February 16, 2018 • 37 mins
From rockets on pogo-sticks to nuclear powered toasters, there's a whole strange world of emerging technologies that will improve and/or ruin everything in our future! Will and Mango chat with author Zach Weinersmith about the hilarious, future-looking text book he and his wife Kelly wrote, Soonish.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what will what's that mango? So I know everyone
loves to make that joke, like it's two thousand eighteen.
Where's my jet pack? Like everyone was promised a jet pack? Yeah,
where's my flying car? I'm still curious where exactly. But
the stuff I want is the stuff we were actually
reported on. I mean, in the last fifteen years, we've
talked about things like contact lenses you wear at night
(00:22):
that would adjust your eyes so that you take them
out in the mornings and have perfect vision through the day,
which is cool, right, Or I remember writing about peanut
butter and jelly slices so you can just slap those
on bread for faster sandwiches. I mean, I was with you.
I'm not sure about the peanut butter thing. I feel
like spreading peanut butter on bread doesn't take that much
time or effort, I know, but I can't outsource that
(00:44):
job to my kids. Plus, you know, when I'm rushing
out in the morning, so I don't want to leave
like a dirty butter knife in the sink, which I
realized is I'm saying it is like a very minor gripe.
But that's the kind of future I want to live
in I mean, that's my favorite part about a P.
B and J is actually licking the peanut butter off
the knife after that. But anyway, I actually looked up
these newspaper predictions for the future for this episode, and
(01:06):
there's this article from I think it was nineteen hundred
in the Boston Globe, and the author makes all these
predictions about the year two thousand, no pollution, moving sidewalks,
and for some reason he thinks there will be an
AM and PM newspaper, which I mean, I guess there
is if you consider the round the clock reporting on
the Internet. But the thing I loved about it was
(01:28):
that he refused to make any predictions about the weather
because he assumed that, you know, a hundred years from then,
it would still be impossible to predict. Speaking of genius,
we've actually got Zach Weener Smith on the program today.
He's the co author of the book Soon Ish, and
it's basically the super fun textbook of the future. It's
almost more a guide to the hurdles will face, plus
(01:50):
a status check on how things like asteroid mining or
nuclear powered toasters are coming along. And I'm already doing
too much talking. Let's get him on the line. M
(02:20):
Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend man guest Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass
playing with his doc Brown bobble Head. I didn't know
Tristan was a Back to the Future fan. Well, apparently
he only likes the first and the third one, so
so do not talk to him about Back to the
Future Part two. He gets really emotional. But but that's
(02:40):
our pal and producer Tristan McNeil. Now I want to
jump right into this interview. Today we've got a very
special guest, the super funny cartoonist and the co author
of the book soon Ish ten Emerging Technologies that will
improve and or ruin Everything, Zach Wiener Smith. Welcome to
Part Time Genius. Than now, Zach, we should mentioned up
front that this is a book that you wrote with
(03:02):
your super smart wife, Kelly, who's a professor at RICE.
Can can you remind us what she what she does
at Rice? Her research pertains to parasites that manipulate host behavior.
So if your audience is familiar with any of this,
they probably heard of toxoplasmosis, which perhaps manipulates a lot
of human behavior cats right in cat litter. Yes, yeah, precisely,
lots of us have it. Um. I actually don't know idea,
(03:24):
I probably do. I group with cats. But yeah, so
so they're they're never of claims about it, like it
reduces reaction time, which you can kind of understand if
if you wanted to have if you were the parasite
and you were trying to make a mouse get etn
my cat. Uh, it makes mice less averse to the
small cat urine. Um. There, there's some there's some studies. Uh,
(03:44):
Kelly knows this stuff better than I do, but minderstaining
from talking to her is there's some studies that try
to correlate the stuff to humans, and they're very tantalizing.
But obviously you're you're not allowed to like get a
hundred humans and then put parasites in them and see
what changes. Meanwhile, Kelly's at work right now doing exactly that. Yeah,
(04:05):
we don't talk about that. So this book soon is
is so fun and funny, and especially the nota Benet
sections which are just so great. But can you tell
us why you chose to write a book about the
future and why you concentrated on the ten subject areas
that you did. Sure. Um, so we were kind of
just interested in future stuff. And also we we both
(04:28):
had this thing where we're sort of generally interested in
space travel and realize we know really nothing about it.
The tent technologies in particular, we got into sort of
a process of cutting away. We actually started with a
list of fifty and some got cut because they turned
out to just not really exist. We thought maybe it
was a thing, and it's not a thing. Uh so
we we have to give an example of that. Like
(04:49):
we we thought, hey, what is anyone working on like
perfected economic forecasting or something like that, Like, is there's
gonna be some future like you know, super computer devices.
I mean there are things that kind of do related
suff but no one's trying to sort of forecast like
the weather gets forecast, right. So Yeah, it was sort
of willing away to stuff that we thought we could
do properly in five to ten thousand words and which
was interesting, and also stuff that we thought maybe people
(05:11):
hadn't heard about. Um that's not true every chapter, but
stuff like programmable matter I think most people have not
heard of, Um, maybe synthetic biology most people have not
heard of it, and I think probably most of the
like cheap access to space technology stuff is not the
exception of a couple of things is probably not on
people's radar. Yeah, and we we definitely want to ask
you about a few of those things. I will say
one of our favorite sections was the note on the
(05:33):
End for humanity and you know and why you and
Kelly are are pessimistic about betting on humans if robots
ever revolt. So can you tell us a little bit
about promobod and guyas specifically? Sure? Problem about we kind
of just throwing for a cute seas this is this
Russian robot or maybe maybe sort of set the table.
Is this Russian robot designed to assist people like to
(05:54):
assist the elderly. So the idea is basically elder care.
There are a lot of people who want to do it.
It's not well paid work. It would be really nice
if you could have a machine to do a lot
of the basic tasks of elder care. Uh. And so
there's this robot a Russian company is working on called
promo Butt. I think I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong,
but anyway, it uh tried to escape from the facility
(06:15):
we're working apparently twice and one time it escaped and
like died in traffic, which I presumably wasn't like a
choicebody who knows, Um, guy is this robot made by
Serena Booth who's was doing an undergraduate thesis at Harvard.
And the basic deal on Guya is it's just a
dumb remote control robot and she would secretly control it
(06:36):
so to an onlooker would look like, you know, for
all you know, it was like a startup autonomous robot
deal because it's it's Boston after all. And uh, the
robot would go up to students near their dorm rooms
or their dorms and say, well, you let me into
the building, which which is a big no no. It's
especially big no no and on Harvard because Harvard is
you know, the world famous, so they're like lots of
(06:57):
looky loose and weirdos trying to get into buildings. Uh.
And actually, so to speak fortuitously, around the time of
the experiment, there apparently been bomb threats. Um and so
I forget that the numbers are in the book, but
it's something like twenty percent of students will let people
in which is, you know, not not a high number.
I remember it's harvardson so they're supposed to be ultra
genius is um And and furthermore, if you're trying to
(07:18):
cause some trouble and you only have to try five times, uh,
you know, that's not great odds. But but they're the
really interesting thing that there are a number of permutations
of this, and there's a different set of experiments by
another researcher, but the really the one we were really
interested in was she didn't experiment where all she did
was load the robot with cookies, like she just got
a box of cookies to put them on top, and
(07:39):
the rowbout what compeist didn't say, I'm here delivering cookies,
will you let me in? And it's shot up to
the exact numbers in the book, but it's something like
three quarters of students would let that robot in. Um. So,
I mean it's sort of a funny experiment, um. But
but there is a sort of serious side to it,
which is the way we like to say in talks
we've given on this is essentially, if you look at
movies we humans make about what it would take to
(08:01):
fool us into obeying the robots. The robots always have
to really put out right, like build an exoskeleton with
like stem cells or I don't know what, Like the
terminator looks exactly like a human except for it's got
a metal endoskeleton and this and that, Like they bulot
a tea one thousand like this a possible complicated robot
just to like look kind of human. It just turns
out we'll we'll like opening a trash can with cookies. Yeah, yeah,
(08:27):
and so so it is. It is kind of I
don't know, I suppose ominous um or I think you
think about it hard. PUD should cause you to rethink
your relationship to machines a bit like yeah, and well
and cookies. It is kind of analogous to something like um.
I think a lot of us have been rethinking our
relationship with Facebook, right, which is kind of the same deal.
It's giving us something cool, which is the sort of
(08:49):
proverbial cookies, and in exchange, it's taking something or I know,
for example, like I used to second guess my GPS,
and I discovered literally every time I did that, I
was wrong. The machine is always right, and so now
I will obey the GPS, even if it appears to
be doing something stupid to me, I've completely gotten rid
of my my like regard for self. As it as
(09:09):
it pertains to mapping, it is a little ominous. I mean,
you don't even have deposit sentient machines to be scared.
It could be just some bad actor. Well, let's let's
let's talk a little bit about the positive applications because
imagine it sticking with robots and programmable matter. I'm really
fascinated by the benefits in medicine and then also in
(09:31):
the home that you talked about. Could you explain a
little bit about to our listeners. So the basic idea
with programm will matter is something like, you know, the
neat thing about a computer is a computer is not
just one machine. It's potentially infinite machines. You computer does
almost everything for you. That's why your phone can be
a radio and a clock and well phone to it occasionally. Um.
And the idea with programmable matter is to be able
(09:52):
to do that sort of thing but with stuff. So
it's like if you had a sort of object that
could be a cup, or it could be a phone,
or it could be anything else. And the the way
we like to describe it is it's like having the
T one thousand, only it's not trying to kill you.
So obviously that level of stuff that sort of like
shimmering good that turns into whatever, that's really far off
if it's even possible. But there are lots of intermediate versions.
And so one idea is what's called Oregonmy robots. And
(10:15):
so if you think about it in terms of universality,
Oregonmy is basically this thing where you take a piece
of paper and the piece of paper can be almost
infinite things. It might be literally infinite the math on
it um, but it's something like infinite. Right. You can
get many different shapes out of one thing, and many
of them could be useful. And so one idea is
you could um do Oregonmy robots that do stuff in
the body. Right. Um. So, the the the really cool
(10:36):
version of this that we were interested in was done
by a woman named Danielle Rouse, or done by her
lab at M I. T. And the basic idea was
you have a pilly swallow in the pill. The pills
made of ice, but in it is this little um
it's actually piece of sausage casing with some wiring in
it so that it can fold along preprogrammed axis. Uh.
And you swallow it, it it melts. Well, it's in your gut.
(10:57):
And now there's this little machine that you can manipulate
remotely that can fold the different configurations. Uh and and
you know, it's sort of like future optimal version. It's
it's completely self powered and could do all sorts of
cool stuff. In this version, it's it's I think we're
out controlled by like a magnet you have outside the body.
But anyway, the reason why would you want this? Why
would why do you want an orgony robot in your guts? It? Well,
it turns out in America thirty of us every year
(11:19):
swallow a watch battery. Which thing gets lodged in our guts?
And I I hasten to add that's just the people
who a report and and who'd be didn't pass it naturally.
So there's like a like a shockinglar high number of
people swallowing watch batteries. I don't know why. Presumably most
of them are children, but I we didn't get that
set um so. Uh So, But to the idea is
(11:42):
you just have a slow machine that walks in kind
of grabs the battery and then the whole thing passes
right out as nature intended. This one's about the size
of a postage stamp. You can imagine ones that are
much more mentorized. Um and why that would be exciting
or something like this. So you know, if you have
a headache, it's not like your whole body hurts, but
you take a pill, it lowers the inflammation your whole body. Right, So,
(12:02):
so aspirin is good whether you have like a banged
up knee or a headache or what have you. Ideally,
and be nice if you could get machines to deliver
the medicine to a specific location. And you know, an
aspirin it's not a big deal. But if you imagine
like really toxic like chemo medication, it would be really
nice if you could dose only the necessary areas. UM.
So that's a sort of very futuristic application of this
(12:23):
sort of thing. Um it could be really interesting. I
think you asked about programmable homes. I I'm trying to
remember what they think. There are a couple of different
versions of that we talked about. I think the thing
I was fascinated moths about was just that because I
lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and the fact
that you know, your whole room could transform so quickly
or and French and assembly, un assemble and like that.
(12:44):
That's all just amazing to me. Yeah, it's funny because
so pregimal matter we call it that. It actually goes
under a lot of different names. But but yeah, so
there's a lot more sort of you know, macro stuff.
It's really interesting. Um, there's there's a group we talked
about called room bots and rombots. Basically, these cube like
things about the size of a baseball. Uh, it's sort
of a cross between a cube and a circle, so
(13:04):
can sort of roll around and and then it's just
that and then it has a little sensing ability and
it can doc with other versions of itself and it's needs.
Then they can self assemble into like chairs or tables
or whatever. So if you're really wanted to be you know,
Swedish about your your room, you could just have a
pile of these robots in the corner and you could say,
assemble into like my kitchen set up or whatever whenever
you need. Of course, they're very slow right now, but
(13:25):
you can imagine a future right where it doesn't take
you know, ten hours. I don remember if we put
this in the book, but actually people worked on systems
of room buts that mate with each other to produce
like um terrifying Yeah right, it's like implementing genetic algorithms
in the real world. Dogs everywhere shivering the promise. It's
(13:47):
really slow. And again I don't remember mentioned this this
in the book, but there's one group that actually did
basically like machine breading via a three D printer. If
that makes sense that you have two machines the quote
unquote agree to mate in whatever sense machines do that,
and then you have a three D printer sort of
print the outcome. Uh. And what it was funny is,
for whatever reason, the group decided to have the robots
kind of rubb on each other. But they were like
(14:08):
completely needlessly. Uh. I don't know. It just gets lonely
working on these projects. I think these people are kind
of fulfilling other needs. But the speaking of multiple robots
of it. What about these robotics swarms and robots that
work in teams. Can you talk a little bit about
the applications there? Yeah, robot swarms, So we talked about
(14:31):
them in two contexts. Is robot swarm is what it
sounds like. It's a swarm of robots, and you might
ask yourself, why why would I want that instead of
one robot or one large robot. So there are a
couple of contexts where might be valuable. One is suppose
you UM have some kind of disaster areas, so there's
like a nuclear accident, or there's just a lot of
rubbles something where you wouldn't want to send people in.
UM with a store of robots, you can have a
(14:53):
lot of small cameras sort of going all over the
place to explore an area. And also if one breaks,
it's less of a big deal. Yeah. In addition, UM,
you can design them. There's some groups that work on this.
You can design them so they can do stuff with
each other, so they can their modular So you know,
there's one group we looked at where they had this
this clever trick where I suppose you have You can
imagine a little tiny robot about the size of your
(15:14):
fist that's rolling around and it comes across a chasm
it can't cross on its own. It then signals like
five other of the same robot to dock with it
to form a sort of train and now it can
go over or for example, of it has to cross
like on a narrow passage, you can configure so that
it has the sort of robot equivalent of holding two
arms out to the sides. Uh and so it can
balance the stuff like that. So you can imagine it
(15:36):
was some fairly simple algorithms that can navigate all sorts
of terrain more effectively. The other context in which we
talked about robot sworms is we have trapped on what's
called robotic construction, which is again what it sounds like,
it's machines sort of taking over the work of construction
workers or even extending it. The opposite of a swarm
would be this this one idea, which is to have
a sort of giant gantry, like basically a huge three
D printer that kind of prints out a house, which
(15:58):
is cool, but like might be limb to say, if
you wanted to build in New York. That's a little
tough to do. A robot swarm would be building upward,
kind of like termites do. Right, So you have like
a lot of little robots delivering small amounts of material
um and and sort of coordinating with each other. Uh.
And so there would be sort of an interesting different
way to do it. Um like like pretty revolutionary for
better end worse. Um. But but to me that that
(16:20):
seems kind of like plausible because the idea that is
is essentially what might happen is like a semi shows
up and it's loaded with you know, a thousand or
whatever little robots, and they come out and they slowly
assemble your house, kind of like a team of ants.
Um And again it has the same virtue of if
one breaks or something screwy, it doesn't matter. So it's
just like an ant colony. One dies, it's no big deal.
And they can do this trick of building up structures.
(16:42):
They're very simple. They're not ready for prime time. They
can't put in things like plumbing, etcetera. But it's really
cool to see it done. They can build structures and
they can even climb up the structures to add more concrete.
It's a really cool potential future paradigm for construction. Wow,
I kind of want to see this. There are there
videos of this. They totally are. If you have a
good section in the about construction chapter about swarm robotics.
(17:02):
There are a bunch of different ways it might go down.
If this is the paradigm we choose that there's there's
also two reasons that it might not work. You know,
we talked about a guy named Justin Warfel who was
sort of a friend of ours now who works he
studies termites to kind of see how they do it.
Because the neat thing with termites is no particular termite
knows what the structure is supposed to. Like the new
Blueprint system, they have some sort of algorithm they're running
(17:24):
um or or however you want to say it, um
and and so it's sort of fascinating that I learned
a new word. I don't remember if we put it
in the book, but the word of stigmer g, which
is embedding information in an environment, which is really interesting
because you say, how to termites do this? Well, one
thing they can do is they can leave a chemical
trail that says something like don't go here or don't
build here. Um, I don't actually know what. You know,
literally every termite chemical trail does. But they can leave
(17:46):
chemical trails. And it's interesting because they don't even know
I have to know what the trail does, right, They're
just acting out part of this process of building. It's
sort of fascinating. Now there's so much more we want
to ask you about, from the future of poco sticks
to the important of breathing through both your nostril. But
before we get to that, let's take a quick break.
(18:16):
So I want to switch gears a little bit and
and talk a little bit about travel to space, because
you know that this week we watched the SpaceX launch
and one of the things you talk about in your
book is why cheap travel to space will be important. Um,
can you talk a little bit about why that is
and what's the real hindrance right now? And also can
this idea of a giant pogo stick or super gun
really help us get there? Yeah? Good, Okay, So the
(18:38):
first question was why does it matter? I actually I
want to punch a little of the mattering thing. Actually,
I feel bad because I've had We've been on economics
podcasts and they'll say, like, so, what's the economic benefit
of space? And I'm like, I just don't know. I
don't know if there is one. I'm giving you some
arguments that might work. There are minerals in space, it
might be valuable. The question you always have to ask
yourself is would it be cheaper to just dig a
big hole on Earth, and often it probably isn't more valuable.
(19:00):
I I really think the value of going to space
you have to be a bit poetic about it. I
think Carl Sagan wrote a bit about how it just
kind of satisfies the fundamental human urge um to to explore.
And then you know, an economists I talked to a
pointed out, well, you know, the deal is we don't
know so that there could be developments were not imagining
yet um in these other environments. So who knows. But
(19:21):
I think we we just kind of want to do
it um so, and the basic deals we can't now,
mostly because it's expensive. You know, people will say we
don't find NASA enough. I think there's a good argument there,
But NASA is funded about half as much as in
the glory days of Apollo, and a lot of technology
is a lot cheaper um. So I don't think it
comes down to funding. It comes down to just the
the general extreme difficulty and expensive going to space, and
(19:43):
because until very recently the technology had not developed that much.
Because I think it's mostly you know, it's mostly governmental technology.
And I'm not in any way against governmental science research.
But there wasn't they that drive to get cost down
that you get with you know, companies like SpaceX that
have a bottom line. Um. And so I would say
the best argument in Favorite cheap space flight is basically
(20:04):
that it's awesome. It would be amazing, it would be wonderful.
You I. I really think there's no no stronger argument Favorite.
And there's also sort of let's find out what we'll
do in space. We don't really know what we're going
to do up there. Um. If you want to be
a little more cynical, they're they're incredibly strong military applications. Um.
Just space. You know, if you go to g geosynchronous
orbit and you can drop a rock, it's space, just
like a hunk of metals. Say, it's like dropping nuclear weapon. Um,
(20:27):
and it's a nuclear weapon. It's actually worse than a
nuclear weapon because it's very hard to stop. Um, because
you're just it's just Newton who's throwing the piece of
metal down at you. It's not you know, a little
ticklish nuclear warhead. Um that that could be diffused. Uh.
So they're they're tremendous military applications. They're also their communication
satellite applications. That's a little less sexy, but it's you know,
(20:47):
impartant and so so those are some arguments I do think.
If you if you want to talk about like why
is it valuable to go to Mars? The only legit
argument I think is that we want to do it.
And it's sort of in a way. I mean that seriously,
it's sort of a glorified art project. It just sort
of satisfies some desire we have. There are two things
that really allows you about taking a rocket to space
and most uses. Um So the first thing that's a
(21:09):
lousy is in in every company but SpaceX, we throw
away the rocket. And it's actually pretty close in terms
of price point. If you imagine you wanted to fly
from London to Los Angeles, uh, and imagine the only
way to do that would you get in the plane
and you fly until your over Los Angeles and then
you jump out in a parachute and then the plane
crashes into the ocean. That is essentially what we do
with rockets. These rocket launches, they cost at the very cheapest,
(21:32):
like SpaceX rates. You're talking like sixty million dollars and
that's for a pretty ho hum mission. That's just putting
like satellites and in lower thorbit um and and it's
about the same for planes. Like if you had to
if you had to crash the plane every time you
went to London, you probably would have to pay a
million dollars to seet maybe more so. Part of why
it's so exciting that SpaceX can land part of its rocket.
It can't land the whole thing yet, but maybe one
(21:52):
day is that that's the major part of the cost.
The the the fuel is minimal, right, so we said
sixty million, it's generally more than that. Let's say sixty million.
The cost for fuel is under a million dollars. I
don't know what the cost for like staff is, and
we don't know yet what the cost of refurbishment is
or even if SpaceX notices, I don't think they're telling
um yet. But but it's like planes, right, Your plane
(22:13):
ticket from London is now, you know, maybe a thousand
bucks instead of the million bucks it would be. So
you can do the same for space travel. It's kind
of wild, right, So you as a first approximation, imagine
you get the price of all space stuff down by
a factor of ten. Uh. Take any space mission you
care about, and multiplied by say a factor of two
or three, you know, so instead of two dudes on
the moon, it's four or five dudes or well and
(22:35):
four or five ladies. So that's just awesome. That's great,
and nothing is bad about that. The other thing that's
standing in the way with rockets. Uh, people don't realize this.
If you look at rockets sitting on the pad ready
to launch, about of it by mass is propellant. It's
fuel and oxidizers. The stuff you're gonna burn in order
to go up and over about sixteen sevent is just
(22:59):
the machine itself, like the metal and plastic and silicon
that go into you know, going up. Uh. And the
the stuff you might call actually going to space is
on on a really lower thorbit. Efficient mission is about
three and a half percent, right the little tippy top.
It's so it's it's essentially like you have to launch
a skyscraper into space to put the first floor into space. Uh,
(23:20):
And which you might imagine is is is pretty inefficient. Uh.
There are also some environmental concerns, but but in terms
of costs that it's pretty dramatic. Right, So as a
way to think about it, if you could just get
the fuel usage from pent to you know, seventy six
and a half percent, you've cut the cost in half
of any card goo going up. The tricky part is
is rocketcern Like they're pretty optimized to my understanding, Like
(23:42):
you know, it's just it's the rocket equation. It's it's
pretty Newtony, and it's it's there's not a whole lot
you can do to make it better. There's some wacky ideas.
Um but I'll get to the pogo stick in a
moment um. But but but so, uh I can I
can get a lot more into that. But but so,
like a lot of the proposals for how to get
to space without using a rocket or in one way
or an they're essentially fighting this problem of the idea
that most of what you're doing when you go to
(24:03):
space is lifting fuel that you're gonna burn on your
way to space, and not stuff that you want to
go to space. Right, I hasten to add to for
like Apollo going just to the moon, just the moon,
not very far at all in a solar system sense,
that was about one point five percent stuff going to space.
Um so the Poco stick. So how might you improve. Well,
so remember I said, only let's say three percent is
(24:25):
going it's just for efficiency and math. So that means
if you just get three percent more efficiency, you double
the amount of cargo, you cut the price in half.
So well, so part of the fuel, as you might imagine,
is just getting the like the initial launch, because right
when you launch, most of what you're lifting is other fuel. Right. Um,
so if you could spare yourself just a little of
(24:47):
that need to get that fuel up to speed, you
you get like that. Our guy we talked to it
NASA said you could get like one or two percent
more efficiency maybe. So the basic idea, it's a poco
stick rocket up some height I don't know, let's say
a hundred feet, You drop it, it bounces. Now you've
got some speed, uh, and off you go to space.
(25:08):
And so there might be some people who are thinking,
I don't see how the physics of this checks out.
The way to think about it is just, um, you know,
you're imparting some of your energy just by lifting it
up and then dropping it, and so it's it's a
more efficient use of energy than having to burn the
fuel in the rocket to move the rocket. We have
we have some sort of analogies for for how to
(25:28):
explain that in the book. But but, but the basic
idea is, as long as you're burning fuel, it's a
little more fuel, it's bad or is it is a
simple way to think about it. The best way to
fly to space would be a magic pixie dropped a
drop of fuel in the tank every time you needed it,
so you'd only be looking stuff, so that the popo
gets you just a nudge towards that. Um and at
least a card of the guy we talked to it.
(25:48):
And now it would work in the sense of physics. Uh,
whether I said I just like rocket just bouncing slowly
getting high off back, yeah, I'd be like t minus
you know one second to pogo drop. But I do
understanding solutions aren't tried because it went wrong, you'd look
like such an idiot. Um So, but yeah, that's that's
(26:12):
the pogo stick method. More with Zach Weener Smith right
after this break. One last question for you. Your book
is so good to encover so many topics from you know,
(26:34):
synthetic biology through d printing for food, like like there's
there's just so much in their asteroid mining, which we
didn't even get to, which is really great. But um,
but I did want to ask you about this one
experiment that you guys found on the effects of breathing
through one nostril. Yes, talk about that. Yeah, if I correctly,
there was an acronym. It was like unilateral force nose
(26:56):
breathing something like that. You you and B or so anyway,
So uh yeah, so let me set the table a
little for that. So we we did the chapter I
think this is in the chapter and augmented reality. And
so in the book we have these things called not
to bannis, which are generally just little tidbits of weirdness
we came across that had nothing to do with anything
where just didn't fit the chapter, but that we still
wanted to write about. And so this one was on
(27:20):
uh noses. And the reason it's relates to augmented reality
is when you put on an augmented reality helmet, one
of the obvious things that has to do is offset
the image you see in each eye in order to
convey a three D environment, right, because of course in
the real world, your eyes are offset from each other. Uh.
And so you actually would if if you would have
an augmented reality system for the ears. You have to
do the same thing. You have to offset sounds a
(27:40):
little like so you know something's to your right because
you hear the sound from it a little earlier in
the right ear. And so we thought, well, let's see,
you've got two eyes, you've got two ears. The only
other thing on your face you have two of is
your nose, And so can you sort of triangulate with smell?
And we realized either had an answer to that, so
we started like, how can we explode this question? And
(28:00):
and it turned out Kelly happened to know a guy
who worked on snakes, and it's a sort of similar question.
Why do snakes have forked tongues? And it turns out
snakes and the number of other species might have the
ability to do something like that to say like, I'm
getting a little more chemical on this side of the fork,
therefore I should go this way when I'm I'm trailing
a rat. Uh. And so then our crush was can
humans do this? And it basically turns out the answer
(28:22):
is probably no. Very sadly, you cannot probably tell where
the bad smell of the room is by by using
you know, offsetting your nostrils. Um so then the question
we had was, then why do you have two nostrils
line up one big, giant, awesome nostril um. And it
turns out the best argument is, essentially your your nostril
is this sort of um, your your You have this
(28:43):
mucous line system that protects you from pathogens and other stuff,
and it has to be kept moist in order to
do its job. And so the you don't realize it,
but you constantly have one nostril dominant quote unquote, you
have one dominant nostril that has this engorged tissue that's
the term in the field and gorged uh um in
(29:04):
one nostril. So so one one side is essentially getting
a break. Uh and um you really noticed this, by
the way, when you have a cold, you know, when
when when one nelson was just not doing anything? Um
and uh so um, so what does this have to
do with abuse to undergrads? Uh So, it turns out
there's some weirdness that goes with this. There's some evidence
(29:27):
we're i would say, pretty skeptical of that when you
force people to use their non dominant nostril, they perform
worse in all sorts of ways. Uh and so um,
so they they're apparently this was done to undergrade. There
are these tests that do unilateral force. I think it's
nostril breathing or nose breathing. Anyway to the book where
you guess compel students to breathe through the wrong nostril
(29:49):
and do stuff like I I think it was like,
you know, just like intelligence tests. And there's there's even
some argument that there's some correlation with like schizophrenia, uh
like using the wrong nostril. Yeah, like weird of Um,
I'm pretty skeptical of any of it, but I just
love the idea that, you know, someone was like, hey,
we need undergrads for a test. You're like, oh, I'm
gonna come in and take a test, and it's like, okay,
(30:10):
breathe through the nostril you don't feel like breathing through
and answer questions. That's what that's what they're good for. Right,
Bring out of that nostril and now go get on
that poco stick. We're sending that's right, and we'll see
what happens. Yeah, before we let you go, I do
have to know after all of this research for this book,
and by the way, the amount of research and the
(30:30):
amount of fact checking that must have gone into this
project was just tremendous and really impressive to see. I
can only imagine. But I'm curious after putting this together,
you know what, what about the future excites you the most?
And then on the flip side of that, what terrifies
you the most now that you've you've you know, dug
(30:51):
into so much of this. Sure, UM, I would say
the technology that is in some ways less or sexy
spacy than the other technologies, but it is really exciting
is what's called UM precision medicine. Uh. We have chapter
on this in the book. And the basic ideas you
just have a sort of stats approach to medicine. UM.
So maybe some of your listeners have heard of all
(31:13):
these blood tests now coming out that can detect cancer early,
maybe heart attack early, all sorts of stuff. So the
idea is maybe maybe in thirty or forty years will
be a new system where essentially when you go to
the doctor and so of UM instead of the basic stuff,
the fight still do the basic stuff blood pressure and
talking to your doctor, etcetera, or you exercising enough, but
they'll also take a blood test that will be run
through a fancy computer and and we'll spit out a
(31:34):
lot of results. And what's exciting to that is is
potentially it means you drastically drop healthcare costs. A lot
of healthcare costs have to do with unprevented stuff, um,
discovering cancers late, that sort of thing. I'm not to mention,
you know, a lot of like a lot of why,
for instance, pancreatic cancer is dangerous is because you don't
detect it early, um, and so stuff like that, like
subtle heart to detect cancers you can detect early, would
(31:57):
save a lot of money, but it would also obviously
save a lot of you know, horror, a lot of
badness in human life. Um. And so to me, that's
that's really exciting, especially because it kind of comes at
a time when, especially in the US, but also this
is happening in other countries where healthcare costs are really
getting high and it's not exactly clear how the system
can say solvent over the long term, this could be
(32:18):
a way out. It might take us in the other
direction of the short term, but in the long term,
you know, you can imagine a paradigm where it's like
Star Trek, where someone weighs a little wand over you.
More likely the one is like poking you and taking
tissues and but still uh, and it just tells you, hey,
and this is this is apparently literally possible. It might
be able to say, hey, you're headed for a heart attack.
You have dying heart tissue. If this goes on for
(32:39):
three more days, you're gonna be here for a heart attack.
And so instead of you know, having it in your
car or at work or whatever and having to be
worked to the hospital, you come in early and they
take care of it. Um that the amount of prevented
in medicine that could be done is amazing. UM. So
I'll just say that, I mean, I'm on a visceral level,
I'm I'm I suppose more excited about like this space stuff. Um.
(32:59):
But but that's really that's really sort of I don't
know if you've ever known someone who's who's died of
cancer or some sort of prevent a littleness, especially the
young agents, it's very sort of moving to think about
being able to do these things. Um. In terms of scary,
I would say far and away the most scary one
for me is we do have to on brain computer interfaces,
which again is what it sounds like. Uh, and what
(33:22):
scares me a little. So let me give you a
scenario we wade about that was proposed as a positive,
which is something like this. Suppose you're on the job, uh,
and you lapsed and focus. Well, that's bad for your job.
But suppose you have a brain computer face it to
texts that you're not focusing and does something. Maybe he
tells your boss Bob isn't focusing. Maybe it just gives
you a little something, a little uh, little shock or
(33:46):
a does of chemical or something, and then you focus again. Now,
of course that that sounds instantly dystopie on the way
I'm describing it. There is a plausible good version, which
is something like if you're you know, you don't want
that on the job. You might want the guy piloting
your plane to do that. You might want a surgeon
to do that. There are situations where it's reasonable. Um.
But but the scary thing is once the cats out
(34:06):
of the bag, like once this is a possible thing, um,
then there's a sort of race to the bottom or
race to the cydeboard, however you want to say it. Uh,
just something like um, so I don't know. I assume
y'all are either an academia or cross swords with it. UM.
You know, you're you're familiar with that world. You may
not know that on surveys, something like fifth to a
quarter of elite American researchers will admit to using mind
(34:30):
enhancing drugs. And I don't mean like they're dropping acid.
I mean like they're taking adderall or moda, phanil or
what have you to to you know, or or or
illegal stuff like a cocaine or or what have you.
Maybe crack, I don't know, um to to be able
to put out more papers, uh, you know, sleepless, etcetera.
I think drugs are sort of morally neutral, but there
is an externality problem, which is if the top researchers
are all on crack, and presuming crack actually helps by
(34:52):
the way that these are some of the questions, but
I think it's probably possible that it does, especially if
you're like a post talk or something, you have an
narrow time band to do a lot of work. There's
an externality, which is it means that people who aren't
willing to do this stuff, um are putting in a
bad position. Uh, and so we kind of I feel
like most of us don't care if it's happening with
researchers because there's an extent to which you're like, well
I get more science. Uh so whatever, I don't care
(35:16):
that much. And also anyway, they're already elite people, so whatever.
But you can imagine a situation where this goes all
the way down, Like, you know, the worker who is
willing to release their data to an employer, um, and
allow the employer to manipulate that data is more employable. UM.
So do we get into a situation where everyone has
to be wearing one of these and publicly sharing their
data or at least not publicly maybe but sharing it
(35:38):
with employers or what have you. That there's a really
ominous scenario where where we're all, you know, being forced
to become cyborgs or whether we want to or not,
you know, over over the next hundred years, say not
not anytime soon. Yeah, Well, to make sure that we
finish on a positive note, maybe we should just we
should just repeat the term pogo stick to space. Let's
(35:59):
just let's just maybe close with that. What do you
think I think pogo stick to space? I should have
done the precision medicine thing. Second, we have two in
the wrong order. But this this book, I know we've
already said it. It is so fascinating and so fun
to read. I hope all of our listeners will check
it out. It's called soon Ish Ten Emerging Technologies that
will improve and or ruin Everything. But Zach, thanks so
(36:21):
much for joining us today, Thanks for having a lot
of fun. That's it for today's show, but be sure
to check out Kelly and Zach Wienersmith's new book soon Ish,
which is on shelves everywhere right now. And if you
like the program or just have anything to add, remember
you can always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
You can email us part Time Genius at how stuff
Works dot com or hit us up one fact hot line.
That's one eight four four pt Genius. Thanks again for listening.
(36:58):
Part Time Genius is a duction of How Stuff Works
and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan
McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme
song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Gerry Rowland
does the exact producer thing. Gabe Loesier is our lead researcher,
with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the
(37:21):
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Could we forget Jan Jason
who
Guess what will what's that mango? So I know everyone
loves to make that joke, like it's two thousand eighteen.
Where's my jet pack? Like everyone was promised a jet pack? Yeah,
where's my flying car? I'm still curious where exactly. But
the stuff I want is the stuff we were actually
reported on. I mean, in the last fifteen years, we've
talked about things like contact lenses you wear at night
(00:22):
that would adjust your eyes so that you take them
out in the mornings and have perfect vision through the day,
which is cool, right, Or I remember writing about peanut
butter and jelly slices so you can just slap those
on bread for faster sandwiches. I mean, I was with you.
I'm not sure about the peanut butter thing. I feel
like spreading peanut butter on bread doesn't take that much
time or effort, I know, but I can't outsource that
(00:44):
job to my kids. Plus, you know, when I'm rushing
out in the morning, so I don't want to leave
like a dirty butter knife in the sink, which I
realized is I'm saying it is like a very minor gripe.
But that's the kind of future I want to live
in I mean, that's my favorite part about a P.
B and J is actually licking the peanut butter off
the knife after that. But anyway, I actually looked up
these newspaper predictions for the future for this episode, and
(01:06):
there's this article from I think it was nineteen hundred
in the Boston Globe, and the author makes all these
predictions about the year two thousand, no pollution, moving sidewalks,
and for some reason he thinks there will be an
AM and PM newspaper, which I mean, I guess there
is if you consider the round the clock reporting on
the Internet. But the thing I loved about it was
(01:28):
that he refused to make any predictions about the weather
because he assumed that, you know, a hundred years from then,
it would still be impossible to predict. Speaking of genius,
we've actually got Zach Weener Smith on the program today.
He's the co author of the book Soon Ish, and
it's basically the super fun textbook of the future. It's
almost more a guide to the hurdles will face, plus
(01:50):
a status check on how things like asteroid mining or
nuclear powered toasters are coming along. And I'm already doing
too much talking. Let's get him on the line. M
(02:20):
Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend man guest Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass
playing with his doc Brown bobble Head. I didn't know
Tristan was a Back to the Future fan. Well, apparently
he only likes the first and the third one, so
so do not talk to him about Back to the
Future Part two. He gets really emotional. But but that's
(02:40):
our pal and producer Tristan McNeil. Now I want to
jump right into this interview. Today we've got a very
special guest, the super funny cartoonist and the co author
of the book soon Ish ten Emerging Technologies that will
improve and or ruin Everything, Zach Wiener Smith. Welcome to
Part Time Genius. Than now, Zach, we should mentioned up
front that this is a book that you wrote with
(03:02):
your super smart wife, Kelly, who's a professor at RICE.
Can can you remind us what she what she does
at Rice? Her research pertains to parasites that manipulate host behavior.
So if your audience is familiar with any of this,
they probably heard of toxoplasmosis, which perhaps manipulates a lot
of human behavior cats right in cat litter. Yes, yeah, precisely,
lots of us have it. Um. I actually don't know idea,
(03:24):
I probably do. I group with cats. But yeah, so
so they're they're never of claims about it, like it
reduces reaction time, which you can kind of understand if
if you wanted to have if you were the parasite
and you were trying to make a mouse get etn
my cat. Uh, it makes mice less averse to the
small cat urine. Um. There, there's some there's some studies. Uh,
(03:44):
Kelly knows this stuff better than I do, but minderstaining
from talking to her is there's some studies that try
to correlate the stuff to humans, and they're very tantalizing.
But obviously you're you're not allowed to like get a
hundred humans and then put parasites in them and see
what changes. Meanwhile, Kelly's at work right now doing exactly that. Yeah,
(04:05):
we don't talk about that. So this book soon is
is so fun and funny, and especially the nota Benet
sections which are just so great. But can you tell
us why you chose to write a book about the
future and why you concentrated on the ten subject areas
that you did. Sure. Um, so we were kind of
just interested in future stuff. And also we we both
(04:28):
had this thing where we're sort of generally interested in
space travel and realize we know really nothing about it.
The tent technologies in particular, we got into sort of
a process of cutting away. We actually started with a
list of fifty and some got cut because they turned
out to just not really exist. We thought maybe it
was a thing, and it's not a thing. Uh so
we we have to give an example of that. Like
(04:49):
we we thought, hey, what is anyone working on like
perfected economic forecasting or something like that, Like, is there's
gonna be some future like you know, super computer devices.
I mean there are things that kind of do related
suff but no one's trying to sort of forecast like
the weather gets forecast, right. So Yeah, it was sort
of willing away to stuff that we thought we could
do properly in five to ten thousand words and which
was interesting, and also stuff that we thought maybe people
(05:11):
hadn't heard about. Um that's not true every chapter, but
stuff like programmable matter I think most people have not
heard of, Um, maybe synthetic biology most people have not
heard of it, and I think probably most of the
like cheap access to space technology stuff is not the
exception of a couple of things is probably not on
people's radar. Yeah, and we we definitely want to ask
you about a few of those things. I will say
one of our favorite sections was the note on the
(05:33):
End for humanity and you know and why you and
Kelly are are pessimistic about betting on humans if robots
ever revolt. So can you tell us a little bit
about promobod and guyas specifically? Sure? Problem about we kind
of just throwing for a cute seas this is this
Russian robot or maybe maybe sort of set the table.
Is this Russian robot designed to assist people like to
(05:54):
assist the elderly. So the idea is basically elder care.
There are a lot of people who want to do it.
It's not well paid work. It would be really nice
if you could have a machine to do a lot
of the basic tasks of elder care. Uh. And so
there's this robot a Russian company is working on called
promo Butt. I think I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong,
but anyway, it uh tried to escape from the facility
(06:15):
we're working apparently twice and one time it escaped and
like died in traffic, which I presumably wasn't like a
choicebody who knows, Um, guy is this robot made by
Serena Booth who's was doing an undergraduate thesis at Harvard.
And the basic deal on Guya is it's just a
dumb remote control robot and she would secretly control it
(06:36):
so to an onlooker would look like, you know, for
all you know, it was like a startup autonomous robot
deal because it's it's Boston after all. And uh, the
robot would go up to students near their dorm rooms
or their dorms and say, well, you let me into
the building, which which is a big no no. It's
especially big no no and on Harvard because Harvard is
you know, the world famous, so they're like lots of
(06:57):
looky loose and weirdos trying to get into buildings. Uh.
And actually, so to speak fortuitously, around the time of
the experiment, there apparently been bomb threats. Um and so
I forget that the numbers are in the book, but
it's something like twenty percent of students will let people
in which is, you know, not not a high number.
I remember it's harvardson so they're supposed to be ultra
genius is um And and furthermore, if you're trying to
(07:18):
cause some trouble and you only have to try five times, uh,
you know, that's not great odds. But but they're the
really interesting thing that there are a number of permutations
of this, and there's a different set of experiments by
another researcher, but the really the one we were really
interested in was she didn't experiment where all she did
was load the robot with cookies, like she just got
a box of cookies to put them on top, and
(07:39):
the rowbout what compeist didn't say, I'm here delivering cookies,
will you let me in? And it's shot up to
the exact numbers in the book, but it's something like
three quarters of students would let that robot in. Um. So,
I mean it's sort of a funny experiment, um. But
but there is a sort of serious side to it,
which is the way we like to say in talks
we've given on this is essentially, if you look at
movies we humans make about what it would take to
(08:01):
fool us into obeying the robots. The robots always have
to really put out right, like build an exoskeleton with
like stem cells or I don't know what, Like the
terminator looks exactly like a human except for it's got
a metal endoskeleton and this and that, Like they bulot
a tea one thousand like this a possible complicated robot
just to like look kind of human. It just turns
out we'll we'll like opening a trash can with cookies. Yeah, yeah,
(08:27):
and so so it is. It is kind of I
don't know, I suppose ominous um or I think you
think about it hard. PUD should cause you to rethink
your relationship to machines a bit like yeah, and well
and cookies. It is kind of analogous to something like um.
I think a lot of us have been rethinking our
relationship with Facebook, right, which is kind of the same deal.
It's giving us something cool, which is the sort of
(08:49):
proverbial cookies, and in exchange, it's taking something or I know,
for example, like I used to second guess my GPS,
and I discovered literally every time I did that, I
was wrong. The machine is always right, and so now
I will obey the GPS, even if it appears to
be doing something stupid to me, I've completely gotten rid
of my my like regard for self. As it as
(09:09):
it pertains to mapping, it is a little ominous. I mean,
you don't even have deposit sentient machines to be scared.
It could be just some bad actor. Well, let's let's
let's talk a little bit about the positive applications because
imagine it sticking with robots and programmable matter. I'm really
fascinated by the benefits in medicine and then also in
(09:31):
the home that you talked about. Could you explain a
little bit about to our listeners. So the basic idea
with programm will matter is something like, you know, the
neat thing about a computer is a computer is not
just one machine. It's potentially infinite machines. You computer does
almost everything for you. That's why your phone can be
a radio and a clock and well phone to it occasionally. Um.
And the idea with programmable matter is to be able
(09:52):
to do that sort of thing but with stuff. So
it's like if you had a sort of object that
could be a cup, or it could be a phone,
or it could be anything else. And the the way
we like to describe it is it's like having the
T one thousand, only it's not trying to kill you.
So obviously that level of stuff that sort of like
shimmering good that turns into whatever, that's really far off
if it's even possible. But there are lots of intermediate versions.
And so one idea is what's called Oregonmy robots. And
(10:15):
so if you think about it in terms of universality,
Oregonmy is basically this thing where you take a piece
of paper and the piece of paper can be almost
infinite things. It might be literally infinite the math on
it um, but it's something like infinite. Right. You can
get many different shapes out of one thing, and many
of them could be useful. And so one idea is
you could um do Oregonmy robots that do stuff in
the body. Right. Um. So, the the the really cool
(10:36):
version of this that we were interested in was done
by a woman named Danielle Rouse, or done by her
lab at M I. T. And the basic idea was
you have a pilly swallow in the pill. The pills
made of ice, but in it is this little um
it's actually piece of sausage casing with some wiring in
it so that it can fold along preprogrammed axis. Uh.
And you swallow it, it it melts. Well, it's in your gut.
(10:57):
And now there's this little machine that you can manipulate
remotely that can fold the different configurations. Uh and and
you know, it's sort of like future optimal version. It's
it's completely self powered and could do all sorts of
cool stuff. In this version, it's it's I think we're
out controlled by like a magnet you have outside the body.
But anyway, the reason why would you want this? Why
would why do you want an orgony robot in your guts? It? Well,
it turns out in America thirty of us every year
(11:19):
swallow a watch battery. Which thing gets lodged in our guts?
And I I hasten to add that's just the people
who a report and and who'd be didn't pass it naturally.
So there's like a like a shockinglar high number of
people swallowing watch batteries. I don't know why. Presumably most
of them are children, but I we didn't get that
set um so. Uh So, But to the idea is
(11:42):
you just have a slow machine that walks in kind
of grabs the battery and then the whole thing passes
right out as nature intended. This one's about the size
of a postage stamp. You can imagine ones that are
much more mentorized. Um and why that would be exciting
or something like this. So you know, if you have
a headache, it's not like your whole body hurts, but
you take a pill, it lowers the inflammation your whole body. Right, So,
(12:02):
so aspirin is good whether you have like a banged
up knee or a headache or what have you. Ideally,
and be nice if you could get machines to deliver
the medicine to a specific location. And you know, an
aspirin it's not a big deal. But if you imagine
like really toxic like chemo medication, it would be really
nice if you could dose only the necessary areas. UM.
So that's a sort of very futuristic application of this
(12:23):
sort of thing. Um it could be really interesting. I
think you asked about programmable homes. I I'm trying to
remember what they think. There are a couple of different
versions of that we talked about. I think the thing
I was fascinated moths about was just that because I
lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and the fact
that you know, your whole room could transform so quickly
or and French and assembly, un assemble and like that.
(12:44):
That's all just amazing to me. Yeah, it's funny because
so pregimal matter we call it that. It actually goes
under a lot of different names. But but yeah, so
there's a lot more sort of you know, macro stuff.
It's really interesting. Um, there's there's a group we talked
about called room bots and rombots. Basically, these cube like
things about the size of a baseball. Uh, it's sort
of a cross between a cube and a circle, so
(13:04):
can sort of roll around and and then it's just
that and then it has a little sensing ability and
it can doc with other versions of itself and it's needs.
Then they can self assemble into like chairs or tables
or whatever. So if you're really wanted to be you know,
Swedish about your your room, you could just have a
pile of these robots in the corner and you could say,
assemble into like my kitchen set up or whatever whenever
you need. Of course, they're very slow right now, but
(13:25):
you can imagine a future right where it doesn't take
you know, ten hours. I don remember if we put
this in the book, but actually people worked on systems
of room buts that mate with each other to produce
like um terrifying Yeah right, it's like implementing genetic algorithms
in the real world. Dogs everywhere shivering the promise. It's
(13:47):
really slow. And again I don't remember mentioned this this
in the book, but there's one group that actually did
basically like machine breading via a three D printer. If
that makes sense that you have two machines the quote
unquote agree to mate in whatever sense machines do that,
and then you have a three D printer sort of
print the outcome. Uh. And what it was funny is,
for whatever reason, the group decided to have the robots
kind of rubb on each other. But they were like
(14:08):
completely needlessly. Uh. I don't know. It just gets lonely
working on these projects. I think these people are kind
of fulfilling other needs. But the speaking of multiple robots
of it. What about these robotics swarms and robots that
work in teams. Can you talk a little bit about
the applications there? Yeah, robot swarms, So we talked about
(14:31):
them in two contexts. Is robot swarm is what it
sounds like. It's a swarm of robots, and you might
ask yourself, why why would I want that instead of
one robot or one large robot. So there are a
couple of contexts where might be valuable. One is suppose
you UM have some kind of disaster areas, so there's
like a nuclear accident, or there's just a lot of
rubbles something where you wouldn't want to send people in.
UM with a store of robots, you can have a
(14:53):
lot of small cameras sort of going all over the
place to explore an area. And also if one breaks,
it's less of a big deal. Yeah. In addition, UM,
you can design them. There's some groups that work on this.
You can design them so they can do stuff with
each other, so they can their modular So you know,
there's one group we looked at where they had this
this clever trick where I suppose you have You can
imagine a little tiny robot about the size of your
(15:14):
fist that's rolling around and it comes across a chasm
it can't cross on its own. It then signals like
five other of the same robot to dock with it
to form a sort of train and now it can
go over or for example, of it has to cross
like on a narrow passage, you can configure so that
it has the sort of robot equivalent of holding two
arms out to the sides. Uh and so it can
balance the stuff like that. So you can imagine it
(15:36):
was some fairly simple algorithms that can navigate all sorts
of terrain more effectively. The other context in which we
talked about robot sworms is we have trapped on what's
called robotic construction, which is again what it sounds like,
it's machines sort of taking over the work of construction
workers or even extending it. The opposite of a swarm
would be this this one idea, which is to have
a sort of giant gantry, like basically a huge three
D printer that kind of prints out a house, which
(15:58):
is cool, but like might be limb to say, if
you wanted to build in New York. That's a little
tough to do. A robot swarm would be building upward,
kind of like termites do. Right, So you have like
a lot of little robots delivering small amounts of material
um and and sort of coordinating with each other. Uh.
And so there would be sort of an interesting different
way to do it. Um like like pretty revolutionary for
better end worse. Um. But but to me that that
(16:20):
seems kind of like plausible because the idea that is
is essentially what might happen is like a semi shows
up and it's loaded with you know, a thousand or
whatever little robots, and they come out and they slowly
assemble your house, kind of like a team of ants.
Um And again it has the same virtue of if
one breaks or something screwy, it doesn't matter. So it's
just like an ant colony. One dies, it's no big deal.
And they can do this trick of building up structures.
(16:42):
They're very simple. They're not ready for prime time. They
can't put in things like plumbing, etcetera. But it's really
cool to see it done. They can build structures and
they can even climb up the structures to add more concrete.
It's a really cool potential future paradigm for construction. Wow,
I kind of want to see this. There are there
videos of this. They totally are. If you have a
good section in the about construction chapter about swarm robotics.
(17:02):
There are a bunch of different ways it might go down.
If this is the paradigm we choose that there's there's
also two reasons that it might not work. You know,
we talked about a guy named Justin Warfel who was
sort of a friend of ours now who works he
studies termites to kind of see how they do it.
Because the neat thing with termites is no particular termite
knows what the structure is supposed to. Like the new
Blueprint system, they have some sort of algorithm they're running
(17:24):
um or or however you want to say it, um
and and so it's sort of fascinating that I learned
a new word. I don't remember if we put it
in the book, but the word of stigmer g, which
is embedding information in an environment, which is really interesting
because you say, how to termites do this? Well, one
thing they can do is they can leave a chemical
trail that says something like don't go here or don't
build here. Um, I don't actually know what. You know,
literally every termite chemical trail does. But they can leave
(17:46):
chemical trails. And it's interesting because they don't even know
I have to know what the trail does, right, They're
just acting out part of this process of building. It's
sort of fascinating. Now there's so much more we want
to ask you about, from the future of poco sticks
to the important of breathing through both your nostril. But
before we get to that, let's take a quick break.
(18:16):
So I want to switch gears a little bit and
and talk a little bit about travel to space, because
you know that this week we watched the SpaceX launch
and one of the things you talk about in your
book is why cheap travel to space will be important. Um,
can you talk a little bit about why that is
and what's the real hindrance right now? And also can
this idea of a giant pogo stick or super gun
really help us get there? Yeah? Good, Okay, So the
(18:38):
first question was why does it matter? I actually I
want to punch a little of the mattering thing. Actually,
I feel bad because I've had We've been on economics
podcasts and they'll say, like, so, what's the economic benefit
of space? And I'm like, I just don't know. I
don't know if there is one. I'm giving you some
arguments that might work. There are minerals in space, it
might be valuable. The question you always have to ask
yourself is would it be cheaper to just dig a
big hole on Earth, and often it probably isn't more valuable.
(19:00):
I I really think the value of going to space
you have to be a bit poetic about it. I
think Carl Sagan wrote a bit about how it just
kind of satisfies the fundamental human urge um to to explore.
And then you know, an economists I talked to a
pointed out, well, you know, the deal is we don't
know so that there could be developments were not imagining
yet um in these other environments. So who knows. But
(19:21):
I think we we just kind of want to do
it um so, and the basic deals we can't now,
mostly because it's expensive. You know, people will say we
don't find NASA enough. I think there's a good argument there,
But NASA is funded about half as much as in
the glory days of Apollo, and a lot of technology
is a lot cheaper um. So I don't think it
comes down to funding. It comes down to just the
the general extreme difficulty and expensive going to space, and
(19:43):
because until very recently the technology had not developed that much.
Because I think it's mostly you know, it's mostly governmental technology.
And I'm not in any way against governmental science research.
But there wasn't they that drive to get cost down
that you get with you know, companies like SpaceX that
have a bottom line. Um. And so I would say
the best argument in Favorite cheap space flight is basically
(20:04):
that it's awesome. It would be amazing, it would be wonderful.
You I. I really think there's no no stronger argument Favorite.
And there's also sort of let's find out what we'll
do in space. We don't really know what we're going
to do up there. Um. If you want to be
a little more cynical, they're they're incredibly strong military applications. Um.
Just space. You know, if you go to g geosynchronous
orbit and you can drop a rock, it's space, just
like a hunk of metals. Say, it's like dropping nuclear weapon. Um,
(20:27):
and it's a nuclear weapon. It's actually worse than a
nuclear weapon because it's very hard to stop. Um, because
you're just it's just Newton who's throwing the piece of
metal down at you. It's not you know, a little
ticklish nuclear warhead. Um that that could be diffused. Uh.
So they're they're tremendous military applications. They're also their communication
satellite applications. That's a little less sexy, but it's you know,
(20:47):
impartant and so so those are some arguments I do think.
If you if you want to talk about like why
is it valuable to go to Mars? The only legit
argument I think is that we want to do it.
And it's sort of in a way. I mean that seriously,
it's sort of a glorified art project. It just sort
of satisfies some desire we have. There are two things
that really allows you about taking a rocket to space
and most uses. Um So the first thing that's a
(21:09):
lousy is in in every company but SpaceX, we throw
away the rocket. And it's actually pretty close in terms
of price point. If you imagine you wanted to fly
from London to Los Angeles, uh, and imagine the only
way to do that would you get in the plane
and you fly until your over Los Angeles and then
you jump out in a parachute and then the plane
crashes into the ocean. That is essentially what we do
with rockets. These rocket launches, they cost at the very cheapest,
(21:32):
like SpaceX rates. You're talking like sixty million dollars and
that's for a pretty ho hum mission. That's just putting
like satellites and in lower thorbit um and and it's
about the same for planes. Like if you had to
if you had to crash the plane every time you
went to London, you probably would have to pay a
million dollars to seet maybe more so. Part of why
it's so exciting that SpaceX can land part of its rocket.
It can't land the whole thing yet, but maybe one
(21:52):
day is that that's the major part of the cost.
The the the fuel is minimal, right, so we said
sixty million, it's generally more than that. Let's say sixty million.
The cost for fuel is under a million dollars. I
don't know what the cost for like staff is, and
we don't know yet what the cost of refurbishment is
or even if SpaceX notices, I don't think they're telling
um yet. But but it's like planes, right, Your plane
(22:13):
ticket from London is now, you know, maybe a thousand
bucks instead of the million bucks it would be. So
you can do the same for space travel. It's kind
of wild, right, So you as a first approximation, imagine
you get the price of all space stuff down by
a factor of ten. Uh. Take any space mission you
care about, and multiplied by say a factor of two
or three, you know, so instead of two dudes on
the moon, it's four or five dudes or well and
(22:35):
four or five ladies. So that's just awesome. That's great,
and nothing is bad about that. The other thing that's
standing in the way with rockets. Uh, people don't realize this.
If you look at rockets sitting on the pad ready
to launch, about of it by mass is propellant. It's
fuel and oxidizers. The stuff you're gonna burn in order
to go up and over about sixteen sevent is just
(22:59):
the machine itself, like the metal and plastic and silicon
that go into you know, going up. Uh. And the
the stuff you might call actually going to space is
on on a really lower thorbit. Efficient mission is about
three and a half percent, right the little tippy top.
It's so it's it's essentially like you have to launch
a skyscraper into space to put the first floor into space. Uh,
(23:20):
And which you might imagine is is is pretty inefficient. Uh.
There are also some environmental concerns, but but in terms
of costs that it's pretty dramatic. Right, So as a
way to think about it, if you could just get
the fuel usage from pent to you know, seventy six
and a half percent, you've cut the cost in half
of any card goo going up. The tricky part is
is rocketcern Like they're pretty optimized to my understanding, Like
(23:42):
you know, it's just it's the rocket equation. It's it's
pretty Newtony, and it's it's there's not a whole lot
you can do to make it better. There's some wacky ideas.
Um but I'll get to the pogo stick in a
moment um. But but but so, uh I can I
can get a lot more into that. But but so,
like a lot of the proposals for how to get
to space without using a rocket or in one way
or an they're essentially fighting this problem of the idea
that most of what you're doing when you go to
(24:03):
space is lifting fuel that you're gonna burn on your
way to space, and not stuff that you want to
go to space. Right, I hasten to add to for
like Apollo going just to the moon, just the moon,
not very far at all in a solar system sense,
that was about one point five percent stuff going to space.
Um so the Poco stick. So how might you improve. Well,
so remember I said, only let's say three percent is
(24:25):
going it's just for efficiency and math. So that means
if you just get three percent more efficiency, you double
the amount of cargo, you cut the price in half.
So well, so part of the fuel, as you might imagine,
is just getting the like the initial launch, because right
when you launch, most of what you're lifting is other fuel. Right. Um,
so if you could spare yourself just a little of
(24:47):
that need to get that fuel up to speed, you
you get like that. Our guy we talked to it
NASA said you could get like one or two percent
more efficiency maybe. So the basic idea, it's a poco
stick rocket up some height I don't know, let's say
a hundred feet, You drop it, it bounces. Now you've
got some speed, uh, and off you go to space.
(25:08):
And so there might be some people who are thinking,
I don't see how the physics of this checks out.
The way to think about it is just, um, you know,
you're imparting some of your energy just by lifting it
up and then dropping it, and so it's it's a
more efficient use of energy than having to burn the
fuel in the rocket to move the rocket. We have
we have some sort of analogies for for how to
(25:28):
explain that in the book. But but, but the basic
idea is, as long as you're burning fuel, it's a
little more fuel, it's bad or is it is a
simple way to think about it. The best way to
fly to space would be a magic pixie dropped a
drop of fuel in the tank every time you needed it,
so you'd only be looking stuff, so that the popo
gets you just a nudge towards that. Um and at
least a card of the guy we talked to it.
(25:48):
And now it would work in the sense of physics. Uh,
whether I said I just like rocket just bouncing slowly
getting high off back, yeah, I'd be like t minus
you know one second to pogo drop. But I do
understanding solutions aren't tried because it went wrong, you'd look
like such an idiot. Um So, but yeah, that's that's
(26:12):
the pogo stick method. More with Zach Weener Smith right
after this break. One last question for you. Your book
is so good to encover so many topics from you know,
(26:34):
synthetic biology through d printing for food, like like there's
there's just so much in their asteroid mining, which we
didn't even get to, which is really great. But um,
but I did want to ask you about this one
experiment that you guys found on the effects of breathing
through one nostril. Yes, talk about that. Yeah, if I correctly,
there was an acronym. It was like unilateral force nose
(26:56):
breathing something like that. You you and B or so anyway,
So uh yeah, so let me set the table a
little for that. So we we did the chapter I
think this is in the chapter and augmented reality. And
so in the book we have these things called not
to bannis, which are generally just little tidbits of weirdness
we came across that had nothing to do with anything
where just didn't fit the chapter, but that we still
wanted to write about. And so this one was on
(27:20):
uh noses. And the reason it's relates to augmented reality
is when you put on an augmented reality helmet, one
of the obvious things that has to do is offset
the image you see in each eye in order to
convey a three D environment, right, because of course in
the real world, your eyes are offset from each other. Uh.
And so you actually would if if you would have
an augmented reality system for the ears. You have to
do the same thing. You have to offset sounds a
(27:40):
little like so you know something's to your right because
you hear the sound from it a little earlier in
the right ear. And so we thought, well, let's see,
you've got two eyes, you've got two ears. The only
other thing on your face you have two of is
your nose, And so can you sort of triangulate with smell?
And we realized either had an answer to that, so
we started like, how can we explode this question? And
(28:00):
and it turned out Kelly happened to know a guy
who worked on snakes, and it's a sort of similar question.
Why do snakes have forked tongues? And it turns out
snakes and the number of other species might have the
ability to do something like that to say like, I'm
getting a little more chemical on this side of the fork,
therefore I should go this way when I'm I'm trailing
a rat. Uh. And so then our crush was can
humans do this? And it basically turns out the answer
(28:22):
is probably no. Very sadly, you cannot probably tell where
the bad smell of the room is by by using
you know, offsetting your nostrils. Um so then the question
we had was, then why do you have two nostrils
line up one big, giant, awesome nostril um. And it
turns out the best argument is, essentially your your nostril
is this sort of um, your your You have this
(28:43):
mucous line system that protects you from pathogens and other stuff,
and it has to be kept moist in order to
do its job. And so the you don't realize it,
but you constantly have one nostril dominant quote unquote, you
have one dominant nostril that has this engorged tissue that's
the term in the field and gorged uh um in
(29:04):
one nostril. So so one one side is essentially getting
a break. Uh and um you really noticed this, by
the way, when you have a cold, you know, when
when when one nelson was just not doing anything? Um
and uh so um, so what does this have to
do with abuse to undergrads? Uh So, it turns out
there's some weirdness that goes with this. There's some evidence
(29:27):
we're i would say, pretty skeptical of that when you
force people to use their non dominant nostril, they perform
worse in all sorts of ways. Uh and so um,
so they they're apparently this was done to undergrade. There
are these tests that do unilateral force. I think it's
nostril breathing or nose breathing. Anyway to the book where
you guess compel students to breathe through the wrong nostril
(29:49):
and do stuff like I I think it was like,
you know, just like intelligence tests. And there's there's even
some argument that there's some correlation with like schizophrenia, uh
like using the wrong nostril. Yeah, like weird of Um,
I'm pretty skeptical of any of it, but I just
love the idea that, you know, someone was like, hey,
we need undergrads for a test. You're like, oh, I'm
gonna come in and take a test, and it's like, okay,
(30:10):
breathe through the nostril you don't feel like breathing through
and answer questions. That's what that's what they're good for. Right,
Bring out of that nostril and now go get on
that poco stick. We're sending that's right, and we'll see
what happens. Yeah, before we let you go, I do
have to know after all of this research for this book,
and by the way, the amount of research and the
(30:30):
amount of fact checking that must have gone into this
project was just tremendous and really impressive to see. I
can only imagine. But I'm curious after putting this together,
you know what, what about the future excites you the most?
And then on the flip side of that, what terrifies
you the most now that you've you've you know, dug
(30:51):
into so much of this. Sure, UM, I would say
the technology that is in some ways less or sexy
spacy than the other technologies, but it is really exciting
is what's called UM precision medicine. Uh. We have chapter
on this in the book. And the basic ideas you
just have a sort of stats approach to medicine. UM.
So maybe some of your listeners have heard of all
(31:13):
these blood tests now coming out that can detect cancer early,
maybe heart attack early, all sorts of stuff. So the
idea is maybe maybe in thirty or forty years will
be a new system where essentially when you go to
the doctor and so of UM instead of the basic stuff,
the fight still do the basic stuff blood pressure and
talking to your doctor, etcetera, or you exercising enough, but
they'll also take a blood test that will be run
through a fancy computer and and we'll spit out a
(31:34):
lot of results. And what's exciting to that is is
potentially it means you drastically drop healthcare costs. A lot
of healthcare costs have to do with unprevented stuff, um,
discovering cancers late, that sort of thing. I'm not to mention,
you know, a lot of like a lot of why,
for instance, pancreatic cancer is dangerous is because you don't
detect it early, um, and so stuff like that, like
subtle heart to detect cancers you can detect early, would
(31:57):
save a lot of money, but it would also obviously
save a lot of you know, horror, a lot of
badness in human life. Um. And so to me, that's
that's really exciting, especially because it kind of comes at
a time when, especially in the US, but also this
is happening in other countries where healthcare costs are really
getting high and it's not exactly clear how the system
can say solvent over the long term, this could be
(32:18):
a way out. It might take us in the other
direction of the short term, but in the long term,
you know, you can imagine a paradigm where it's like
Star Trek, where someone weighs a little wand over you.
More likely the one is like poking you and taking
tissues and but still uh, and it just tells you, hey,
and this is this is apparently literally possible. It might
be able to say, hey, you're headed for a heart attack.
You have dying heart tissue. If this goes on for
(32:39):
three more days, you're gonna be here for a heart attack.
And so instead of you know, having it in your
car or at work or whatever and having to be
worked to the hospital, you come in early and they
take care of it. Um that the amount of prevented
in medicine that could be done is amazing. UM. So
I'll just say that, I mean, I'm on a visceral level,
I'm I'm I suppose more excited about like this space stuff. Um.
(32:59):
But but that's really that's really sort of I don't
know if you've ever known someone who's who's died of
cancer or some sort of prevent a littleness, especially the
young agents, it's very sort of moving to think about
being able to do these things. Um. In terms of scary,
I would say far and away the most scary one
for me is we do have to on brain computer interfaces,
which again is what it sounds like. Uh, and what
(33:22):
scares me a little. So let me give you a
scenario we wade about that was proposed as a positive,
which is something like this. Suppose you're on the job, uh,
and you lapsed and focus. Well, that's bad for your job.
But suppose you have a brain computer face it to
texts that you're not focusing and does something. Maybe he
tells your boss Bob isn't focusing. Maybe it just gives
you a little something, a little uh, little shock or
(33:46):
a does of chemical or something, and then you focus again. Now,
of course that that sounds instantly dystopie on the way
I'm describing it. There is a plausible good version, which
is something like if you're you know, you don't want
that on the job. You might want the guy piloting
your plane to do that. You might want a surgeon
to do that. There are situations where it's reasonable. Um.
But but the scary thing is once the cats out
(34:06):
of the bag, like once this is a possible thing, um,
then there's a sort of race to the bottom or
race to the cydeboard, however you want to say it. Uh,
just something like um, so I don't know. I assume
y'all are either an academia or cross swords with it. UM.
You know, you're you're familiar with that world. You may
not know that on surveys, something like fifth to a
quarter of elite American researchers will admit to using mind
(34:30):
enhancing drugs. And I don't mean like they're dropping acid.
I mean like they're taking adderall or moda, phanil or
what have you to to you know, or or or
illegal stuff like a cocaine or or what have you.
Maybe crack, I don't know, um to to be able
to put out more papers, uh, you know, sleepless, etcetera.
I think drugs are sort of morally neutral, but there
is an externality problem, which is if the top researchers
are all on crack, and presuming crack actually helps by
(34:52):
the way that these are some of the questions, but
I think it's probably possible that it does, especially if
you're like a post talk or something, you have an
narrow time band to do a lot of work. There's
an externality, which is it means that people who aren't
willing to do this stuff, um are putting in a
bad position. Uh, and so we kind of I feel
like most of us don't care if it's happening with
researchers because there's an extent to which you're like, well
I get more science. Uh so whatever, I don't care
(35:16):
that much. And also anyway, they're already elite people, so whatever.
But you can imagine a situation where this goes all
the way down, Like, you know, the worker who is
willing to release their data to an employer, um, and
allow the employer to manipulate that data is more employable. UM.
So do we get into a situation where everyone has
to be wearing one of these and publicly sharing their
data or at least not publicly maybe but sharing it
(35:38):
with employers or what have you. That there's a really
ominous scenario where where we're all, you know, being forced
to become cyborgs or whether we want to or not,
you know, over over the next hundred years, say not
not anytime soon. Yeah, Well, to make sure that we
finish on a positive note, maybe we should just we
should just repeat the term pogo stick to space. Let's
(35:59):
just let's just maybe close with that. What do you
think I think pogo stick to space? I should have
done the precision medicine thing. Second, we have two in
the wrong order. But this this book, I know we've
already said it. It is so fascinating and so fun
to read. I hope all of our listeners will check
it out. It's called soon Ish Ten Emerging Technologies that
will improve and or ruin Everything. But Zach, thanks so
(36:21):
much for joining us today, Thanks for having a lot
of fun. That's it for today's show, but be sure
to check out Kelly and Zach Wienersmith's new book soon Ish,
which is on shelves everywhere right now. And if you
like the program or just have anything to add, remember
you can always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
You can email us part Time Genius at how stuff
Works dot com or hit us up one fact hot line.
That's one eight four four pt Genius. Thanks again for listening.
(36:58):
Part Time Genius is a duction of How Stuff Works
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(37:21):
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who
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