Chapter Two
The robot that Janus was designing would understand what someone was saying and
where their mind was "going" and start talking before the person had finished her
sentence. Although the robot was both being efficient and being correct, he had a
'personality problem'. It is not about 'being right' but it is about letting someone finish
their sentence and giving them the feeling that you heard what they said and understand
them.
One personality wants to be social, another one wants to be intellectual.
Janus’ thoughts were interrupted by a nearby noise. He decided it was time to stop
daydreaming and get back to work. Janus had quit his job designing androids and had
taken a job with a customer who had purchased a number of these androids. His new
boss was an anonymous wealthy man named Mr. M., who had a few projects that required
“special treatment.” Janus was the only human working on this new project. His daily
communications were with the androids ‘whom’ he had created. No doubt the use of
‘whom’ when referring to an android is strange to many people. But if you worked with
them all day and conversed in English (plus engineering buzz words), you would start
thinking of them as humans and referring to them using ‘whom’ and 'who' as well.
Basically the new job assignment was to supervise a group of his androids in “special
projects” for Mr. M.
Janus’ first job was to supervise a group of his androids in creating a computer model of
the earth which would accurately reflect the tension between the earth’s tectonic plates.
He had access to many seismic microphones placed all over the earth. When a
earthquake occurred, tremors moved through the crust and sound waves traveled
through the earth’s core. These sound waves reflected off of the earth’s mantle and
came back across the core of the earth again. By comparing the pattern of the sounds
received at the earth’s surface with the computer model of the earth, Janus and his
androids were able to
“improve” the model to reflect the reality shown by the patterns of sound in the earth.
The job of analysis was similar to the Computerized Tomography (CT) scans of the brain
used in the medical field. If you know the received density of every beam of x-rays
passing through someone’s head than you can perform the reverse transform and derive
the original structure. Such it was with calculating the earth’s structure using random
sound rather than focused x-rays. The next step was to simulate the placing of hydrogen
bombs in various locations so as to create small earthquakes that would relieve the
tension between the plates and thus prevent larger earthquakes from occurring. Placing
such bombs in holes at the bottom of the ocean seemed the most logical thing to do but
one had to consider the disturbance to the ocean that would occur.
The wealthy individual who funded Janus’ work had concluded that no international
organization would ever be able to set off such bombs simply because of the potential
liability. If nature does something by itself, it is called “an act of God” by the insurance
companies and liability lawyers of the world. But if humans were to cause an earthquake
to occur, even if the best of intentions were involved, the lawsuits and insurance claim
disputes would be going on for decades.
Janus’ mind started to wander again. He recited a poem he had set to memory in his
youth, “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons…”
But unlike Miniver, Janus was not sad that he wasn’t living in the past, Janus was sad
that he wasn’t living in the future. He dreamed of a time in the future when he didn’t have
be so secretive about what he did for a living. He envisioned being able to walk up to the
common man and have him understand that nature is not quite as friendly as commonly
portrayed,
nor are human-created H-bombs our “unnatural enemy”. Humans have only a vague
memory of “Noah’s flood” which is quite contorted and confabulated mixture of stories
from survivors of floods and mega-tsunamis from our distant past. You cannot blame
people for trusting nature and distrusting technology. After all, humans evolved in
caves, on mountainsides and next to bodies of water. They didn’t evolve in an
environment where they would say to themselves, “I can tell that a tsunami is coming
and if I only had an H-bomb, I could prevent it.”
Janus’ friend, Somorh, worked on calculating the trajectories of all asteroids in the
asteroid belt around the earth. His second job was to create computer simulations of
how an asteroid which was on a collision course with the earth could be deflected.
This was another secret
“H-bombs for peace” project funded by the same individual that Janus was working for.
Janus and Somorh could tell each other about their projects but couldn’t tell another living
soul except Mr. M., their sponsor.
Janus and Somorh “compartmentalized” their lives. In fact, they decided that having totally
separate personalites for work and for social interactions was quite necessary.
Here are some scribblings found in Janus’ journal. The original notes are quite terse and
use abbreviations that most people would not understand. These notes have been
'padded out’ so as to be more comprehensible to the average reader:
Maslow had his hierarchy of human needs. How about a hierarchy of jobs in various fields?
Real Estate hierarchy of jobs:
Selling homes to people.
Design and build homes.
Design and build housing developments.
Design and build skyscrapers.
Design and build cities.
Guide governments.
Prevent asteroids and comets from colliding with the earth and wiping out much of the
progress to date.
Moving our Sun's other planets to positions where they are more habitable.
Harnessing enough energy to be able to visit other solar systems and establish living
quarters there.
Harness enough energy to be capable of moving planets in other solar systems into more
hospitable locations relative to their suns.
(Reminder: moving planets is a real estate project in which one realizes the importance of
location, location and location.)
Geology:
Warning the people of the world about the impending ice age.
(Note the growing glaciers: http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm)
If the next ice age is like the last one, where will we get the vast amount of energy that will
be required to prevent 2-mile thick ice over Canada and the northern part of the USA?
Philosophy:
Teach the true meaning of life so that people’s goals may be more focused an attainable.
Advanced Society mixed with advanced engineering:
Which of the following methods is most economically feasible?
Design various ecologies for Mars including a complete set of creatures to inhabit that
neighboring planet.
Move Mars to an orbit such as perhaps the earth’s orbit plus 180 degrees, in order to
make it more inhabitable for humans.
Create structures on Mars that would enclose an environment that would sustain human
life.
Design a family of androids which would be able to live under the ecological conditions of
Mars.
Do the same thing for Venus.
Astrophysics:
Astrophysicists tell us that a Type I civilization consumes the energy of its planet of origin,
a Type II civilization consumes the energy of its star and a Type III civilization consumes
the energy of its galaxy. Each of these civilizations is roughly 10 billion times larger than
its predecessor in terms of energy consumption. These definitions are based on
observing that past civilizations on the earth have been roughly proportional to their
energy consumption. The earth is currently considered a Type 0 civilization, too small
to be significant in the grand scheme of things. Confronted with this reality, some people
want to harness the power of fusion atomic reactors and then of our sun itself in order to
move on to a Type I civilization. Meanwhile other people actually want to restrict the use
of energy and go back to the horse and buggy. These people need to be educated as
to the meaning of life and how we are meant to strive to higher and higher types of
civilizations which require the consumption of more energy.
Galileo believed the teachings of Copernicus and was persecuted for it. Can I tell
anyone what my job is? Can I freely reveal my deepest thoughts? I am trying to picture
myself at a party telling someone what I do for a living. “Well, yes, I am working on a
directional H-bomb that can be deployed in great numbers and detonated in a sequence
which will create a series of small earthquakes. These smaller earthquakes will relieve
the tension in faults so that we can avoid having earthquakes whose Richter reading
exceeds six. I am working on this project without the knowledge of any government or
the United Nations. Well, enough about me, what do you do for a living? ”
Janus, it appears, was a very lonely man.
End of Chapter Two
Chapter Three
The robot that Janus was designing would understand what someone was saying and
where their mind was "going" and start talking before the person had finished her
sentence. Although the robot was both being efficient and being correct, he had a
'personality problem'. It is not about 'being right' but it is about letting someone finish
their sentence and giving them the feeling that you heard what they said and understand
them.
One personality wants to be social, another one wants to be intellectual.
Janus’ thoughts were interrupted by a nearby noise. He decided it was time to stop
daydreaming and get back to work. Janus had quit his job designing androids and had
taken a job with a customer who had purchased a number of these androids. His new
boss was an anonymous wealthy man named Mr. M., who had a few projects that required
“special treatment.” Janus was the only human working on this new project. His daily
communications were with the androids ‘whom’ he had created. No doubt the use of
‘whom’ when referring to an android is strange to many people. But if you worked with
them all day and conversed in English (plus engineering buzz words), you would start
thinking of them as humans and referring to them using ‘whom’ and 'who' as well.
Basically the new job assignment was to supervise a group of his androids in “special
projects” for Mr. M.
Janus’ first job was to supervise a group of his androids in creating a computer model of
the earth which would accurately reflect the tension between the earth’s tectonic plates.
He had access to many seismic microphones placed all over the earth. When a
earthquake occurred, tremors moved through the crust and sound waves traveled
through the earth’s core. These sound waves reflected off of the earth’s mantle and
came back across the core of the earth again. By comparing the pattern of the sounds
received at the earth’s surface with the computer model of the earth, Janus and his
androids were able to
“improve” the model to reflect the reality shown by the patterns of sound in the earth.
The job of analysis was similar to the Computerized Tomography (CT) scans of the brain
used in the medical field. If you know the received density of every beam of x-rays
passing through someone’s head than you can perform the reverse transform and derive
the original structure. Such it was with calculating the earth’s structure using random
sound rather than focused x-rays. The next step was to simulate the placing of hydrogen
bombs in various locations so as to create small earthquakes that would relieve the
tension between the plates and thus prevent larger earthquakes from occurring. Placing
such bombs in holes at the bottom of the ocean seemed the most logical thing to do but
one had to consider the disturbance to the ocean that would occur.
The wealthy individual who funded Janus’ work had concluded that no international
organization would ever be able to set off such bombs simply because of the potential
liability. If nature does something by itself, it is called “an act of God” by the insurance
companies and liability lawyers of the world. But if humans were to cause an earthquake
to occur, even if the best of intentions were involved, the lawsuits and insurance claim
disputes would be going on for decades.
Janus’ mind started to wander again. He recited a poem he had set to memory in his
youth, “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons…”
But unlike Miniver, Janus was not sad that he wasn’t living in the past, Janus was sad
that he wasn’t living in the future. He dreamed of a time in the future when he didn’t have
be so secretive about what he did for a living. He envisioned being able to walk up to the
common man and have him understand that nature is not quite as friendly as commonly
portrayed,
nor are human-created H-bombs our “unnatural enemy”. Humans have only a vague
memory of “Noah’s flood” which is quite contorted and confabulated mixture of stories
from survivors of floods and mega-tsunamis from our distant past. You cannot blame
people for trusting nature and distrusting technology. After all, humans evolved in
caves, on mountainsides and next to bodies of water. They didn’t evolve in an
environment where they would say to themselves, “I can tell that a tsunami is coming
and if I only had an H-bomb, I could prevent it.”
Janus’ friend, Somorh, worked on calculating the trajectories of all asteroids in the
asteroid belt around the earth. His second job was to create computer simulations of
how an asteroid which was on a collision course with the earth could be deflected.
This was another secret
“H-bombs for peace” project funded by the same individual that Janus was working for.
Janus and Somorh could tell each other about their projects but couldn’t tell another living
soul except Mr. M., their sponsor.
Janus and Somorh “compartmentalized” their lives. In fact, they decided that having totally
separate personalites for work and for social interactions was quite necessary.
Here are some scribblings found in Janus’ journal. The original notes are quite terse and
use abbreviations that most people would not understand. These notes have been
'padded out’ so as to be more comprehensible to the average reader:
Maslow had his hierarchy of human needs. How about a hierarchy of jobs in various fields?
Real Estate hierarchy of jobs:
Selling homes to people.
Design and build homes.
Design and build housing developments.
Design and build skyscrapers.
Design and build cities.
Guide governments.
Prevent asteroids and comets from colliding with the earth and wiping out much of the
progress to date.
Moving our Sun's other planets to positions where they are more habitable.
Harnessing enough energy to be able to visit other solar systems and establish living
quarters there.
Harness enough energy to be capable of moving planets in other solar systems into more
hospitable locations relative to their suns.
(Reminder: moving planets is a real estate project in which one realizes the importance of
location, location and location.)
Geology:
Warning the people of the world about the impending ice age.
(Note the growing glaciers: http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm)
If the next ice age is like the last one, where will we get the vast amount of energy that will
be required to prevent 2-mile thick ice over Canada and the northern part of the USA?
Philosophy:
Teach the true meaning of life so that people’s goals may be more focused an attainable.
Advanced Society mixed with advanced engineering:
Which of the following methods is most economically feasible?
Design various ecologies for Mars including a complete set of creatures to inhabit that
neighboring planet.
Move Mars to an orbit such as perhaps the earth’s orbit plus 180 degrees, in order to
make it more inhabitable for humans.
Create structures on Mars that would enclose an environment that would sustain human
life.
Design a family of androids which would be able to live under the ecological conditions of
Mars.
Do the same thing for Venus.
Astrophysics:
Astrophysicists tell us that a Type I civilization consumes the energy of its planet of origin,
a Type II civilization consumes the energy of its star and a Type III civilization consumes
the energy of its galaxy. Each of these civilizations is roughly 10 billion times larger than
its predecessor in terms of energy consumption. These definitions are based on
observing that past civilizations on the earth have been roughly proportional to their
energy consumption. The earth is currently considered a Type 0 civilization, too small
to be significant in the grand scheme of things. Confronted with this reality, some people
want to harness the power of fusion atomic reactors and then of our sun itself in order to
move on to a Type I civilization. Meanwhile other people actually want to restrict the use
of energy and go back to the horse and buggy. These people need to be educated as
to the meaning of life and how we are meant to strive to higher and higher types of
civilizations which require the consumption of more energy.
Galileo believed the teachings of Copernicus and was persecuted for it. Can I tell
anyone what my job is? Can I freely reveal my deepest thoughts? I am trying to picture
myself at a party telling someone what I do for a living. “Well, yes, I am working on a
directional H-bomb that can be deployed in great numbers and detonated in a sequence
which will create a series of small earthquakes. These smaller earthquakes will relieve
the tension in faults so that we can avoid having earthquakes whose Richter reading
exceeds six. I am working on this project without the knowledge of any government or
the United Nations. Well, enough about me, what do you do for a living? ”
Janus, it appears, was a very lonely man.
End of Chapter Two
Chapter Three
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