Requirement 5.2.2 – The [Commercial Crew Transport System] shall safely execute the Loss of Crew (LOC) requirements specific to the NASA Design Reference Mission (DRM). The Programs shall determine and document the LOC risk when DRMs are specified. The following are current:

a) The LOC probability distribution for the ascent phase of a 210 day ISS mission shall have a mean value no greater than 1 in 1000

b) The LOC probability distribution for the entry phase of a 210 day ISS mission shall have a mean value no greater than 1 in 1000

c) The [overall] LOC probability distribution for a 210 day ISS mission shall have a mean value no greater than 1 in 270

– Commercial Crew Transportation System Certification Requirements for NASA Low Earth Orbit Missions ESMD-CCTSCR-12.10 Revision-Basic. accessible here.

Loss of Crew is a polite way of saying that everyone on board dies. Put differently, the requirements officially state that it is taken as acceptable / par for the course if,

1. All astronauts on Dragon die on ascent or descent 1 out of 1,000 times.

2. Everyone dies 1 out of 270 times.

There isn’t a formal acceptable LoC specification for Artemis, but according to NASA’s Inspector General,

[after analysing] the risk of failures in Starship’s avionics, main engines, lander propulsion, landing legs, and electrical power. [NASA]’s loss of crew threshold is 1 in 40 for lunar operations and 1 in 30 for the Artemis missions overall.

– NASA Office of Inspector General. NASA’s Management of the Human Landing System Contracts. IG-26-004, 10 Mar. 2026. accessible here

Pre-launch, well-meaning people across multiple forums were talking about NASA’s “broken safety culture [..since] the beginning of the Shuttle program.” As these commentators have pointed out, there’s reason to believe Orion’s heat shield might be compromised.

Pre-launch, SLS was leakier than a submarine’s screen door; had a battery failure in its launch abort system; had multiple NOGO points. But they launched anyway.

As they should have.

but what about apollo?

Our memories of Apollo are hazy due to decades of hagiography. There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable.

To quote, the astronaut’s astronaut John Young,

As Young was training to command his own 1972 landing mission, his new wife told him something disturbing. She had learned about a formal risk analysis that put the chance of survival on future moon missions as low as 20 percent. Young claims it didn’t affect his thinking, but it was upsetting to his wife, and apparently to NASA. “George Low never let anybody see those numbers,” Young says today. Low was the space agency’s deputy director at the time. “I really believe that’s why the big guys wanted to knock off [Apollo] 18, 19, and 20 [the later missions that were canceled in 1970]. Even if they’d had the money, they didn’t see the benefits of lunar surface exploration, in terms of real scientific benefits, but they thought they were going to lose some people. You know, they might have.”

— astronaut John Young, as quoted in, “John Young, Spaceman. ” accessible here.

Every Apollo mission was on the edge. No mission was problem free.

The one most comparable to Artemis II? Apollo 8? Foggy windows. Helium bubble in the oxidizer line. An engine with “a small chance of [exploding].” Accidental computer wipes. Navigation loss (due to said computer wipe). Flipping over in the ocean. And a stuck hatch.1

Testing [..had] shown that the service propulsion system (SPS) engine had a small chance of exploding when burned for long periods unless its combustion chamber was “coated” first by burning the engine for a short period. This first correction burn [..added] less [..velocity..] than [planned,] because of a bubble of helium in the oxidizer lines, which caused unexpectedly low propellant pressure. The crew had to use the small RCS thrusters to make up the shortfall. Two later planned mid-course corrections were canceled because the Apollo 8 trajectory was found to be perfect.

– via wikipedia. Apollo 8 – Lunar Trajectory.

The first humans to truly leave Earth ended their heroic2 journey bobbing, upside down, in vomit.

The next one? 9? The LEM failed to jettison. Faulty ullage burn… Every single Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury flight had an “oh shit” moment. Giving ammunition to the many, many, many critics, congressmen, and senators who wanted to end the program.

It took $257 billion and the superhuman competence, diligence, and effort of four hundred thousand people to make sure only 3 astronauts died.3 And they still barely made it.

Their effort – their sacrifice – are why we remember Apollo. It’s why it was such a leap ahead. And it’s why no one has done it since. via ‘NASA’s Understanding of Risk in Apollo and Shuttle,’

In abstract, everyone is OK with “taking risks,” but very few people are able to stomach real risk.

We live in a world that’s – for the most part – overwhelmingly safe. Parts in our planes are rated to 1 in a Billion failure rates.4 Water contamination is measured in parts per billion.5 Deaths from infectious disease have gone from the leading cause of death to relatively rare.6 Violence keeps getting rarer with time.7 More people die from obesity than starvation.8

It took centuries for humans to learn enough about this unsafe world to invent the technologies necessary to make it safe. We haven’t done that yet for space – not even near-Earth space. For most in the developed world,9 Artemis is the first time they’ve encountered real risk. And that’s OK.

It’s what makes exploration worth it.

Capt. John Young [..put] it this way: ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’

putting in a subscribe button so that substack stops bugging me

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In any specific action, in any measure we may undertake, we always have the choice between the most audacious and the most careful solution. Some people think that the theory of war always advises the latter. That assumption is false. If the theory does advise anything, it is the nature of war to advise the most decisive, that is, the most audacious. Theory leaves it to the military leader, however, to act according to their own courage, according to their spirit of enterprise, and their self-confidence. Make your choice, therefore, according to this inner force; but never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity.

— Clausewitz, Carl. “Principles of War.” Military Service Publishing Company, 1942. Accessible here

Medieval rulers would have heartily disagreed with von Clausewitz. Their constraints and dogma would have led them to say, “why not both?” Why not have your cake and eat it too? The most careful solution and the most daring one at the same time?

What if you could have defense and offense in a single, elegant solution?

Historians have wondered for a long time where lords acquired their powers of justice and command. […] Others have seen the origin of seignorial power in the droit de ban - the right to command, coerce, and punish originally delegated.by the king to his officers and then increasingly appropriated by them. […] Current research leads us, to think that without the instrument represented by the motte and bailey castle, the final appropriation of the droit de ban by the king’s officers or the usurpation of this power by the wealthiest landowners would never have taken place. The motte accelerated the tipping of the balance of power toward the seignory. […] The most important factor was the lordship inherent in possession of a castle; the motte and bailey castle crystallized power and in some cases even created it.

— Bur, Michel. “The Motte and Bailey Castle: Instrument of Revolution.” Engineering and Science 45, no. 3 (1982): 11-14.

As with old music, there’s a selection bias in the castles we remember. In our collective consciousness, we associate the word castle with beautiful buildings like these,

Buildings exemplary both in history and their beauty. But they’re the exceptions, not the rule.

Early castles were stark in their simplicity. They had to be because of their strategic role in capturing territory. Soldiers would arrive onto foreign land, temporarily secure it, create a castle,1 leave a garrison, and then move on. It has been suggested by some historians that between the start of William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 and his death in 1087, his army had built at least 500 castles across England.2 Somewhere between 500 to 550 of these were occupied at the time of his death.3

The overwhelming majority of these castles were cheap and disposable. Dollar store castling. Affordable earthen mounds and wooden walls — within reach for even the most impoverished of feudal lords. Typically taking the motte-and-bailey form,

When medieval rulers c. 900 AD built castles, they mostly built motte-and-baileys. And they did so in astonishingly scrappy ways. More generally, early medieval rulers built, used and abused castles in radically different ways than the pop-culture, Disney movie version of castling.

doing a motte-and-bailey

I worked with an amateur archaeologist and trained architect, J. Lyonsmith, who studies historical European martial arts and the way in which Europe once waged war. Using archaeological data, dig findings, and a 3D photogrammetric map, we studied a small motte-and-bailey, Castle Pulverbatch in Shropshire, England.

Pulverbatch is an exceptionally preserved, entirely wooden motte-and-bailey, offering us a great example of what it could have been like to build one of these castles. It’s hard to do the site justice with photos alone, via the 3D aerial survey map,

Pulverbatch shows one of the most counter-intuitive things about ancient warfare; they loved to dig build. The Romans would set up palisades and fortifications at every given opportunity. They were so prolific that they exported their techniques to their enemies;

Disappointed in this hope, the Nervii surround the winter-quarters with a rampart eleven feet high, and a ditch thirteen feet in depth. These military works they had learned from our men in the intercourse of former years, and, having taken some of our army prisoners, were instructed by them: but, as they had no supply of iron tools which are requisite for this service, they were forced to cut the turf with their swords, and to empty out the earth with their hands and cloaks, from which circumstance, the vast number of the men could be inferred; for in less than three hours they completed a fortification of ten miles in circumference; and during the rest of the days they began to prepare and construct towers of the height of the ramparts, and grappling irons, and mantelets, which the same prisoners had taught them.

— Caesar, Julius. “Commentarii de bello Gallico” c. 49 B.C. Translated & Re-published as “The Gallic Wars.” by W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn, Harper & Brothers, 1869. Accessible Here. (Caesar 5:42)

Even when deep in enemy territory, a Roman legion on the march would set up a fortified, highly-organized camp by the end of the day. Their carpenters and military engineers could create a cheap, disposable fort within hours under enemy fire. Much like cats, the Romans (and William the Conqueror) would find a spot that fits and would sit (behind a ditch with fortified wooden walls).

Very little evidence remains that tells us exactly how Pulverbatch was built nearly a thousand years ago. Thanks to archaeologists, we know a lot about the era’s construction techniques, but we don’t have a Castle Pulverbatch “recipe.” Or, a comprehensive set of techniques that would let us faithfully recreate their work with era-appropriate tools.4 But what we do have is a beautifully embroidered, descriptive tapestry — the Bayeux Tapestry,

Legend has it that the tapestry was commissioned and created by William the Conqueror’s wife Queen Matilda and her ladies in waiting. Others contend that it was commissioned by his half brother, Odo – who was a bishop at Bayeux. But no matter who commissioned it, its beauty and utility remain the same. The tapestry portrays the most crucial ingredient of the Pulverbatch-era motte-and-bailey recipe – mechanically stabilized earth,

Or, in more detail,

Ignoring the palisade and subsequent construction (that made the castle a castle), we can simplify and describe the initial process as,

• Establish the castle’s perimeter

• Dig a ditch along the perimeter

• Move the dirt to one end of the site

• Layer the dirt as you pile it and shape it into a mound

• Put clay along the exterior of the mound.

This recipe was simple enough and castles were important enough that medieval rulers would have their their soldiers (and subjects), to quote Caesar, “cut the turf with their swords, and to empty out the earth with their hands and cloaks.” The initial simplicity of motte-and-baileys allowed armies to brute force security.

There is a case to be made that they were (maybe) too simple. There was – apparently – a persistent problem of “illegal castling.” During a civil war or succession crisis, the disputing parties would start by building castles in disputed territory,

A similar phenomenon of “illegal” castle building occurred in times of crisis, such as succession or wardship, particularly around the middle of the 11th century in territories that were otherwise well under control. When the ruler recovered his power, he usually preferred to formalize the status quo rather than start a war with the new castle owners who had appeared during the crisis. In the long run, however, even these illegal castles usually ended up acquiring legality by agreement between parties. Those that stayed totally independent were very rare.

— Bur, Michel. “The Motte and Bailey Castle: Instrument of Revolution.” Engineering and Science 45, no. 3 (1982): 11-14.

All of the other trappings of castling that we see in classic diagrams of motte-and-baileys – the palisade, stone keep, draw bridge etc. – would usually be added over time. Doing a motte-and-bailey was – for the most part – an exercise in shoveling dirt more efficiently than the enemy.

Beyond the obvious defensive benefits, it’s worth asking – why? Why did they do this? And why was it so effective?

but why castles?

To understand why castles matter, we really need to understand wagons. The Tyranny of the Wagon Equation is my favorite post on this website. I had never given it much thought before, but it turns out that medieval logistics share a lot in common with the rocket equation. Roughly;

To get X (armies, explorers, astronauts, etc.) from A to B, you need a Resource R which is also a resource that you want to deliver at the end (food for the army, fuel for the explorers to explore with). If the thing (donkeys, horses, hydrazine, RP-1) that pushes X also consumes R, then the amount of R needed to get from A to B grows non-linearly as the number X increases.5

In the post, the author shares an amazing series of diagrams showing what the wagon equation leads to in the real world,

You may think this diagram is merely a fellow nerd’s conceit, but for most militaries, it is a force as fundamental as gravity. When Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982, a part of the UK’s answer was this diagram,

It is the wagon equation in tangible form. Planes refuelling other planes to refuel planes. The long-term solution to this would be establishing bases at islands along the way, sending fuel to these islands, and then sending planes that “island hop” until they reach their destination. The US pursued this strategy during WW2 to fight the war in the Pacific.

We had to fly those planes from the bases in Kansas to India. Then we had to fly fuel over the hump into China. [...] We were supposed to take these B-29s—there were no tanker aircraft there. We were to fill them with fuel, fly from India to Chengtu; offload the fuel; fly back to India; make enough missions to build up fuel in Chengtu; fly to Yawata, Japan; bomb the steel mills; and go back to India. We had so little training on this problem of maximizing [fuel] efficiency, we actually found to get some of the B-29s back instead of offloading fuel, they had to take it on. To make a long story short, it wasn’t worth a damn. And it was LeMay who really came to that conclusion, and led the Chiefs to move the whole thing to the Marianas, which devastated Japan.

— McNamara, Robert, “The Fog of War.” 2003.

The modern US Navy sidesteps this problem with a little help from a magical substance called Uranium. Modern US aircraft carriers operate for 25 years between refueling.6 As of writing, there are multiple aircraft carriers in operation somewhere in the world that were refueled before some of this blog’s readers were born. Uranium and Plutonium are magic under other names.

But what if you don’t have a stockpile of Highly-Enriched Uranium and a fleet of multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers? Then your only recourse is a Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP). Or some logistical combination of Forward Operating Bases, Forward Operating Sites, and Main Operating Bases.7 Each base acts as a resource buffer in your supply chain – allowing your troops to go from link-to-link-to-link while re-supplying at each point. It’s the same strategy the US Army Air Forces used for operations in WW2, what pony express used to send mail, Edward I used for his invasion conquest of Wales, and the strategy Edward I’s distant descendants used to manage the British navy’s ever increasing need for coal.8

Castles were the FARPs of the past, amongst other things,

The castle was also a storehouse for munitions, an advanced headquarters, an observation post in troubled areas, home of a lord, and a place where he could be secure from attacks by his enemies. Royal castles could in times of emergency act as havens for the king’s field army, or supply the men to raise a new army if the field army was defeated… [They were] not a place of refuge, but a centre of military power.

— Wise, Terence. “Medieval Warfare.” New York: Hastings House, 1976.

Castle garrisons would steal forage9 from the land around them and create stockpiles of resources so that armies could use them as Forward Operating Bases/Sites when necessary. Each castle would be spaced one day’s march apart from the others, allowing armies to hop across the countryside. This strategy was central to medieval warfare. It’s why wars were fought castle-to-castle, siege-to-siege — disrupting this network was crucial for the enemy to gain territory.

When William I, or William the Conqueror, invaded England in the 11th Century, he used castles to secure territory. Lots and lots of castles. When his troops would first arrive at a new site, the first thing they would do would be to find a spot for a motte-and-bailey. Once a spot was identified, they would descend and build the castle as quickly as possible.

Orderic Vitalis gave the lack of castles in England as one reason for its defeat: ‘the fortifications [munitiones] called castles [castella] by the Normans were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English — could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.

— Turner, Ralph V. “Castles, Conquest and Charters: Collected Papers.” (1992).

As castles became more expensive and elaborate, they would require more than just troops in the field. They required masons, engineers, and castle specialists — expensive specialists. Regents would build castles until bankruptcy, take on debt, and then continue building more anyway. And it was a completely rational course of action at the time — castles were simply that important.

But what if the cornerstone of power in your society becomes obsolete? What if the strategy that has held true for over 500+ years10 becomes irrelevant in an afternoon?

For nearly 500 years castles were a source of power for medieval societies, what happens then? Well… that’s for Part 2.

Sources & Tool Use.

This series is the result of something I’ve been thinking about since the pandemic and is the synthesis of parts from several books + papers and discussions with friends. Sources include,

• Bur, Michel. “The Motte and Bailey Castle: Instrument of Revolution.” Engineering and Science 45.3 (1982): 11-14. Accessible here.

• Slavin, Philip. “Chicken husbandry in late-medieval eastern England: c. 1250–1400.” Anthropozoologica 44.2 (2009): 35-56. Accessible here.

• Kelly, Jack. “Gunpowder: alchemy, bombards, and pyrotechnics: the history of the explosive that changed the world.” Basic Books (AZ). (2004).

• Brauer, Jurgen, and Hubert van Tuyll. “Castles, Battles, & Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History.” (2008).

• Granberry, G., et al. “The Age Of Gunpowder: An Era of Technological, Tactical, Strategic, and Leadership Innovations.” Emory Endeavors in History Series. (2014).

• US Department of the Army. “The law of land warfare.” Field Manual 27-10 (1956).

LLMs lack a sense of taste so I don’t use them for writing. My writing style and approach is just too out there for most LLMs. I am (alas) an entirely carbon-based user of the em dash.

What I do use them for is augmenting my executive function and extracting data from digital copies of the books and papers I’ve read (doing it manually takes a lot of time).

The conjuring proceeds with hope. It is extremely exciting and hopeful to be a part of such an endeavor. Naked hope sparks the flame of conviction. Sponsors are found. Press releases are released. Social media is social-ed. Applications are announced... It's real!

And then there's silence. Louder the start; quieter the end. Many an aspiring titan ends up wandering the plains of human endeavor with an open jar; forever searching for magic to bottle.

qualitatively & quantifiably different

Alexander Graham Bell was prolific. His interests spanned hydrofoils (see footage above), metal detectors, optical data transmission, aviation, genetics, acoustics and early electrification. Bell used his first big liquidity event to start Volta Laboratory and Bureau, a lab that Bell led with an enlightened management style that would become Bell Labs' signature. From "[Bell] suggested the basic lines of research, furnished the financial resources, and then allowed his associates to receive the credit for many of the inventions that resulted." 1

Mervin Kelly, the man who built Bell Labs, shared this attitude. Starting in the late 1920s and accelerating in the 1930s, Kelly went about scouting and (indiscriminately) assimilating every talented person he could find. From the Idea Factory,

It was curious, in a way, who they were, these men coming to Bell Labs in New York. Most [...had been flagged by professors...] and their names had been quietly passed along to Kelly or someone else at the Labs. [Typically, these recruits grew up] with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.

— Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation. Penguin, 2012.

Bell Labs' antecedent was founded by a prolific maker and researcher, and it was led from the very start by makers and researchers. As a working scientist, Mervin Kelly understood the golden rule, "How do you manage genius? You don't." And it worked.

During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. Helped create the "Bazooka." Built an electronic computer that semi-autonomously controlled anti-aircraft guns, invented an acoustic homing torpedo, proximity fuzes, echo-ranging SONAR, pulse code modulation, the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike) and the klystron.

By all accounts, Kelly stayed true to his philosophy. None of these projects were micro-managed by Kelly. People did things because they wanted to do them. And they kept doing them after the war.

Bell Labs is the furnace wherein the American century was forged.

killing bell labs

Bell Labs died when Ma Bell died, that's how the popular narrative goes. While this account is mostly true, it obscures a deeper truth — Bell Labs was a victim of the information age it helped create.

There have been non-profit and corporate giants with larger war chests than Ma Bell. AT&T started Bell Labs when its revenue was under $13 B (current USD). During the great depression, when Mervin Kelly laid the foundation for the lab, AT&T's revenue was $22 B (current USD).

Inflation adjusted, Google has made more than AT&T did at Bell Labs' start since 2006. Microsoft, 1996. Apple, 1992.

Each has invested in research. None have a Bell Labs.

Academia's worse. Scientists at the height of their careers spend more time writing grants than doing research. Between 1975 and 2005, the amount of time scientists at top tier universities spent on research declined by 20%. Time spent on paperwork increased by 100%. To quote the study, "experienced secular decline in research time, on the order of 10h per week." 2

Empirical measures are hard to find, but another study found that principal investigators in astronomy spend more than 110 hours per grant. Or, one month per grant. As grants have a 20% success rate, more successful investigators apply to two or more per year.

The game is far more brutal if you're young. A young scientist with their own lab who sets their own research direction is unheard of. When was the last time a 20-something ran a lab at a major university?

People who can survive this system aren't necessarily the same as people who can do great work. Most of the great names of the past would be considered unemployable today;

"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964... Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

— Peter Higgs

Higgs' statement gets to the heart of the problem, MBA culture,

We live in a metrics obsessed culture that is obsessed with narrowly defined productivity. There's too much focus on accountability and too little focus on creativity.

The reason why we don't have Bell Labs is because we're unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy.

The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

"I've always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I've spent lots of time on totally useless things."

— Claude Shannon

patronage

I don't think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn't trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.

— Claude Shannon

On December 23rd 1947, when the transistor was demo-ed for the first time, Mervin Kelly wasn't invited. In fact, he didn't know what Bardeen and Brattain were doing. Why would he? They'd tell him when they were ready.

Kelly seems to have believed that the desire to impress your boss was a corrosive force, and so new discoveries and inventions were steadily percolated up to him and other leadership layer-by-layer one to two weeks at a time. From his perspective, it wasn't Kelly's job to micromanage people. Yes, they worked for him, but in his model, he wasn't their employer — he was their patron.

Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later.3 Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

As with many things, it – ultimately – comes down to taste. Bell Labs worked because Mervin Kelly had great taste in people and problems. He could identify who had that innate drive and thirst for more, and who didn't. From Richard Hamming's You and Your Research,

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for 10 years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about 3 or 4 years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not.

Well, I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

Bell Labs' pantheon was built on the backs of those who can't escape having dark nights of the soul. People who wake up in the middle of the night every night and ask "what am I doing with my life? I've accomplished nothing worthwhile.”4 People with an exotic mix of conscientiousness, high openness and highly-directional neuroticism. Kelly and Bob Taylor (PARC) were gifted at identifying such people, because (I suspect) they were such people.

Like seeks like.

errata: the formula

Sadly, freedom and patience alone isn’t enough. The Bell Labs formula can be briefly described as,

• Use good taste to find great, ambitious people.

• Surround them with other great, ambitious people.

• Hire smart, technical makers to be around them.

  • Cross-pollinate between the two groups as necessary.

• Make sure people talk to each other every day.

• Create a school so they teach one another.

  • Encourage everyone to study / improve.

Once the group is humming with activity and has a sense of self identity, the smart leader can then,

• Use taste to curate problems for the researchers.

• Give freedom to think — for years, if necessary. Trust the taste.

• Make explicit hand-offs to the makers.

  • Once you have something that works from the makers; emphasize fast scaling and execution.

• Scale outwards as necessary.

Proving and expanding on the above formula is left as an exercise to the reader.

One of the reasons why I love working at 1517 is because I believe the general partners (Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson) do understand why Bell Labs worked. I see it in how they deal with me and the people around them. Danielle is a teacher first, and has the patience of one combined with the resources of a VC.

And while a VC fund is limited in what it can do in providing open-ended freedom. It can try to provide a meaningful simulacrum of that space and community, which is why I’m so excited about programs like 1517’s Flux that invests $100k in people, no questions asked and lets them explore for a few months without demanding KPIs or instantaneous progress.5

I am hopeful that – as more organizations try such approaches – the idea will spread and we’ll get to see another Bell Labs.

This post is the result of two personal observations:

Observation 1: Smart people extrapolate outwards from themselves and their social environment. In predicting technological trends, they are unable to accurately gauge broader political, social, and economic forces that shape technology. Example, predicting outwards from the phenomenon that was Apollo, smart people in the 60s believed that we would be on Mars by the ‘90s and 2000s. Or, more recently, the laments that followed Segway and Google Glass.

Observation 2: The magnitude of the error increases depending on whether they can imagine a direct use-case or not. If a technology/product can be viewed as “just a toy,” or a recombination of older, more established technologies, then its impact is more likely to be dismissed.

It is my personal hypothesis that some experts discount the ability of ‘mundane’ technology to change the world. Or, more generally, when making predictions, experts are biased towards overestimating the impact of seemingly new and radical technologies while underestimating the ones we view as mundane.

For example, Kurzweil’s predictions from The Age of Spiritual Machines are often fantastic and full of sci-fi tech like,

"Phone" calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses.

He predicted direct retinal projection via lasers and holographic gratings, but he missed out on the fact that a) slow and expensive growth of battery power densities would mean that such headsets would be impractical and b) always-on, always-connected devices give everyone the ability to argue with everyone. We don’t use our pocket supercomputers to call people — we use them to post.

Kurzweil systematically overestimates the impact of the objectively cool technology while missing out on the “basics” like, instagram, sharing memes (formerly known as, jokes), and ordering groceries. Applications that have become a part of the bedrock of humanity. Billions are spent online every day by billions of people who talk to each other using some form of social networking. For hundreds of millions of these people, Facebook / Meta is The Internet and The Web.

Yes, a world where everyone shares pictures of their lunch with everyone else is a banal one, but it evidently matters to those doing it. They don’t care about promised “hyper-realistic” 3D worlds in which they can see the floating torsos of their friends. They care about fulfilling their hunger for social acceptance and approval; their creature comforts, no matter how small; and the warm, fuzzy afterglow of human connection (or, the rush of argument).

I’ve noticed that technologists tend to dismiss these needs as as mundane or trivial. A few understand - in an abstract sense - that people desire comfort, connection and standing, but fewer appreciate the impact this has on the world and how technology matures.

If human progress is the story of technology alleviating wants, technological progress is the story of humans amplifying desire. To fulfil core needs in ever more expanding ways. Steve Jobs understood this and shaped Apple around it;

Jobs: Who do you think will be the main beneficiary of the web? Who wins the most?

Reporter: People who have something... Jobs interjects To sell!

Reporter: To share. Jobs: To sell!

Reporter: You mean publishing?

Jobs: It's more than publishing. It's commerce. People are going to stop going to a lot of stores. And they're going to buy stuff over the web!

— Wolf, Gary. "Steve Jobs: The next insanely great thing." Wired, February 1996. Accessible here.

the internet. derivative or profound?

Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in Info.World, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

[…]

So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information
superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages.

I hope I'm not being too negative. Tell me if you think so.

— Metcalfe, Robert. “From the Ether: Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996.” InfoWorld, 4 Dec 1995. Accessible here.

If you have a certain kind of mind, it’s likely that you’ll love watching videos of Clifford Stoll. I am a superfan. It’s one of the smaller fandoms in the world, but his Klein bottle warehouse (and its tiny robot forklift), writing, and videos on mathematics have been a source of deep joy over the years. I have simple tastes. Give me a video of Dr. Stoll talking about how math isn’t about numbers, and I’m a happy woman.

But he’s not famous for his explorations of topology. Not to most people. Amongst certain people, he’s known for a work-related incident that occurred while he was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Dr. Stoll’s supervisor approached him about an accounting discrepancy. It was a tiny amount, just a few cents, but Dr. Stoll became so taken with the problem that he spent ten months of his life tracking down every single avenue related to this tiny accounting error. Sometime during these ten months, his project went from being about a heroic physicist plumbing the depths of accounting minutiae to a bonafide spy thriller. He had uncovered a scheme by a German engineer, Markus Hess, to infiltrate US defense networks to steal “sensitive semiconductor, satellite, space, and aircraft technologies” on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The year was 1986, and he had discovered the first state-sponsored data breach on the public record. The subject of Dr. Stoll’s first book, “The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage.”

But there’s another reason why Dr. Stoll’s famous. Or infamous.

In 1995, 9 years after the espionage incident, Dr. Stoll published a widely-shared article in Newsweek called “The Internet? Bah!” about a technology that would never take off; the Internet. It was the subject of his second book, “Silicon Snake Oil — Second thoughts on the information highway.”

It’s worth quoting the article’s start verbatim,

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in [sic] no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

— Stoll, Clifford. ‘The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana’. Newsweek, 27 Feb 1995. Accessible here.

It’s tempting to chalk up this article as yet another incident of “experts getting it wrong.” But that’s neither an interesting nor a productive response. It’s worth taking a moment to ask why Dr. Stoll got it wrong.

Out of all the people on Earth in 1995, you would have expected one of the early sysadmins, someone who had been online since (at least) 1975, to be amongst the people to get it right. He had been living in the future for two decades at that point. How could someone so brilliant and steeped in the tech be so wrong?

refining the hypothesis, OCPs v. ICPs

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

— Banks, Iain M. ‘Excession’. 1996.

For most people encountering this wild new thing called the Internet in 1995, it was (or was going to be) an Outside Context Problem, or OCP.

Almost no one at the Yellow Pages publishers, most retailers, book stores, fax machine manufacturers, small newspapers, independent book publishers, and record labels had encountered anything like the web of that era. Neither had their customers. For them, its potential, as well as its impact, was the full stop at the end of their sentence. They just hadn’t realized it yet.

Conversely, for Dr. Stoll, the Internet and the Web were something firmly within his domain and context — an Inside Context Problem, or ICP. He had spent two decades tinkering with it. His friends had gamed on it.1 They’d chatted on it.2 They’d bought things from one another on it.3

His familiarity had bred contempt.

Everything promised during the Dot Com hype of the ‘90s were things he and his friends had already created or played with at some point in their careers. He had already gone through the hype and the inevitable disillusionment. From his perspective, everyone hawking an iterative improvement on decades-old technology was pulling a fast one over people who didn’t know better. It certainly didn’t help that many of the Dot Com boom companies of the time were outright scams.

If you read the rest of his piece, you’ll find that we’ve caught up with his cynicism, albeit from a very different place, with trillions of dollars in monetary value being created along the way,

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress —important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Our familiarity has bred contempt as well. The Internet, the technological miracle, has become mundane. Just like it happened to the radio, electricity, vehicles, internal combustion engines, heavier-than-air flight, space travel, submarines, supersonic flight, laser surgery, robots, precise global navigation… We are all on the miracle treadmill — forever chasing novel miracles before discarding them as mundane.4

The more a technology is used towards fulfilling core desires and needs — especially social needs; the stronger this dismissal becomes. Did any technologist take people sharing lunch over instagram seriously in 2012? Snapchat filters in 2015? Uber in 2011?

If the miracle treadmill blinds us to a technology’s possibilities during its ascent, it also causes us to overestimate immediate impact on genesis. Think Webvan v. Amazon Fresh. Vine v. TikTok. ALIWEB, JumpStation, AltaVista v. Google.

Or, on a larger scale, the ambitious post-Apollo timelines where Apollo-era scientists, engineers and leaders reasoned to n from the glow of lunar success.

It seems that the only way out is to perspective shift on self-command — to see the new as if it was old; and the old as if it was new.

1

The first multi-player 3D flight simulator was made in 1974, and was called Airfight.

The first tank simulator (if you’re interested in that sort of thing) was made in 1975, Panther.

2

Dr. Stoll had, likely, at some point, used Talkomatic, the first true messaging app in 1975,

from, Stone, M. David. “Getting Online for Education.” Ziff Davis, Inc. 1 May 1984. pp. 221. Accessible here.

These people in the 1960s (i.e., his childhood) had predicted much of the world that was to come. They reached far beyond their present and grasped the threads of the world that was to be. And in my father’s eyes, that was true achievement.1

Naturally, as I grew older, I rebelled by watching more 2001. In middle school, I wrote a frame-by-frame analysis of the movie for a report. My arguments were so exhaustively exhausting2 that I was forever known as “that girl” by my teachers.3

As I’ve gotten older, my father’s ideas have been transmuted into an obsession with modeling the future, predictions, and the history of The Future. I am obsessed with the mechanics of making predictions. How did people go about modeling the future? What assumptions did they discard on their way to their conclusions? And why do some people come so close yet remain so frustratingly far off the mark?

Or, in other words, how did Kubrick and Clarke come so close and (yet) remain so far from predicting the iPad?

2001: A Case Study

2001: A Space Odyssey offers a great case study and example of the non-intuitive ways in which predictions miss their target. In the movie, most of predictions are surprisingly on point.

Dr Heywood Floyd watches a movie/TV on his flight to the Low-Earth Orbit space station on a seatback display,

Glass cockpits are everywhere. As far as the eye can see. Showing telemetry, guidance and math (??)

I was struck by how similar they are to the dashboard on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule,4

When Dr. Floyd arrives at the space station, he goes through an automated immigration kiosk with biometric authentication,

He pays for a video call via a very modern-looking credit card,

When Dr. Floyd travels to the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly - 1 (TMA-1) via shuttle, its pilot uses augmented reality guidance on a screen to land in the lunar night,

In the shuttle, he eats artificial, or synthetic, meat — “What's that? Chicken?” “Something like that. Tastes the same anyway.”

On the surface, in front of the TMA-1, one of the crew takes videos and pictures with a cuboidal-ish camera that reminds me of the RED V-Raptor, with a specialized housing, lens and display attachment,

When we fast forward to life on Discovery One, one of the most iconic sequences in the movie shows HAL playing chess with Frank,

and winning,5

It is astonishing how much they got right.

2001 is filled with predictions that have panned out, but few are as famous as the “iPad scene.” It is the second most famous prediction in the movie. The first is HAL.

Samsung even cited it in a court case against Apple as prior art. Samsung’s lawyers contended that Kubrick and Clarke predicted the iPad,

As much as I would like Samsung’s lawyers to be right, they’re sadly wrong. Because as impressive as that scene is, it is immediately followed up by the astronauts using paper with ever-present clipboards for their day-to-day work,

Within the movie, paper is everywhere and their portable TVs are, sadly, just that - TVs. It’s striking how everything in 2001’s universe still runs on paper, as implied by the 0g pen,

The newspapers,

The folio Dr Floyd carries with him on his way to the moon,

The briefing materials that are used during Dr. Floyd’s lunar meeting,

It seems to have never occurred to I.J. Good, Marvin Minsky, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, and over fifty technical advisory organizations, including NASA of the ‘60s, that a portable TV would necessarily imply portable computers.

Portable computers would then, in turn, imply the existence of radically new forms of information capture. Technologies that would be far more comfortable to use in space than pen-and-paper,

Why didn’t they see this coming? The scientists and engineers involved in creating the world of 2001 were some of the smartest, most technically proficient people of the time. They were at the cutting edge. They were making the cutting edge. Why didn’t they connect the dots?

I’ve subjected many people to my rants on this topic, and some have pointed out that it might not be a fair question to ask. Did they have the dots in the first place? Could they have connected them at all?

Could Kubrick & Clarke have predicted the iPad?

Yes.

Kubrick and Clarke weren’t lacking in contemporaneous examples that could have helped them to make the leap. They were lacking in insight. Insight that, we can say, with the benefit of hindsight, was within arm’s reach the entire time. The fundamental components of what would become the iPad were being actively explored by the organizations Kubrick and Clarke consulted with.

One of their closest collaborators, Marvin Minsky, had all the pieces, but neither he nor his collaborators were able to put them together.

In 1963, Ivan Sutherland, a student of Marvin Minsky, finished building the first CAD system that served as one of the genesis points of Graphical User Interfaces and object-oriented programming.

In his system, humans would collaborate with machines (the aid part in Computer Aided Design) as partners in the design process. The computer wouldn’t just offer a way to “undo” your work, but it would allow you to manipulate the state, relationships, and topology of your designs. It was a work of genius. He called it Sketchpad,

Sutherland grasped that computers could be better than just paper. He demonstrated the ability to undo mistakes, transform pre-existing drawings, use a primitive form of version control and more. In his paper, he emphasized that computers were more than just a new kind of slate; they were design partners-in-waiting,

As we have seen in the introductory example, drawing with the Sketchpad system is different from drawing with an ordinary pencil and paper. Most important of all, the Sketchpad drawing itself is entirely different from the trail of carbon left on a piece of paper. Information about how the drawing is tied together is stored in the computer as well as the information which gives, the drawing its particular appearance. Since the drawing is tied together, it will keep a useful appearance even when parts of it are moved. For example, when we moved the corners of the hexagon onto the circle, the lines next to each corner were automatically moved so that the closed topology of the hexagon was preserved. Again, since we indicated that the corners of the hexagon were to lie on the circle they remained on the circle throughout our further manipulations.

It is this ability to store information relating the parts of a drawing to each other that makes Sketchpad most useful.

— Ivan Sutherland, "Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system," 1963.

Sutherland first published his paper in January, 1963.

2001 started filming in 1964.

Sketchpad drew from earlier pen-based graphical interfaces. Interfaces that Marvin Minsky played with and cut his teeth on. When he was a student, the TX-0, the original font of hacker culture, could use a light pen as an input device. And the people at MIT played video games with it. Minsky himself might have played these games,

Minsky was immersed in the soup that created modern computing because his teachers and mentors built much of it. To quote Minsky,

I had a great teacher in college, Joe Licklider. Licklider and Miller were assistant professors when I was an undergraduate. And we did a lot of little experiments together. And then about 1962, I think, Licklider went to Washington to start a new advanced research project that was called ARPA.

— Marvin Minsky, MIT oral history interview for the InfinteMIT Project.

While Licklider was at MIT, teaching Minsky, he was also a human factors expert for SAGE, or the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. A hyper-ambitious project to bring together RADAR data from across the US with air-traffic control data and military flight data to detect overflight by the USSR.

SAGE is typically remembered as the first large-scale computer network, but it was also the first widespread deployment of real-time compute. People around the country would interact with SAGE’s computers via consoles that used “light guns” to point and interact with digital objects on the display,

SAGE significantly automated what used to be an intensely manual and paper-based task. The earliest defensive RADAR systems, like Chain Home, relied on paper to pass around information;

SAGE took the operations performed by those people on paper and directly translated them onto the screen while reducing the number of people required. Was it a direct one-to-one translation? No, but it was pretty close.

Minsky grew up within arm’s reach of the seeds that grew into the iPad and the (eventual) obsession with going “paperless.” He was arguably one of the very few people in the world who could have corrected Kubrick and Clarke when they wrote the iconic scene of Dave showing HAL his sketches on paper. But he didn’t. Why?

Why do we have a gap between 2001’s adept predictions about computing, screen technology, and AI versus this inability to put two-and-two-together and augur the inevitable end of ubiquitous paper?

What did Kubrick & Clarke get right and why? A story about flat screens.

Before we get there, it’s worth examining the inverse, i.e., unlikely predictions they did get right.

Kubrick and Clarke successfully predicted a closely related technology — flat screens. For screens, in 2001, the world was flat. Be it at large lunar bases,

Or, spaceships heading into the unknown,

They nailed it. That’s impressive. And it should be impressive.

We take the existence of flat screens for granted, but when Kubrick and Clarke were making 2001, there weren’t any in existence.6 The very first practical flat screen display (which was also a touchscreen) was invented sometime in 1964 by Donald Bitzer for PLATO and it wasn’t deployed until the late 1960s — i.e., after Kubrick and Clarke had begun writing the novel and film.7

He was also outside of Kubrick and Clarke’s sphere of influence, so it’s doubtful that he was the source of their flatscreen dreams.

So where did the dream come from? A reasonable guess is RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. The Google of its time.

In the 1960s, for more than a decade, the RCA had doggedly pursued the end of Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology. RCA's president and chairman, David Sarnoff, wanted the company to pursue the creation of "optical amplifiers," likening them to the invention of the loudspeaker,

Now I should like to have you invent an electronic amplifier of light that will do for television what the amplifier of sound does for radio broadcasting. Such an amplifier of light would provide brighter pictures for television that could be projected in the home or the theater on a screen of any desired size. An amplifier of sound gave radio a 'loudspeaker,' and an amplifier of light would give television a “big-looker.”

— David Sarnoff, RCA President, September 27th, 1951

Three years later, RCA researchers debuted a flat-panel light amplifier that consisted of an electroluminescent phosphor segment combined with a Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) photoconductor; Sarnoff attended the unveiling,

By this point in time, an RCA engineer, Jan Rajchman, had summarized RCA’s new flat-panel dreams in an internally circulated memo,

For a long time there has been a desire to produce a ‘Mural Television Display’ which would be a large flat box-like device with a large rectangular face and relatively small thickness. This then could be used on the wall of the viewing room.

— Jan Rajchman, Internal RCA memo, 1952

By 1955, they had made rough, pixelated flat-panel TVs that offered — to them — a glimpse of the future, their mural TV that would eventually hang on a wall,

These were big, unwieldy lab prototypes, but they were prototypes of a future beyond CRTs. A future RCA broadly publicized via the press from one of RCA’s patents,

I don’t know if Kubrick followed these developments closely, but it’s very likely he did. These predictions were “in the air.” RCA had made sure of it. Just as you know about Google’s AI projects or Google X etc.

Knowing the above, it shouldn’t be surprising to us that 2001 followed RCA’s trail of logic and shrunk its hangs-on-the-wall TV even further to put it on a table. It was the next logical step.

Nor should it be surprising that 2001 has 0 CRTs; their elimination was — for them — another logical step.

What should be surprising, and what remains surprising to me, is that no one thought about writing on a screen, given that they were already “writing” (or drawing) on CRTs.

In their brilliance, they saw how A would directly lead to B ("Now that we can build useful flat displays, it means that someday there will be no more thick CRTs!"), but they couldn't predict how A and B would radically reshape their environments.

Or, "if we can put TVs on a table as if they were pieces of paper, would that mean that paper will become a TV?"

So... Why didn’t they?

Most pieces I’ve read on failed predictions usually assume that the correct prediction didn’t occur to the predictors. I don’t think that’s the case with Kubrick and Clarke. It doesn’t give them or their team enough credit. It’s also a very boring way of looking at the world.

I want to make the argument that they were too skilled not to. But they were (sadly) too smart to embrace the result.

While in the movie, the iPad-like device is just a movie, in the novel, it is so much more;

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

They were so close; why didn’t they embrace their true potential?

A good friend of mine, Dave, suggested the following possibility, they ruled it out because of good technical sense. The movie reflects the prevailing mode of computing at the time — a centralized large computer (HAL in the spaceship) with users getting access piecemeal via dumb terminals or displays.

It was hard for them to imagine another reality. The technical marvel that was SAGE relied on a computer called AN/FSQ-7 — or Q7 for short, that weighed 250 tons, took up 22,000 sq.ft., and had a floor of a bunker dedicated to it; another two were dedicated to the user-interface;

A view of the floor plans obtained from a digitised IBM manual,

Transistors had made computers like the Q7 smaller, but it wasn’t obvious at the time just how powerful miniaturization was going to be. Integrated circuits had debuted less than half-a-decade ago, and they just weren’t very good. The defining technology of our age looked like a dud in the 1960s.

If an internet comment section had been around during the debut of the IC, they would have pointed out that decades of research had conclusively shown that nichrome was the best material to make resistors with, mylar for capacitors. Silicon? Bah, humbug.

And they would have been right.

To quote Jack Kilby himself, “These objections were difficult to overcome, [..] because they were all true.” It also faced headwinds from the industry. Consequently, the vast majority of the industry didn’t take one of the defining inventions of the century — arguably human history — seriously.

As late as the spring of 1963, most manufacturers believed that integrated circuits would not be commercially viable for some time, telling visitors to their booths at an industry trade show that “these items would remain on the R&D level until a breakthrough occurs in technology and until designs are vastly perfected.”

— Leslie Berlin. “The Man Behind the Microchip” (p. 136) quoting Richard Gessell, “Integrated Circuitry Held Far From Payoff,” Electronic News, 27 March 1963.

No one lavished magazine pages on it. No one wrote much about it, if at all, except to criticise it and the absurd Apollo Program’s boneheaded decision to use it to make a guidance computer instead of a sensible solution like transistors. In 1959, according to the technical press of the day, the real breakthroughs were gallium arsenide diodes and backward-wave oscillators.

No one took it seriously other than a few companies across the US and Eldon C. Hall.

Standing in the mid-1960s, it would have been fantastical to suggest that this technology would eventually keep miniaturizing; offering better performance for cheaper all while doing pre-existing operations faster every time the feature size shrank. And yet, that is what occurred.

Our reality has ended up far more miraculous than anything Kubrick and Clarke could have contrived. We have stagnated in areas where they thought we would prosper. We have prospered where they believed anything but stagnation was impossible.

They couldn’t imagine the iPad because they couldn’t re-imagine their constraints.

Tablets don’t make sense in a mainframe environment. There’s something a bit like a light-pen in 2001; it’s shown in the scene when Dave, Frank and HAL are troubleshooting a circuit, but it’s tethered to a workstation. Sensibly so.

From their perspective, a portable tablet-like device would have been absurd. As a dumb terminal, it would have to constantly, wirelessly poll the mainframe while simulating writing on paper. Why would you do that when you could just write on paper? Why would you waste the bandwidth and resources necessary to perform these constant operations when a paper would offer better fidelity for cheaper?

It’s a compelling argument. Some people still make it today.

On the other hand, portable media consumption would have made a lot more sense to them — transistor radios were a runaway success and were an early indication of what was to come. And they weren’t wrong in this regard. The vast majority of tablet users use their portable devices to consume rather than produce. Most of the time. But the possibility that the device could be more than that eluded them. They just couldn’t see outside that narrow use case and imagine what portable computing would enable.

The technology required to shrink computers just wasn’t there and the one touted as the pathway towards it wasn’t credible and was restricted to expensive, limited use cases — or, so their advisors must have told them. And being the clever, well-educated people they were, Kubrick and Clarke believed them.

Which is why they came so close and yet remained so frustratingly far from predicting the iPad.

Yesterday, some very lucky people got to play Kerbal Space Program in real-life. And luckily, we got to watch.

Their prototype was a 394’ (120m), 11 million lbs (~5,000t) behemoth that generated twice the thrust of the Saturn V at launch. Nominally, it’s going to consume somewhere between 44 thousand lbs (~19.7t ±0.4) to 46 thousand lbs (21.45t) of propellant (methane and liquid oxygen) per second.1

For comparison, the Saturn V consumed around 28 thousand lbs per second (or, more precisely, 12,885kg/s). Using the international unit of African bush elephants, Starship will consume an extra ~51 bush elephant equivalents of propellant per minute, give or take some elephants (but what are a few elephants between friends?).

Their project is so massive that when they lit the candle, its infrared signature could be observed from Geostationary Orbit,

The satellite that captured the above IR images (GOES-16) also saw the rocket’s plume (1), its shadow (2), and its destruction(3). The satellite’s sensors capture images in strips that are stitched together. Accordingly, different parts of the image below are likely to be from different time points.

The test ended in the most Kerbal way possible. 172s into the flight, they lost control. After 67 seconds of donuts, as their flight control system worked furiously to regain control, whoever was in charge of Range Safety triggered the vehicle’s Flight Termination System. The prior sentence is a fancy way of saying that they triggered explosive charges on the fuel tanks, rupturing them to reduce the size of the eventual explosion.

It was spectacular.

Pre-launch, I tried to start a betting pool around the launch’s outcomes. No one took me up on the offer.

People were surprised that I was so cheerful about the rocket meeting a fiery end. I tried to explain that it's the first time in history that someone has lit 33 rocket engines simultaneously. The record was previously held by the Korolev’s N-1. All four of its prototypes met a fiery end.2

SpaceX is trying to outdo them. They’re building something 60% more powerful than the N-1. Something that pumps many, many elephants of propellant per second. And they’re trying to build it in a way that can withstand the violence of flight and launch with minimal refurbishment a dozen-plus times.

The odds have always been stacked against them.

Post-launch, the reaction was split. Almost everyone in the space community loved every second of it. But outside the community, most of the world saw it as a failure and a waste. This sharp split isn’t something new. It has existed for as long as we’ve been building rockets.

Explosions and rocketry go together like bread and butter. SpaceX didn’t invent this golden combination. It has always been this way.

Back when Robert Goddard was a newly minted undergraduate trying to make his way in science, he was kicked out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute for causing one explosion too many. Before JPL was JPL, it was the Suicide Club (Or, Suicide Squad), so named because its members were clearly suicidal. They were kicked out of Caltech after an explosion that either set a dorm on fire or embedded a steel plate in a wall (depending on whom you ask). But either way, kicked out they were. As John Clark put it in ‘Ignition!’, “Pioneers are seldom appreciated.”

Out in the desert, the Suicide Club blew up many an experiment on their test stand. But work continued, culminating in JPL’s first rocket experiment,

Four times that day they tried to test fire their small rocket motor. On the last attempt, they accidentally set fire to their oxygen line, which whipped around shooting fire! These were the first rocket experiments in the history of JPL. They tried again on Nov. 15, 1936, and their experiment finally worked.

— JPL’s Early History. Accessible here.

Their work eventually became the first rocket startup, Aerojet, that developed and deployed the first commercial rocket motors in the US. One-by-one, starting with the dropout Jack Parsons, the founders were kicked out and lost control. As von Kármán put it,

Unhappily for us, no bank would lend us money; bankers hadn’t yet come to think of rocketry as a stable business.

— von Kármán, Theodore & Lee Edson.”The Wind and Beyond.” 1967.

Even as rocketry grew up, it remained true to its explosive roots. Much of the safety data used today was derived in experiments with a high-eyebrow singe potential,3

Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it—the acid valve is leaking!"

"Go ahead —fire anyway!" Paul ordered.

I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog- eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.

I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, to collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.

— Clark, John Drury. Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants. Rutgers University Press, 1972.

You cannot do the impossible without a few explosions along the way.

The journalist Jay Barbree4 once called Alan Shepard “a cool cat” and an “educated daredevil” during an interview. There is no better description of spaceflight.

You have to be a little crazy and a bit of a daredevil to do it. The field was started by misfits and hermits who dreamed of worlds beyond their own, and it is continued by successive generations of weirdos seeking to do the impossible in some shape or form. Be it landing a car on Mars or building skyscrapers that can fly.

But getting the golden mixture of sanity, knowledge, and craziness right is critically important. It is the same as rocket fuel, the wrong mixture mixed in the wrong proportions will blow up in your face. It is critically important that craziness is never mixed with stupidity, or you end up in the desert running away from carelessly handled UDMH and NTO.5

We are splitting a fine line here. Most people are unable to distinguish between those capable of pulling off impossible feats and those who are just unhinged. Careful, calculated discernment is necessary.

Calculated discernment is where the educated part of ‘educated daredevil’ comes in. Every single grand space project that has succeeded was successful because of people who understood every part of the system they were trying to create and could discern the difference between acceptable risk and stupidity. That’s what separates the Alan Shepards from the Lawnchair Larrys.

It is at this point some people will remark, “Why not make it as safe as possible then? And make sure that the system works no matter what?”

The problem is that we’re primitives. We’re dealing with immense energies and forces with materials and understanding that’s still quite rudimentary. For example, the first stage of Saturn V’s raw thermal energy output was around 46,788.5 MJ/s per engine. Or 233,942.5 MJ/s for all five engines. For a 168s burn duration, the total thermal energy that was channeled by the machine is roughly equivalent to 2/3rds the yield of the weapon used at Hiroshima. At lift off, the output power of the Saturn V exceeded the output of all nuclear power stations operational in the US at the time.6

Starship’s first stage is in excess of that.

The history of spaceflight shows that holding on to the idea that these forces can be dealt with without any risk is a dangerous notion. It’s also an expensive one. And you end up falling into the trap that post-Apollo NASA fell into,

Risk is a combination of the probability of an undesirable event and its consequences. There are different flavors of consequences: technical, cost, schedule, safety, political. As a project becomes more expensive, the financial consequences of failure become more dire. That risk can be mitigated, but those procedures are expensive, increasing the cost, thus increasing the risk…ad infinitum.

Because of spiraling costs and schedules, NASA did not launch a single planetary mission between 1978 and 1989.

— Frank, Elizabeth. Faster, Better, Cheaper: A maligned era of NASA's history. 2019. Accessible here.

During the ‘90s, President Clinton appointed Daniel Goldin to be NASA’s administrator, he is the one who diagnosed and first defined the above paradox of how chasing safety led to greater and greater risks,

There’s a paradox at work here that creates a downward spiral. Launching fewer spacecraft means scientists want to pile every instrument they can onto whatever’s going to fly. That increases the weight, which increases the cost of the spacecraft and the launcher. Fewer spacecraft also means we can’t take any risk with the ones we launch, so we have to have redundancy, which increases weight and cost, and we can’t risk flying new technology, so we don’t end up producing cutting edge technology.

— Daniel Goldin, 1992-3(?)

Administrator Goldin’s answer was simple. They were going to eliminate the systems management technique used during Apollo, and they were going to leverage commercial-off-the-shelf advances in miniaturization to put new technology in space to perform new missions faster, better, cheaper.

Tacitly, though not explicitly, he endorsed the idea that risk was okay. And the result was a mini-golden age.

During Administrator Goldin’s Faster, Better, Cheaper (FBC) era, NASA frequently had projects that were delivered before time and under budget,

The Viking mission to Mars in 1976 cost $1.06 billion in real-year dollars and took 6 years to develop. The Pathfinder team was instructed to send a lander AND rover (Sojourner) to Mars in half the time and 1/14 the budget. They succeeded.

— Frank, Elizabeth. Faster, Better, Cheaper: A maligned era of NASA's history. 2019. Accessible here.

Sojourner was the first successful rover on Mars, and the entire team’s budget was less than that of a single instrument on Viking.

Of course, with acceptance of risk comes risk. In 1999, four out of five of the FBC missions failed spectacularly. It didn’t matter that the total cost of all 16 FBC missions was still less than the Viking missions and Cassini. It didn’t matter that NASA’s Inspector General was asked to investigate FBC and recommended “fully incorporating” it into NASA’s approach. What mattered to the politicians, the press, and the public was that NASA failed. The affair was a “national embarrassment.”

Administrator Goldin was hauled in front of Congress, and that was the end of NASA’s SpaceX era.

There is a sharp difference between those who play status games, and those who are interested in creation and exploration. That difference can be measured in explosions.

This post is a somewhat brief introduction to a session on supernovas being hosted by Dr Andy Howell. There are two parts,

• Dr. Howell’s introduction to his talk

• Supernovas on human scales by areoform

Dr. Howell’s introduction to his talk.

A supernova is so catastrophic that the explosion of a single star can outshine the other hundred billion stars in a galaxy. The last time one was seen by humans in the Milky Way, it was obvious for weeks in the sky to most of the planet, and could even be seen in the daytime. It was one of the indications that the heavens were not perfect and unchanging, helping Galileo to chisel away at the Catholic Church's claim to be the single source of truth, and ushering in the modern scientific revolution. 

In my lifetime we've gone from almost never seeing a supernova to discovering thousands per year in distant galaxies. Since supernovae achieve energies far beyond what humans could ever hope to produce, they are natural laboratories for probing the frontiers of physics. This has led to an explosion of knowledge spanning the origins of subatomic particles, the creation of black holes, the limits of relativity, the origins of the universe, and the discovery and study of Dark Energy. Even the origin of the elements depend on supernovae, as does our own existence — most of the raw material in your body was created in a supernova. They have impacted some of the biggest forces in human life too, including commerce and warfare.  

At the forefront of this frenzy of new information sits Las Cumbres Observatory, a robotic network of telescopes placed around the globe so that they can observe as one instrument continuously, uninterrupted by daytime. It combines two of the most disruptive technologies in history - the telescope and the internet - to see the universe in a way never possible before. Our insights are also being used to shape the next generation of technology. 

In 2024 astronomers will begin to use the Vera C. Rubin observatory -- a telescope that will image the entire visible sky every few nights, finding ten million things that change each night. This big data revolution is changing the way astronomers work, and like the invention of the digital camera, our technology will eventually impact the larger society. And in 2027 we plan to launch the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, a spy satellite repurposed to be our first wide-field infrared instrument in space. It will measure supernovae nearly back to the beginning of time, giving us the best possible insight into the nature of the elusive Dark Energy that dominates the universe.

Supernovas on human scales

The Soviet Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed using energy as a marker for civilizational progression. Kardashev's model focuses on the harnessing of energy, but if we extend his model to include releases of energy, there are four moments that stand out in the history of humans (and our direct evolutionary ancestors);

The first is the taming of fire in the distant past. This event is old enough to have had a profound impact on our physiology. The proportion of your limbs; the shape of your teeth; and the development of your brain were all shaped by the hominid discovery of fire,

Indeed, recent studies demonstrate a preference by nonhuman primates for cooked food (Wobber et al. 2008). The higher food energy that cooking supplies, as well as the detoxifying effects of heating (which increased the diversity of available food), contributed to a fitness advantage in these early humans. Furthermore, cooking implied a delay in food consumption, which required the development of social abilities for the distribution of tasks within the group (e.g., collection, accumulation, cooking, defense, even stealing), as well as the socializing effect of gathering around nighttime campfires (Pyne 1995). These factors are thought to have prompted the evolution of large brains and bodies, small teeth, modern limb proportions, and other human traits, including many social aspects of human-associated behavior (Wrangham et al. 1999). Indeed, by softening food, fire could have had a large effect on extending the human life span beyond the age of good-quality teeth. This may have been very significant in social organization, including the “grandmother” hypothesis relating child care with social development and human evolution (Hawkes 2004).

— Pausas, Juli; Keeley, Jon. “A Burning Story: The Role of Fire in the History of Life.” BioScience, July 2009. Pages 593–601.

The second is the discovery of gunpowder. This discovery shaped the history of civilization and the governance structures that undergird our world.

The third moment happened within a human lifespan, 77 years ago. Unlike the other two, we know exactly the moment when the threshold was crossed; 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time on July 16, 1945. A subgroup of humans achieved fission that day with a yield of at 24.8 ± 2 kilotons of TNT. Or, 103.8 ± 8.4 * 10^12 Joules. For the sake of simplifying calculations, we're going to round it out to 100 * 10^12 Joules. This event was Trinity.

From the cosmic perspective, humans released about the relativistic mass-energy equivalent of 0.042 ounces on that day. Or, 1.2g. Or, 3 and ⅔'s of a regular aspirin.

Humanity's fourth big step was taken on November 1st, 1952 at 07:15 local time (UTC+12). Humans released the energy of roughly 10,400 kilotons of TNT. Or, 43,510 * 10^12 Joules. (we'll be rounding this down to 43,500 for future calcs). This event was Ivy Mike.

Cosmically, our species released the relativistic mass-energy equivalent of 1.07lbs of matter. Or, 484g. Or, ⅖'s of a current gen Macbook Air. The highest we've ever achieved is the mass-energy equivalent of two Macbook Air's.

These are impressive numbers, but they don't hold a candle to nature. Dr. Howell was a part of the global group that discovered the first kilonova; an explosion caused by the merger of two neutron stars. This event released approximately ~1.5 * 10^47 Joules of energy. Or, about ~3.6 * 10^34 kilotons of TNT. These numbers are so big that they’re absurd, so let’s break them down.

From the human perspective, here's how the event chalks up against our breakthroughs,

— In terms of Trinity, the event the group found is approximately, 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Trinities. That's still a very large number, it's 200 trillion times bigger than all the grains of sand on Earth (~7.5*10^18)

— Or, once again approximately, 3,450,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Ivy Mikes. Which has fewer zeroes than Trinity (humanity is catching up!), but it's still 460 billion times all the sand on Earth times the pinnacle of current human energy release capability.

At these scales, these events aren't destructive. They're creative. All of the oxygen you breathe was created in a supernova. Almost all of the silver and gold that you've ever touched was created in this type of a neutron star merger. The event that Dr. Howell's team observed, GW170817, is thought to have produced somewhere around 3 to 13 Earth masses of gold. The fuel used by Zeno Power, Strontium1, was likely created in such a neutron star merger. More broadly, almost every single element on this planet above Oxygen was likely created in some form of supernova.

These aren't moments of destruction. They're forges of creation.

In this guest session, Dr. Howell will explore how such events act as natural laboratories for probing the frontiers of physics. And how they've led to an explosion of knowledge spanning the origins of subatomic particles, the creation of black holes, the limits of relativity, the origins of the universe, and the discovery and study of Dark Energy.

For further reading,

• Illuminating Dark Energy with Supernovae by Dr Andy Howell

• The Origin of r-process Elements in the Milky Way

In 1974’s East German hit single ‘Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen’ (you forgot the color film), singer Nina Hagen loudly complains about her holiday being ruined by her boyfriend, Michael, who forgot to bring the eponymous color film. The lyrics go,

  Now nobody believes us how nice it was here, haha, haha
           Nun glaubt uns kein mensch, wie schön’s hier war, haha, haha.

Of course, as you’ve probably surmised, the song isn’t really about the color film. It’s a thinly veiled satire aimed at the communist regime by the artist, toying with everything from the regime’s attempts to pass its citizens’ lives as being nice to Western audiences to the drabness of communist Germany.

As with other jetsam in the stream of the public’s consciousness, the song came and went, with few people remembering its context and meaning. I remember listening to it, thanks to a German history lesson. I found Nina Hagen’s performance so enchanting that I played it on loop for a week before promptly forgetting it.

It would have stayed in the drawers of history, gingerly enduring an occasional prod from a wandering history student, if it weren’t thrust back into the limelight in December 2021.

I wasn’t the only one obsessed with the song in my nascent youth. I and many others shared the experience with a post-reunification German chancellor whom you might be familiar with. Except, for her, it was contemporary. Experienced as a nouveau 20-year-old studying physics at Leipzig University. It must have influenced her deeply, for she chose it as one of three songs that would play her out at the end of her 16-year career as chancellor1.

I am not German. Nor am I fluent in the language — a regrettable lapse that I am working to correct. :)

My infatuation with the song was acontextual. I was a passerby pulled in by M. Hagen’s charm; the lyrics didn’t quite land for me as they would for that young student living under the communist regime. Nevertheless, it must have left a deep mark — moving the famously stoic woman to tears decades later.

And I don’t understand why. What did she hear that I didn’t?

Even if someone from that era sits us down and patiently walks us through line-by-line. We will never be able to recreate the experience that moved Merkel to tears. The information contained within their brain — the thought pattern — that’s necessary for constructing and appreciating the necessary context isn’t communicable.

We will never be able to truly understand or feel how the satire hit under the weight of an oppressive communist regime. Their context is transient in the stream of time. Forever just out of reach, even when exquisitely preserved.

This regrettable process of knowledge loss becomes something more acute and dangerous when it comes to our technology. And it shows up in subtle and surprising ways. Here’s one example of large-scale knowledge loss; what if I told you the picture you have in your mind of one of the most famous machines ever made was wrong?

A machine so famous that you’ve seen in film and stills multiple times (and, perhaps, even in person).

A machine so famous that it is synonymous as The Recognizable Object of its class, like the Golden Gate Bridge.

A machine so famous that even people who don’t know its name can still recognize it.

Yes, for those of you who know me, I am a space nerd. And yes, I am talking about the Saturn V.

I have chosen this as an example of the universality of this image and the relative rarity with which the following details are known.

Most people’s exposure to the Saturn V comes from movies, documentaries, model sets, and museums. Save for two instances of film, almost every depiction you have seen of the Saturn V’s first stage engines is incorrect, or more correctly, incomplete. Every single popular representation either omits or fails to correctly depict a critical aspect of the engines,

For example, Apollo 13 (1995);

Assorted Final Fantasy remake (2020),

Rocket gardens (ca. 2022),

Marshall Space Flight Center displays behind Wernher von Braun (1969/70?),

Textbooks2,

Gorgeous illustrations (2022),

And most consequentially, Lego sets,

These images and museum pieces are either based on the genuine article or are the genuine article themselves. But they are not what the Saturn V looked like on the pad. If you could go back in time to stand underneath the mighty Saturn V before it was launched, the F-1 engines would have looked like products of an arts and crafts project gone awry;

This detail is not a triviality. Every pound (or gram) put on the rocket was there for a purpose. In this case, it was to protect the engines from themselves. Before launch, the engines would be brought into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), and layers of Inconel “foil-batting” would be applied to the more complex engine complex surfaces and asbestos blankets for more straightforward surfaces. As this process took thousands of hours, and they were applying asbestos, almost every other display omits this step.

Interestingly, projects around Apollo 11’s 50th that restored the original film showed this detail to audiences for the first time. One of the better shots of this can be seen in First Man. The film’s VFX team and director, Damien Chazelle, restored NASA’s archival engineering footage from the launch and applied CGI to make details more visible, creating a form of Baudrillard-ian hyper-reality,

At first glance, my digression may appear to be pointless and pedantic. And quite fairly, it is pedantic, but it is not pointless.

The Saturn V is one of the most recognizable machines humanity has ever built, and this is one of its most famous parts. When people think of the word rocket, they think of the Saturn V. Billions of people have looked at this rocket and these engines at least once in their life. Countless schoolchildren have been repeatedly exposed to this machine for decades, not just in the US but across the world. It’s difficult to find a curriculum that doesn’t feature this rocket. 

It’s iconic. So iconic that it has its own mini-cult of adherents who worship it with near-religious fervor. 

And yet, despite all this reproduction and memetic transmission, outside of a few dedicated space fans, we’ve forgotten what a crucial part of it looked like on the launch pad.

We’ve forgotten the asbestos.

Once you pay close attention, this form of forgetting is everywhere. In no particular order, we’ve lost the recipe for roman concrete, the process for creating greek fire, the knowledge and existence of devices like the Antikythera mechanism (before its discovery), odometers (roads had accurate mile markers in the Hellenistic and Roman age, deviating by ±0.2%3), vending machines, primitive steam engines, sophisticated water clocks (with gauges and alarms), etc.

If you had lived concurrently with these inventions, their loss would have been inconceivable. How could anyone forget the recipe for concrete that could last for millennia? Or lifting large stones into a ritual spot without the use of heavy machinery? And yet, we’re the same species that forgot the existence of sophisticated analog computers for millennia before an accidental discovery.

This process of forgetting seems to be like Philip K. Dick’s kipple. A form of entropy baked into us that steadily occurs without us noticing. Forever multiplying unless we consciously fight against it.

I have observed it in my personal projects. I’ve written bits of code that worked and I thought were exceedingly clever in their “simplicity,“ only to come back a year or three later and be faced with inscrutable ancient Greek.

I have also observed it at larger scales within organizations that I have consulted with, ”oh, no one knows how that works anymore, the people who built it have left, and we don’t want to touch it right now.“ And we can witness it writ large with projects like the Saturn V.

Observations.

While examining the problem, two details stood out to me,

Forgetting starts at the edges.

Little details seem to always fall first. They’re the first casualties in our war against entropy. We don’t start out by forgetting the major things; rather, the loss occurs through gradual buildup. Details, like the engine batting, are harmless, but they add up. Over time, the process of forgetting seems to accelerate, and the amount we forget appears to grow as well.

Documentation (usually) doesn’t help.

Documentation doesn’t help. Almost all documentation regarding the Saturn V has been preserved. Yet there were so many changes, so many little details that never made it in, and so much to record that it is simultaneously too much and not enough.4 Documentation is, at best, a tool to help those in the present communicate with others. At worst, it’s a simulacrum of understanding that quickly falls apart on close examination.

Re: Documentation

Some will (rightly) question my observation that documentation doesn’t help. While a broader, more formal study still needs to be performed, the real-world examples I’ve seen firsthand and have read of seem to suggest that documentation rarely (if ever) rises to its intended and stated purpose; documenting a project.

The most emblematic of these cases is the story of FOGBANK. A substance that is the subject of my favorite quote,

After the fall of the Soviet Union, under President Clinton, the US decided to scale back some of its Cold War-era infrastructure in anticipation of a new era of peace. The “end of history.” One of the many things decommissioned during this era was a small plant near Oak Ridge National Laboratory that produced FOGBANK (an aerogel) for the US nuclear arsenal.

At the time, the cuts made sense. The beyond classified material was also beyond expensive to produce. Its factory was even more expensive to maintain. From the perspective of decision-makers at the time, mothballing the factory was the most optimal decision as the production process had been extensively documented. The material had been extensively characterized. They had documentation regarding its properties and (presumably) data from testing. They knew the machines used to make it.

It “just made sense” to remove the physical asset while retaining the knowledge. Surely, they could spin up a new factory if more of the material was required in the future.

In 2000, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) decided that it would keep the weapons the material had been used in for another 40 years. As the material had a rated lifespan, this decision couldn’t be executed without restarting the production process. A decision was made to allocate $23M to find an alternative and to spin up the factory again. After all, how hard could it be?

They failed.

When they tried to recreate the material following the steps they’d been given, it didn’t display the original properties. Neither did the alternatives. It took nearly $70M and a few more years of experimentation before they finally replicated the material.

Unsurprisingly, the original documentation was lacking — limited both by the practices at the time and what they couldn’t have known. Even the best technology in the ‘80s didn’t detect that the material’s properties were due to a trace impurity and that without this impurity, the process wouldn’t be the same.

The difference was so subtle that it took years and $70M to find the problem. From LANL’s brief explanation;

I used to write research reports for a living. One of the customers I once had was a foundry operated by someone who had spent decades in the industry. While talking to him, he told me something astonishing, when casting something like Aluminum alloy 7075 (AA7075), they would vary the composition of the alloy ever so slightly on a regular basis depending on the day’s humidity, temperature, and casting results.

This practice was surprising to me as I’d always presumed that the alloy composition would be fixed, but on further reading, I learned that there is always some leeway in the mix. For example, the short recipe for AA7075 is,

Aluminum : 87.1 – 91.4%
Zinc : 5 – 6%
Magnesium : 2.1 – 2.9%
Copper : 1.2 – 2%
Trace (Silicon, Titanium,         : <= 0.5%
Chromium, Iron, Manganese 
etc.)

Like a chef baking a pie, my customer would change the percentage of each element based on what they felt the day’s castings needed. The day-to-day compositions were recorded in a notebook, but the why behind it and the how were a closely guarded secret.

This foundry was by no means an outlier in the industry. I checked with the other handful of foundry customers I had, and they reported similar practices. An entire national security critical industry runs on the concentrated experience of a few hundred to thousand people. Those in glass houses should not cast stones, but their bus factor is worse than the software industry!5

A Solution (?)

In some depictions of Greek myth, the Moirae (or, the fates) would weave destinies into a tapestry that would inform the story of the world. For each life they’d weave into the tapestry, one would spin the thread, the other would measure, and the third would cut. If the tapestry of fate was made out of lives, then the tapestry of our civilization is made out of the individual and collective achievements of humanity. Including what we have achieved in our attempts to solve this problem.

There are as many solutions to this problem as there are lost civilizations. For example, the now extinct Druid order was a strictly oral culture due to their desire to preserve their secrets, and their belief in a strong oral tradition being necessary for mental acuity.6 We remember them through the eyes of Romans, and one Roman in particular, Julius Caesar — who painstakingly recorded his campaigns.7

Counterintuitively, the fact that we forgot the druids doesn’t mean that the oral tradition isn’t somewhat effective. It was, after all, the dominant medium of human knowledge transfer for most of our existence — the following quote is from the book Signs of Orality,

The uncomfortable truth is that nothing we have tried so far, no technology we’ve invented, so far, has allowed us to prevent knowledge loss. We have lost more than 50% of all feature films made before the 1950s, and over 90% of all movies made before 1930.8 We are already unable to access substantial amounts of important data stored on floppy drives,

“But, then again, sometimes it could just be a bad set of disks,” said O’Neill. “I’ve hit a whole run where double-sided, high-density disks don’t work. I can’t get them to read. Sometimes I’m able to recover them quickly; sometimes not. Sometimes the third time works. It’s trial and error. But you have to balance that with what’s on the disk and whether or not it is worth the extra levels of work.”

- Tracking Digital Collections at the Library of Congress, from Donor to Repository

Nothing we have tried in the past two hundred thousand years of our species’ existence has successfully captured and preserved sufficiently complex knowledge for future transmission. Or, rather, nothing that we have tried so far has worked. We have tools that our ancestors didn’t. What if we imagine what a potential solution could look like?

In the spirit of decomposing problems and spherical cows in a vacuum, let’s imagine that we have some magical tool that can create any technology that we can imagine, what would the solution to this problem look like? How would it work?

For me, the answer to this question is “obvious,” if I could magically create any technology that had the potential to solve this problem, then I would recreate braindances from Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk universe.

To quote the in-game text;

Braindance.

As braindance's popularity spread, public opinion divided into two camps: those who saw the new technology as a revelation, and those who saw it as a threat. Some predicted braindance would save humanity as we know it, bringing an end to unnecessary conflict and ushering us into a new utopian age of mutual understanding and respect. After all, the argument went, if you look at yourself from your enemy's point of view, if you understand him deeply – and vice versa – he ceases to be your enemy.

Others, however, foresaw a wave of new addictions, deepening isolation and societal division, even a crisis of identity.

In the end, the market proved both views right – braindance became an everyday product, another form of entertainment, but also a new form of surveillance.

In the Cyberpunk universe, characters with Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) can step into the consciousness of other individuals through “braindances.” A braindance isn’t just a simulation of what the other person saw and experienced at a sensory level, but rather it’s the recording and immersive playback of someone’s consciousness.

As a fan of the Pondsmith’s universe, and sci-fi in general, it is interesting to me that these stories never quite tackle the profound effects such BCIs would have on knowledge work. A braindance is different from simply “downloading knowledge” — a fact that’s never truly explored in these stories. Instead of downloading say, a physicist’s understanding of,

What if you could download and experience Einstein’s consciousness as he conceived, drafted, and created the field equations? What if you could sit in Emmy Noether’s body as she wrote her theorems? Or felt the beautiful desolation as you step out of the LEM in Neil Armstrong’s shoes? Or, experience Swan Lake from the perspective of the ballerinas?

If we could record, store, and transmit the configuration of our neural state as we are in the process of discovering, creating, and problem-fixing our inventions, then we could theoretically eliminate the problem of knowledge loss.

If such a machine existed, it would be a solution to our problems. Which, I believe, gives us an indication of how to solve the problem within the constraints of our current technology.

We don’t have a magical BCI that can jack into our brains and record our neural contexts for posterity (not yet, anyway). However, what if we used the ideal case to generate the next best thing? What if we could induce — through questions, examples, explanations, and sample problems — an approximate neural state in someone else?

We already do this, sub-optimally, in teaching — what if some of those stratagems could be adapted for preserving technology? It won’t be 100% effective. But it could be a potential solution with greater efficacy than current practices.

More concretely, we could shift the role of documentation from describing what something does or how something was done, but rather attempting to teach why the system does X, why choice Y was made, before detailing the how.

If we are truly dedicated, and willing to go a step further, then we could take a page out of the reverse engineering handbook, and have a small “clean room” team that have access to the project notes and documentation, and nothing else. Can they recreate the project from those notes, in that vacuum?

Or, less ambitiously, if given access to the code base/blueprints, can they understand what does what, and successfully add to the project?

As a concrete example, we can turn back to the Saturn V. If we were attempting to preserve this element of the project using this methodology.

F-1 Engine Thermal Protection System.

When firing on the test stand, $ENGINEER expressed concern about the heat being produced by the engines. Most of the engineering of the first stage was dictated by thermal constraints and Milton Rosen’s desire to have a “Big ****ing Rocket.” The original design called for 4 F-1 engines, as seen here,

The addition of one more F-1 increased the amount of thrust available for the vehicle. But one of the bigger problems was that the quartet had a empty space in the middle. People were worried that exhaust gases would accumulate with potentially explosive consequences. Adding a fifth engine and its plum filled the void and directed the heat away from the base of the first stage.

But the engine still got too hot!

The fuel pump delivered 15,471 gallons or 58,560 liters of RP-1 (kerosene) per minute. RP-1 is heavier than kerosene. Assuming 1.02g/ml, we get 995.5kg/s or 2,195lbs/s.

The higher heating value of kerosene is 47 MJ/kg, using that to gain a rough estimate, we arrive at 46,788.5 MJ/s per engine. Or, 233,942.5 MJ/s for all five engines.

That’s nearly five and a half times the amount of energy used by your house in a year. The engines would run for 168s in a nominal launch, or roughly it would be about 63% of the yield of the weapon used at Hiroshima.

Based on measurements of the plume, the peak temperature reached is 2,600˚K/4,220˚F, and it is more than 1.5 miles long.

This is a lot of energy contained in some very hot gases! It has to go somewhere. Ideally, not into our vehicle. But, as the vehicle goes up, due to properties of aerodynamics, the plume starts to climb up the sides of the vehicle9,

There was concern that, at higher altitudes, gases would concentrate around the engines, leading to catastrophic failure from the exterior (a liquid film of fuel protects the interior).

After testing, it was found that inconel and asbestos could be layered to create a shield to protect the engines. Layering was done in A, B, and C steps by personnel in the VAB… [details of the process — note: there isn’t sufficient public information without consulting archivists on the how/why of the precise material choices and foil batting process]

The example is likely subpar as it is a fictional example, but the intent is to preserve the why before explaining how the solution was arrived at. Hopefully, as the reader goes through the example, they can put themselves (imperfectly) in the shoes of the designers and arrive at a more intuitive understanding.

In the future, I will try to document my personal projects in this newsletter using a similar technique in an attempt to practice what I preach. It would be interesting to compare/contrast and see if the results are better at preserving knowledge than the alternatives.

Best,
areoform

1

When the song came out, I doubt it that anyone would have foreseen that the proto-punk bopper would be played by a military band in full dress at a state function to a Chancellor who listens with tears in her eyes.

A mathematical treatment of game theory is beyond this post. However, if you’d still like to truly understand game theory, I would recommend buying a copy of Dr. Martin Osborne’s excellent text, “An Introduction to Game Theory.1” It requires minimal mathematical understanding, and if you’re studying with the solution manual2, you can gain a somewhat fluent beginner’s understanding of game theory.

Game theory, as we know it, was first formalized when, arguably, the smartest human being to ever walk the Earth realized that he was terrible at poker. 

Having mastered calculus by the age of 8, moved the great mathematician Gábor Szegő to tears over his mathematical brilliance by the age of 15, young John von Neumann certainly had the intellectual pre-requisites to be brilliant at poker. He intimately understood the probabilities involved and — for a mind capable of dividing 8 digits in his head almost instantly — could keep track of the branching possibilities as the deck (or decks) played out. And yet he lost. Frequently.

Von Neumann quickly realized that no one had formalized the mathematical process of betting itself. And so, he set out to prove the minimax theorem, which formed the cornerstone of game theory and provided the mathematical basis for the entire field. He published his work in the journal Mathematische Annalenin the paper, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele” in 19283.

He later went on to write and publish the foundational text in the field, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, with Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. Around the same time, he was responsible for helping build the first nuclear bombs. These two events are intertwined in the theory’s beginnings and form the seeds of our world. For if game theory had been conceived on the poker table, it was born at Los Alamos.

It is difficult to overstate the contributions of von Neumann to American strategic policy and the stability of the post-war years. Contributions that were guided by his unique abilities and framed with game theory.

He arrived at that point due to his work during the war years. In more ways than one, the nuclear standoff that our world is perpetually engaged in was created in his mind. He was the one who practically conceived of and demonstrated that the explosive lens-type device used at Trinity and Nagasaki was more efficient than the gun-type device used at Hiroshima. It required extensive calculations of the physics and mechanics of blast waves that seemed beyond the technology of the day. Until von Neumann.

A more ordinary person had left the problem as intractable, causing Oppenheimer to bring in the one person he thought could solve this seemingly impossible problem4,

“We are in what can only be described as a desperate need of your help. We have a good many theoretical people working here, but I think that if your usual shrewdness is a guide to you about the probable nature of our problems you will see why even this staff is in some respects critically inadequate…I would like you to come as a permanent, and let me assure you, honored member of our staff. A visit will give you a better idea of this somewhat Buck Rogers project than any amount of correspondence.”

When Turing was working with the Bombe to break the enigma, von Neumann was running competitions between electromechanical and electronic computers to build the bomb. The first consequential program the Harvard Mark I ever ran was for his explosive lens problem5. The electromechanical computer won, but von Neumann wrote6,

The Los Alamos group completed its work in a much shorter time than the Cambridge group. However, the punched-card machine operation computed values to six decimal places, whereas the Mark I computed values to eighteen decimal places. Additionally, Mark I integrated the partial differential equation at a much smaller interval size [or smaller mesh] and so...achieved far greater precision.

Seizing the importance of this moment, he realized that the most important work he could do, far more consequential than bombs, was computers. His ‘First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC7’ was so widely circulated that the architecture he described within it came to be known (controversially) as the von Neumann architecture, the very same architecture your devices use today.

In doing so, he augured the creation of the Teller-Ulam design — he did the math to demonstrate that it was feasible and possible to create. Executed, of course, on the first digital computers. He pushed for more research into computation and drove the creation of faster computers. At around the same time, he convinced the US Government to give resources to the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (Wernher von Braun’s group) and the Naval Research Laboratory to pursue the development of ICBMs. He felt that multiple groups, collaborating and competing against each other, would reach the goal faster than a single group trying to build it alone8. The Top Secret committee on ICBM design would, naturally, meet in his living room.

In the post-war years, until his death by cancer, John von Neumann was, by and large, the intellect behind US defense policy. His centrality must be understood to punctuate and grasp the failure and limits of game theory. From Marina von Neumann Whitman’s “The Martian’s Daughter,”

In September of 1956, I was sitting in the anteroom of an elegant hospital suite at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in a VIP wing reserved for the president and other high-ranking individuals, both civilian and military. [...] The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father’s involvements, absolute privacy was essential [...]

Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) [...] was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father’s everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.

You may have already arrived at his most famous contribution to American national security. One shaped entirely by game theory. Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s called MAD because he thought it was funny. This game theoretic policy has led the US, and the rest of the world, to spend trillions of dollars over decades to perpetuate the largest “game” ever played. 

However, the implications of MAD aren’t what most people expect. Our current interpretation is a mutation of the original premise, as von Neumann examined the situation mathematically and arrived at a two-party version of Nash’s Equilibrium (John Nash generalized it to n-parties).

More precisely, nuclear annihilation is not an iterated dilemma; therefore, it is completely logical for a first strike to be the best strategic option in this scenario. If State A destroys State B and removes any capacity for State B to strike A, then State A is able to guarantee its future existence and “wins” the game. 

The policy of nuclear retaliation, or a second strike, is an attempt to change the payoff function of this game and add a cost to this form of defection. It adds one more iteration to the game where the player is punished for their defection/first strike. Thereby making sure that the win-state is not attained.

However, this rationale/version of MAD starts to break down the longer that you look at it. What incentive do the submarine commanders have to launch, given that the homeland that they’ve received their orders from has already been destroyed? It is not a rational policy from the survivor’s standpoint to destroy what is left of the world and end their own existence in the process. Therefore they have an incentive to not carry out the second strike, resurrecting the first-strike problem once again.

From this perspective, and from the technology that existed in 1950, game theory predicts only one solution — strike first; strike hard. As he famously put it9,

“If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

It was, and is, a single iteration game with two players operating under a clear payoff function. Clearly, the only correct, rational choice was to annihilate rather than be annihilated.

And yet, we’re still here. Despite many, many, many close calls. Including the times when the US accidentally, almost, nuked the Carolinas. Twice.  (that we know of.) 

Why?

In 1962, the Soviet submarine B-59 thought that nuclear war had already broken out. They had been out of contact with Moscow for days. US Navy destroyers were dropping signaling depth charges onto them despite their presence in international waters. The captain decided to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo, an act that would have led to the start of a nuclear war.

According to Soviet Nuclear Command & Control procedure, he had to get approval from both the Soviet political officer, and the Flotilla’s Chief of Staff, who happened to be on board. The political officer said yes. Only Vasily Arkhipov, the Chief of Staff, said no. An argument broke out, but Arkhipov stood his ground. And, in doing so, he saved the world.10

Every time we have come close to a strike or a launch, there has been someone like Vasily Arkhipov in the room who has said no. When the cards have been down, people have refused to be the ones to sentence humanity to a, possibly, species-ending self-genocide.

President Nixon used to get drunk. Extremely drunk. And he would sometimes order nuclear strikes. Kissinger would usher him to bed and would get the forces to stand down. It is not unreasonable to say that one of the reasons why Nixon was hastened out of power was because of these incidents.

From Senator Sam Ervin, who led the charge in Watergate (emphasis mine)11; 

Senator Sam Ervin discussed just such a possibility with majority leader Mike Mansfield before they decided on the Watergate probe. It had been, even then, “that thing which was the main fear and therefore the prime issue. Which wasn’t whether or not Nixon was a crook. Millions had been talking on both sides of that issue for more than a quarter century now. Everyone knew what the prime issue was. A certain thumb moving awkwardly towards a certain red button, a certain question of sanity... Query: if the man who holds the thumb over the button is mad...”

This question of sanity caused the probe to become a bipartisan effort. No one wants to be the one to end the world.

In Israel, during the Yom Kippur war, prime minister Golda Meir authorized the arming of nuclear warheads to strike Cairo and Damascus as a last resort. But, ultimately, she stood down and halted all military action, preventing further escalation.

All told, there have been 16 “close calls.” That we know of. The world has faced nuclear annihilation 16 times, and all 16 times, multiple people have refused to press the button despite (seeming) orders and procedures to the contrary.

Their actions are not rational. These outcomes fly against the predictions of game theory. All actors involved understood the dominant strategy and why it was the best strategy, and they chose not to play it. They chose not to end the world.

Dr. Thomas Schelling calls this “the event that didn’t occur,” and he devoted his Nobel prize lecture to the invalidation of von Neumann’s and game theory’s predictions by our 50+ years of applied experience.

What’s worse (for game theory) is that these results aren’t unique. When tested and observed in the laboratory and in the real world, human beings consistently buck its predictions. These anomalies are as common as grains of sand.

In ‘Altruistically Inclined?’ Dr. Alexander Field points out that the concept of reciprocity seems to be hard-wired into us12. In games of public good, the overwhelming majority of participants choose to help one another and their fellow human beings. 

These anomalies represent a profound finding. And the more you think about them, the more you realize that we find humanity’s grace in game theory’s invalidation. Or, as Napoleon pointed out more than two hundred years ago,

The great mass of society are far from being depraved; for if a large majority were criminal or inclined to break the laws, where would the force or power be to prevent or constrain them? And herein is the real blessing of civilization, because this happy result has its origin in her bosom, growing out of her very nature.

However, the invalidation of game theory in this case, sadly, doesn’t mean that it’s strictly wrong.

In Part II, we’ll explore the one place where game theory does apply — within the midst and minds of those reaching for power.