There’s nothing like the mention of Geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.
Our old friends the ETC group, who spent the last ten years objecting to nanotechnology on rather questionable grounds, have reactivated their global network to write an open letter to “the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California” which aims to look at a voluntary code “for the least harmful and lowest risk conduct of research and testing of proposed climate intervention and geoengineering technologies.”
What really gives the game away is their objection, or rather their outrage on behalf of a number of Philippines farmers groups, to the “almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries” who will be at the conference.
Come on guys, why don’t you just come out and say that you are outraged by the lack of ethnic diversity in science, peeved about people making money out of it and hopping mad about not being seen as being important enough to be invited? What’s geoengineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or biotech got to do with it? Apparently absolutely nothing.
My estwhile colleague Dexter Johnson who also blogs for IEEE Spectrum received a number of plaudits from readers of the Foresight Institutes Nanodot blog after daring to suggest that the sunny optimism of current President J Storrs Hall might be rather displaced and that the assertion nanobots will save us may be rather missing the point.
Illustrating the difficullty of contrsuctive engament with fanatics, the discussion consited of
Pessimists like Dexter get a pyschological kick out of declaring that “things are bad man, get real”, much like the fundamentalist christians who claim that we are living in “the last days, the most awful phase in human history”, when in fact (for Europe at least) the 14th century is probably the best example if you want war, death and misery in abundance. Did armageddon happen? No it did not.
Dexter Johnson’s bad attitude is borne of ignorance.
and
“Dexter Johnson is an ignoramus whose ignorance leads him to view optimists with contempt.”
and even J Storrs Hall who waded into the debate with a comment that is simultaneously naive and hare brained
@Dexter: Saying “just some people who made some bad investments” is a very incorrect characterization of what I said. The bad investments are the effect: the cause is the widespread coordinated incorrect beliefs. There were lots of them, ranging from fund managers who thought they could use Li’s Gaussian copula without understanding its assumptions and applicability, to investors who thought they could trust the managers.
Nano-hype — the overpromising of near-term nanoscale bulk technologies — was clearly a very minor part of the problem, but it was real. I’ve been amazed how many people asked me for investment advice once they heard I’d written a book on nanotech. (My stock answer: “Buy land.”)
So that’s another argument settled. The various nutcases, fruitcases, burned out hippies and galactic megalomaniacs that orbit the Foresight Institute are always right, and scientists, governments, investors and anyone else who disagrees with them is an ignoramus.Whatever next? Crucifixians, gas chambers, or plagues of nanobots to root out any dissenting thought? It rather looks like “the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology” has been taken over by the nanotech equivalent of the Taliban, or at least some kind of set of nerds that have been driven to the brink of insanity by the thwarting of their plans for global domination and the inability to get a real live girlfriend.
Dexter got off lightly – the last time I questioned anything from this bunch a number of people wished various diseases on me. I wonder what Richard Jones’ postbag looks like?
One of the oddest arguments of the molecular manufacturing community (the bunch that believe that nanofactories will lead to eternal life. personal freedom, and do away with the need for money, government, clothes and apparently, good manners or common sense) is their possessiveness of the term nanotechnology.This extract from a recent tirade is typical:
By appropriating the term nanotechnology for what it was they were doing, the scientists had pulled a neat rhetorical trick: they were associating themselves with the wonderful promises of Drexler’s vision without having explicitly promised anything themselves. And they reaped the benefits of billion-dollar funding levels worldwide, interest from investors and the media, the cream of the students, and all the rest.
What always mystified me about the Foresight Institute(and associated groups) is that they simultaneously wanted to keep nanotechnology to themselves but put no effort whatsoever into doing any science that make make their dreams come true. As soon as the scientific community begins to investigate nanotech they start prancing wildly around waving sticks and accusing all kinds of people of stealing it. Now, as a recipient of the Foresight Communications Prize in 2003 I recall that the molecular manufacturing community did all that they could to reap the benefits, it’s just that sitting in front of a computer all day speculating about what a nano enabled Utopia would be like wasn’t felt by government or industry to be an any more worthy recipient of funding than sitting in front of a computer all day speculating on what it would be like to be a potato.
It’s a real shame. The early work by Drexler was uniquely visionary,and I can’t help thinking that his adoption by a bunch of silicon valley nerds rather than exploring the ideas within the scientific community is a mistake of tragic proportions. Certainly demanding that scientists do what they were unwilling or incapable of doing and then getting all bitter and twisted over a word, and a poorly defined one at that, isn’t going to advance their cause.
The House of Lords Science & technology committee (or more accurately a sub committee) has started to investigate the use of nanotechnologies in the food sector and is calling for evidence.There’s plenty of it here.
Certainly if our experience of running a few Nanofood confernces and producing a number of reports on the subject is typical, the committee could find it hard to gather firm evidence. Richard Jones gave a nice overview of the difficulties of even defiing the subject last year, but the marriage of nanotechnology and food is such an emotive and sensitive issue that it is hard to get anyone from major food company to stick their neck above the parapet.
My colleague Dexter Johnson who was the organiser of most of our food events has a few words to say on the subject, and I have to say I agree 100%. What the world needs is a joined up and sustainable food policy that makes the best, and most appropriate use of the technologies at our disposal, whether replacing horses with tractors or pesticides with GMOs. Many of the hard line groups advocating veganism or organic agriculture are in societies where that is an affordable lifestyle choice, whereas to most of the world food is just food – when it is available.
Banning a particular subsection of food, whether nanotechnology, chemistry (artificial fertilizers for instance) or physics (mechanised agriculture) is a pretty silly thing to do. However, it does work as a campaigning tactic as we have seen in the past. As most of the population is scientifically illiterate, it is very easy to make a convincing arguments by adding two bits of plausible science together and then coming to an implausible conclusion.
If some people want to live in a field eating a diet of grass and weeds fertilized by their own poo then they are quite at liberty to do so (although not in my garden!), and if the use of nanomaterials in packaging is shown to be safe then that is also fine. But just because we are wealthy enough to have a choice doesn’t mean that choice should be denied to the rest of the world – that is just selfish.
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