings, I believe the objective truth overwhelms the personal truth and political truth that might try and hold it at bay. I believe that is what is happening in our world today and I posted about it in “Truth”. The angst about “computers everywhere” is more about the anxiety that perhaps the times are passing us by. The next age where carbon is king will be the most disruptive of all and will rock our sense of self and individuality. Being able to manufacture at the nanoscale will transform health, longevity, and exploration. Buckle up.

Because it is hard to imagine fast-moving changes, posts like today might seem far-fetched. So be it. Here is a song in deference to that opinion. I hope the next time each of you sees a soccer ball, you will think of this post.