Better Living Through Genetic Engineering

Originally Posted by OpDDay2001:
Kind of hard to watch, but it's an example of selective breeding. It's not evolution but it's the closest man has come since the domestication and breeding of the dog. The creation of a breed of "super cows". It's really quite interesting, at the same time disturbing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmkj5gq1cQU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Blue

Originally Posted by 128hoodmario:
GENETIC ENGINEERIN IS WRONG!

One of the reasons we have time to play and talk about computer games is because we (and most other people in the West) are no longer forced to work on a farm to grow enough food to survive, which was the case only some 100 years ago.

The invention and adoption of farm machinery is a large part of the reason why the West is no longer in survival mode where food is concerned. But another important factor is the ongoing -- and, especially since the 1950s, scientific -- breeding of new and better kinds of food, in particular "high-yielding varieties" of cereals. We have in fact been so phenomenally successful at increasing crop yields through methods including selective breeding that only 2% of the U.S. population in 2002 was directly involved in farming (USDA fact sheet) while still supplying not only its own population with more food than they can eat, but supplying much of the rest of the world as well.

There are valid concerns about this process. Relying on a few high-yielding varieties of foods means increased difficulty if one of those varieties falls prey to pests, disease, or climatic variation, for example. There's also a question of whether having more food available may increase world population beyond sustainable levels. There are hard questions that need to be asked about the patenting of the biological results of genetic modification -- is it proper to allow the ownership of entire new species? What about the dangers of creating new lifeforms that we can't control? And any reasonable person can be concerned whether our technological abilities to create new kinds of life are outstripping our understanding of whether it is wise to do so simply because we can.

All of these could be the basis for a principled objection to modifying the genes of some lifeform. But to issue a blanket statement that "genetic engineering is wrong" is to completely ignore the realities of what our lives would be like today without improving food breeds over thousands of years (perhaps starting with the domestication of emmer).

Using technology to move beyond food-based survival is what has allowed humanity to accomplish wonders in the arts and sciences. We ought to be able to acknowledge that.

Optimism and the Future of Humanity +

I've heard the opinion expressed that optimism is incompatible with objectivity. In other words, anyone who questions the current "sky is falling" pessimism is clearly blinded by subjectivity and can therefore be ignored safely.

I would say that optimism and pessimism are only problems when they come first, when they determine what facts one will accept or reject. If the facts demonstrate a trend of improvement (as I have argued is the case for humanity generally), then to be optimistic is not some kind of flaw in one's reasoning; it is to be happy as a member of the human race that one's species has a chance to endure and thrive.

Objectivity is a good thing in analyzing something important. But it's neither necessary nor appropriate when the results are positive -- human beings are allowed to be happy when they get good news. On that basis, I'll willingly accept being called "optimistic" regarding the results of analyzing human history.

Global Warming and Science +

To follow up on my earlier comments, a few additional thoughts on how "global warming" has become a religion, rather than a well-formed scientific theory.

As a religion, Global Warming has its prophets (the "Goracle"), its doctrines and articles of faith (the planet is heating up; it's all the fault of developed countries and/or capitalism; and we have the wisdom, the responsibility and the right to save other people from themselves), and its heretics (Bjørn Lomborg among others). Anyone who questions the gospel is lucky to get off just being called ignorant, stupid, or evil -- the unlucky get compared to Holocaust deniers.

So I don't intend to do any kind of back-and-forth in this blog -- there's no point in trying to have a rational conversation with true believers -- but there is a point worth making once here for the record.

I believe that increasing global air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth, is currently dominant and is responsible for the temperature decline of the past decade or two. (Reid Bryson, "Environmental Roulette," Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man, John P. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich, eds., 1971)

At this point, the world's climatologists are agreed. ... Once the freeze starts, it will be too late. (Douglas Colligan, "Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age," Science Digest, February 1973)

The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind. (Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and producer of scientific television documentaries, "In the Grip of a New Ice Age," International Wildlife, July 1975)

The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations. It has already made food and fuel more precious, thus increasing the price of everything we buy. If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000. (Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976)

The demonstrated falsity of these and other end-of-days predictions from thirty years ago does not mean that the planet's not heating up, or won't heat up, or (if it is heating up) that it's not somehow our fault. What comments like these tell us is that a healthy skepticism of today's "we're killing the planet!" claims is completely justifiable, and that it is entirely correct to question the need for and value of making radical socio-economic changes today as yesterday's proponents of "global cooling" once similarly demanded.

We have been down this road before. I'd like to think we're capable of not letting the professional doomsayers drive us over a cliff this time, either.

Optimism and the Future of Humanity

I like humanity's chances for a future that's better than today.

Without ignoring the many ways we've discovered to kill, wound, oppress, terrorize, and otherwise harm each other (and we have definitely been very good at such invention), we have also found ways to beat those swords into plowshares many times over, and discovered uncountable ways to support, strengthen, heal, and nurture each other as well. For all the real suffering caused by humans, there have been good acts as well.

To see only the evil men do, as Mark Antony claims to do when mocking Brutus, is to willfully close one eye to the whole picture. No forecast of humanity's future can hope for accuracy that doesn't also factor into its equation the decency and optimism and creativity and love of which we're also capable.

The ability of the human race so far to solve all the problems it has caused itself, examined fairly, is astonishing. There is no obvious reason to conclude that we as a species have somehow suddenly become incapable of fixing the messes we get ourselves into. If for example enough of us see sufficient hard evidence that CO2 is as much a problem as some currently claim it is, then we can and we will take steps to solve that problem. If "global warming" (which I place in quotes to give it weight equal to the "global cooling" science abuse of the '70s) really is or becomes a human-caused problem, we can fix it and we will, and we'll do so while making lots of other things better as well.

Perfect? No. Humans are finite and fallible; living in perfect harmony as human beings is not in the works. We'll always be screwups. Like Scott Adams, I don't really think our future will be like Star Trek (especially on the political/economic side).

But that doesn't mean there's any good reason to conclude that a dystopian hell of self-inflicted conquest, famine, war, and death is our only possible future. Our existence here today demonstrates that improvements in human well-being enjoy a kind of ratcheting effect: as liberal democracy -- the single greatest force for good in all of human history -- has spread over the years, it takes two steps forward and one step back. The one step back is real... but so are those two steps forward. (The late Julian Simon has also done yeoman's work in this area, repeatedly demonstrating the errors of the often-wrong-but-never-in-doubt Paul Ehrlichs and Lester Browns of the world. I wish Simon were still here to comment on the rhetorical excesses of the Goracle and his cultists.)

Anyone who believes that we as a species will voluntarily strangle ourselves holds that belief because he chooses to do so in spite of the facts -- not because of them. The steady climb of human history points in the other direction, suggesting that we may reasonably hope that our descendants will inherit a happier and more prosperous Kardashev Type I civilization. Their future appears on track to be a world in which basic human needs are met across the entire planet and perhaps other planets as well.

That doesn't mean we're guaranteed immortality as a species, of course. The Big One (of whatever origin) could take out Earth tomorrow. But that won't be our fault. I'm only rejecting the various claims that we're slowly committing mass suicide, because the evidence of human history does not support any such conclusion -- just the opposite, in fact.

But maybe Ray Kurzweil's "singularity" will get here first. In which case, I saw a bumper sticker on my way to work this morning: "If the singularity comes, an AI will be driving this car". :)

Global Warming and Science

There seems little point in going deeply into the whole "global warming" thing specifically. Most people have already made up their minds.

Instead, I'd like to focus for a moment on the religious aspect of this public debate, on the way that this has been allowed to be framed as a question of personal morality.

Whenever I hear phrases like "does not have a clue" and "cannot be denied," I know we have left the realm of responsible science and entered the world of doctrine.

There's nothing wrong with being for or against something per se. There are plenty of things I'm personally for or against. But it's wrong to claim that definitive statements of personal belief should be accepted as though they were real science. Insisting that the currently available data "prove" that humans are responsible for global warming is a misuse of, misunderstanding of, and insult to science as an open-ended process of continuous refinement of our understanding of reality.

This isn't a statement "against" global warming. It's a statement against allowing moralism to masquerade as science. We need science, and we especially need its tentativeness, its humility, its capacity to admit incompleteness and error. That is a requirement for effective long-term decisionmaking.

Hearing only what supports our belief and dismissing anything (and anyone) else is not worthy of respect. It's not science.

Here's a test: read the comments of Freeman Dyson (yes, the guy who came up with the idea of the "Dyson sphere," and no right-wing nut job) and John Coleman (the founder of the Weather Channel) and the varied reports over at ICECAP. If you can't read any of the statements made there without instantaneously rebutting those comments in your mind in order to preserve a personal belief, then you may be a lovely person but you are not practicing science and have no business claiming that your beliefs are scientifically sound. (And yes, exactly the same goes for anyone who refuses to consider the validity of evidence supporting an anthropogenic source for global warming.)

In any dispute over science, whichever side claims "the debate is over" is the side less deserving of anyone's trust. If the facts were really so strongly in their favor, they wouldn't need to try to stifle dissent, would they?

Science and Engineering Content in a Star Trek MMORPG 2

One of the questions that comes up when thinking about a MMORPG based on Star Trek is how to generate interestingly distinct gameplay for both Engineering and Science branches. Both of these are fairly dependent on technology... so what's to stop an engineer from being interchangeable with a science officer?

To answer that, we need to figure out what's unique to each discipline. Once we see those things, we can discriminate usefully between them to create appropriate gameplay features.

So here are some of the characteristics of Science and Engineering that come to mind:

• Science is about theoretical understanding; Engineering is about practical application.
• Science is about perceiving patterns in complex data; Engineering is about insuring patterns in the behavior of complex objects.
• Science is about knowledge; Engineering is about technology.
• Science is about building internal models of systems; Engineering is about building external examples of systems.
• Science is about "why"; Engineering is about "how."

Do these observations suggest anything useful about how to generate Engineering gameplay that is distinct from Science gameplay (and vice versa) in a MMORPG set in the Star Trek universe?

Science and Engineering Content in a Star Trek MMORPG 1

What kind of gameplay might be fun for players in the Science and Engineering departments of a Star Trek MMORPG?

I'd like to see these players able to make and modify devices.

It seems unlikely that a Star Trek MMORPG will allow players to create new kinds of things. User-created content is just plain scary to most multiplayer game developers; the potential for abuse by a few jerks looms too large for the perceived development effort. There's also the question of how many of a game's likely subscribers would use this content. Finally, a decision to focus a game's design on conventional MMORPG gameplay would argue against implementing a feature as significant as user-created content.

Having said all this, I don't believe it should stop us from knocking around some ideas on the subject of user-generated content in the sense of creating and modifying the functionality of devices in a Star Trek MMORPG. If not in Star Trek Online, then someone, someday....

So: my ideas on this (which I've described at much greater and more painful length in Starship Operations in a Star Trek MMORPG) boil down to applying two simple design concepts broadly throughout the game:

1. Build every complex object out of components that can be disassembled.
2. Allow the basic functionality of every complex object to be modified by its programming.

The practical effect of these two things would be to give both Engineers and Scientists (including Medical specialists) opportunities for real creativity.

Given the appropriate tools and skills, Engineers would be able to deconstruct complex objects, from hand phasers to warp cores to starships, then put them back together again in new ways (and with different components) that yield new or improved basic functions. (The requirement for having the right tools for the job is important, BTW. Even given all the parts, no Engineer -- not even Scotty -- should be able to build a transporter using only a screwdriver and a paperclip. Repair one, maybe, but not build one.)

Scientists, meanwhile, would be able to modify the functionality of complex devices by writing computer subroutines that apply various filters to the outputs (energy, matter, information) of the internal components of these objects. Examples of this would be writing a quick subroutine that applies a dynamic inversion matrix to the output of a compression rifle to make it more effective against an enemy's shields, or a sensor enhancement algorithm, or a medical steri-field that adapts to a newly encountered lifeform's biology.

Taken together, these two features -- components and programs -- would form the basis for crafting in ST:O. And basing crafting in Star Trek Online from the very start on user-created content would allow players to enjoy the experience of creative problem-solving that is so much a part of Star Trek. (This approach also fits with the notion of "orthogonality" in Star Trek devices, which just means that in Star Trek there are only a few kinds of devices, but most devices have many modes of operation.)

I should note that, to some degree, this "Engineers work with objects, Scientists work with programs" approach is an artificial distinction. That's a fair criticism. After all, engineers in Star Trek (especially the later Ops officers) often reprogrammed devices, and scientists built devices. (Think of Scotty programming the Jenolan's transporter to store his pattern for 70+ years, or Spock's attempt to construct a mnemonic memory device using "stone knives and bearskins.")

Still, in terms of gameplay in a MMORPG, this seems like a reasonable way to insure that both Engineers and Scientists have some kind of useful creative activity they can do without breaking too far away from what's been seen in Star Trek.

Between these two capabilities, I think exploring the Star Trek Online universe would become as interesting as it should be.

Starship Time vs. Planetary Time +

Originally Posted by K'Shaq:
I just couldn't understand how someone could plan to get somewhere only when it's light. I'm just fine with getting there in general, and would rather spend time thinking about what I am doing at the time.

I should have been clearer. The suggestion for how to sync up a ship's time with local planetary time was how I'd guess a "real" starship would do it, and from there to how it could work in a Star Trek MMORPG.

That's just the "how" -- I'm not saying I think it "should" be done that way in Star Trek Online. I'm just observing that if there was a gameplay reason for doing so, it could be done plausibly.

And I'm a fan of letting players make their own choices, too. If players wanted to be able to arrive at a certain ship's time or local planetary time, it would be relatively simple to have a GUI that lets you enter the two times, then the server calculates the best possible speed that achieves that synchronization. So you could arrive when it's morning for both of you, or noon for you and midnight for where you'll be landing, or whatever.

Is this necessary? No. Star Trek Online could be implemented as just another brain-dead MMORPG in which players could arrive any time, day, night, whenever, and the NPCs they're supposed to see could somehow magically always be awake. For that matter, we could do away with the idea of planets having "day" and "night" altogether. A certain amount of going "to explore strange new worlds" is lost if ST:O is little more than the usual eternally-available NPC quest-givers and elite mobs to kill in the daylight, but there are probably a lot of gamers who feel that a MMORPG's developers should stop there instead of wasting time on simulationist stuff like planetary rotation and day/night cycles on a starship.

I'm not one of those gamers. I like my science fiction games to have some actual science somewhere in their fiction. And I like my gameworlds to have some worldiness as well. But that's just me, and my opinion is worth no more and no less than any other individual's.

Whoever develops an online Star Trek gameworld will decide for us where to draw the line between action features and world features in their game. And then each of us will have to decide whether the game they made is close enough to our individual definitions of "fun."

Starship Time vs. Planetary Time

Originally Posted by CaptSerek:
As I had mentioned in the previous thread, the reason for the slight dimming was to keep the humanoid life forms on some sort of body clock so they know when to sleep after their respective shifts.

This assumes that other races have a circadian rhythm close enough to that of humans (25 hours) to entrain their clocks with a 16-hour daytime and 8-hour nighttime lighting schedule. Is that really a good assumption? Wouldn't sticking to an eight-hour dimming cycle be rather anthropocentric?

It's probably not unrealistic, though. (Assuming you can accept starships and aliens as "realistic" in the first place.) Both "real" starships and ships in a MMORPG (assuming it has a nighttime lighting period at all), if crewed mostly by humans, would probably impose a 16/8 day/night cycle regardless of other species or planetary clocks.

But having a "night" brings up the question of synchronizing ship's time to planetary time. How do you do that when you're traveling to a planet with its own rotation period? And what's the best time to make contact with the locals, if by varying your ship's speed you can arrive at any point in the local day you like?

First let's consider how a "real" starship would operate. Under normal circumstances (i.e., without instructions or requests from someone on the target planet to arrive at a specific local time), the standing orders for a starship would probably be to adjust the ship's speed so as to arrive at its destination when both ship's time and local time (of wherever the landing party will arrive) are synchronized as being "morning." This will provide the maximum amount of local time for the ship's primary bridge officers to conduct business. (In an emergency, you'd use maximum warp and get there whenever you get there.)

This operating procedure could be implemented in a MMORPG with relative ease. Even if planets in the game rotate at different speeds, the time required for anyone's ship to arrive in orbit over a particular location on a planet could be adjusted so that it's always morning there. That way planets can all have their own day/night schedules, and so can starships, but they both wind up synched to "morning" when you arrive.

Naturally, this assumes that warping to a planet will last some reasonable amount of time and not just be yet another irritating form of universal instant travel....

Originally Posted by Or'ab Ibo:
Wow, this got far more complicated than what I initially anticipated :P

Yes, that's what happens when a Simulationist geek like me shows up. :)

Magic as Art and Science

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." -- Anonymous

It's an old question, but it's still a good one: When developing a concept of magic for a work of fantasy (whether a book or a game), should it be presented as a form of science with consistent laws? Or should it be described as an ineffable thing that simply works because it does?

In other words, should magic be represented as a science or as an art?

Some fifty years ago, C.P. Snow (The Two Cultures) described a widening gulf between the artistic and scientific conceptions of the world. We don't seem today to be any closer to resolving that tension. I have trouble deciding it for myself (in general, and in how magic is implemented in computer games) because I can see both sides too well.

On the one hand I'm one of those crazy INTP "Architect" types. I make sense of the world by building taxonomies and cause-and-effect structures to see how well observed reality fits within that model. If some model doesn't match reality in some way, I try to change the model to achieve a closer fit with reality. Life is a quest for a better model of the world.

To someone like me who reads science fiction and fantasy, then, this "build a better model" attitude makes the temptation to try to construct some set of foundational principles for "how magic works" almost irresistible. It's even worse when I play a game or read a book in which no thought appears to have been given to how magic works, in which the creator just threw something together that seems to get the job done. That drives me nuts. Where's the logical consistency? Where's the coherence of effects? Where's the control point that allows for controlled experimentation? Where's the system that suggests opportunities for new forms of magical expression? (I said I was one of those crazy Architect types. ;-)

I naturally think of magic as a system, with rules governed by physical reality of some kind that can be described and understood. And then I want to explore those rules to see where the interesting exceptions live. That's what science does.

But on the other hand, something in me rebels at exposing beauty to harsh lighting and a microscope. Why can't art simply be? Isn't something of value lost when you analyze a thing down to its component molecules?

In his stories, Lord Dunsany liked to refer to the world "beyond the fields we know." Tolkien was going after something similar in his concept of "Faerie." These artists and others have shared a concern that once something becomes familiar, it loses its power to inspire. Without an incomprehensible and inexplicable Other beyond our power to understand, without a bend in the road beyond which anything could exist, without the possibility of joy and hope despite pain and loss, the world becomes a gray and dusty ant-hill of soulless mortals scurrying this way and that to no purpose.

For an artist, that's an unacceptably bitter thought. Existence in a world without beauty is unendurable.

I don't think of myself as an artist, but I respect that part of the artistic temperament that tries to ennoble human nature. Like the artist, I also want to think of magic as tapping into the power of a world of brightness that can't even be perceived by the gray bureaucrats of our world. Maybe it's possible to learn how to control this otherworldly power; maybe such power can only be requested in an extreme circumstance and is never certain. But what it can't be is understood, because it simply is. To understand it would be to crush the very quality of ineffability that gives it its power. You may use it, but you may never possess it.

I find this concept of magic strongly appealing as well.

So I'm stuck. I love the idea of building systems of magic, but I know that to do so risks squeezing the glamour completely out of magic. You probably have to build a system if you're designing a game that allows player characters to do magic... but when you do, it's no longer about beauty, it's about numbers, and a spark of something larger than ourselves is lost in the pursuit of cold game mechanics.

I'm still trying to resolve this dilemma, and I'm curious to hear what others think about it. Does the tension between art and science matter in general? Can it ever be resolved in a computer game?