I have co-authored a book about the global warming scandal regarding the leaked emails from a UK university. I would be pleased if you would consider buying it. My next question is, would you like to see a book called 'Does Human Knowledge Double Every Five Years?'
The title is Climategate: The CRUtape Letters. It is available on Create Space here, on Amazon here, on Kindle here, and as a PDF from Lulu here.
"The Climategate scandal covered from beginning to end--from 'Hide the Decline' to the current day. Written by two authors who were on the scene--Steven Mosher and Tom Fuller--Climategate takes you behind that scene and shows what happened and why.
For those who have heard that the emails were taken out of context--we provide that context and show it is worse when context is provided.
For those who have heard that this is a tempest in a teacup--we show why it will swamp the conventional wisdom on climate change.
And for those who have heard that this scandal is just 'boys being boys'--well, boy. It's as seamy as what happened on Wall Street."
Hi all,
As you may have noticed my output has slackened. This is not due to a lack of interest in the topics covered here, but rather to the fact that I have started as a columnist for Examiner.com. I will be writing more frequently there, as I actually get paid to do so.
I welcome your visit there--bookmark me and check back. I get paid by number of visits...
Here's my Examiner home page.
I will continue to post on this weblog--and will probably get back to a semi-regular schedule after the newness of the new toy wears off a bit. Besides, some of the stuff I write here probably wouldn't make it into a daily newspaper column, right?
The project that called me away from this explored the growth of two new 'disciplines'--identity management and information assurance. Both are attempts to put strategic management protocols around all the work that is going on in subsectors relating to passwords, permissions, hand-offs of responsibilities between websites and organisations, etc. They're both new, and they both deal with subsectors that they want to 'control' (i.e., have oversight responsibility for). So I've been exposed to information on the growth of both of them and other sectors as well, such as biometrics.
The next three posts will look at knowledge growth in these sectors. Since two of them were essentially invented after 9/11, the time series will be blessedly short.
The question is how quickly. Here's yet another summary of what is in this weblog. Since April, we have shown that primary evidence of human knowledge, as shown in patents and academic publication, doubles at different rates for different sectors, ranging from 2 years for nanotechnology to 21 years for other sectors.
Secondary evidence, such as the number of university students and funding for research, varies by country. The OECD has reduced government funding for research (and the growth in patents and students in scientific disciplines) has dropped to zero. China and India, among others, are funding research and encouraging students to enter scientific fields, and they are seeing rapid gowth in publications, patents, research funding and students.
But the growth of Asian knowledge engines has not yet replaced the flattening of the growth curve in the developed world. This has led to uneven growth in knowledge--in sexy sectors like nanotechnology, growth is very rapid. In other areas, such as Alzheimer's Disease, it is not as rapid as one would think.
I have been hijacked away from this project for two months, working on a very interesting project called Blindside, which had the benefit of having a paycheck attached to it. It also is tangentially related to what I am doing here, as my next few posts will show.
No reason why you should care about any of the above (but do follow the link if you're interested in how technology relates to UK government, information assurance issues and identity management), but it has caused me to rethink my scheduling for this. I'm going to do more primary research--maybe through the summer--and then tie it up with a couple of really brilliant think pieces and try to sell it as a book.
I'd like to welcome the flood (well, trickle) of readers who have actually found this weblog--I assume it's academic assignments that lead you here. I hope you feel free to comment or ask questions.
Anyway, back to work.
Let's try to look at real world effects of this dangerous illusion we are discovering.
The illusion is that a rapid growth in human knowledge (doubling every five years) is happening all around us, naturally and painlessly. As we hope to have shown on this weblog, human knowledge about a particular subject can increase that fast or faster, but it is always as a result of putting money, institutional resources, interested and bright people to do the research, together. It doesn't hurt to have an urgent public need (HIV) or potential private gain (nanotechnology) as a carrot.
But where these inputs are not provided, human knowledge about a subject grows at a much slower pace. Let me explain what I mean.
Click below for more...
The number of patents filed regarding prions doubles every 2.38 years. The number of patents filed regarding Alzheimer's disease doubles every 6.5 years. That four year difference may not seem very great to you at first glance--and you may think that the few dozen people who are afflicted each year with CJD, the human variation of mad cow disease, also deserve to be treated quickly and with cutting edge science. But there are possibly hundreds of millions who will be afflicted with Alzheimer's disease in the next 50 years, as there are predictions that a) half of all people over 85 will have Alzheimer's disease and b) the number of people reaching that age is going to skyrocket.
But even so, doubling the number of patents every 6.5 years will still mean a huge expansion of human knowledge between now and 50 years out. Right?
The problem is that we don't know how many times we will have to double our knowledge of Alzheimer's disease before we can treat it, vaccinate against it, devise behavioural and cognition therapies that mitigate its effects, and perhaps, some day, cure it.
So here's a hypothetical game. Let's imagine that there are today, June 3, 2007, 100 patents for Alzheimer's disease (In fact, there are 67,900) and 100 patents for prions (In fact, there are 6,771) . And let's pretend that we need 1 million patents to find a cure for Alzheimer's and another 1 million on prions to cure both mad cow disease and CJD.
So, beef-eaters rejoice--we will have the hypothetical 1 million patents needed to cure mad cow disease in December, 2039, using the observed historical CAGR of 33.76% for patents regarding prions. However, don't sell your shares in chronic care facilities that treat Alzheimer's patients.
On the same day in 2039 that we celebrate the cure for mad cow disease with 1 million patents, we will only have moved from our original 100 patents for Alzheimer's to a total of... 3,040, using the observed CAGR of 11.26%. I will be celebrating my 85th birthday, if I'm still around (lovely coincidence, that), and I am really hoping today that we can do better at shielding me from a 50% chance of having the disease.
So when will we get our millionth patent (and miracle cure) for Alzheimer's? In 86.5 years, or in December of 2093. This means our children will have to stump up for a generation of baby boomers in fairly good physical condition sitting out a vacant endgame in some care center while we nod off with Alzheimers.
So the real world question becomes, Who decided to prioritize research into prions instead of Alzheimers?
Imagine the real world consequences if the growth rates for Alzheimer's Disease and prions were reversed. Finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease half a century early, perhaps.
There are some caveats, of course. There are actually more patents and journal publications about Alzheimer's than about prions. (But there should be--people have been studying Alzheimer's disease for a century.) But obviously, Alzheimer's is not being ignored. It just isn't being given the priority I think it deserves.
Also, research on prions may indeed help the fight against Alzheimer's. In fact, it almost certainly will. (But the vice-versa is also true.)
Finally, we don't know if we have to get that many patents to find a cure for either mad cow and CJD or Alzheimer's. We could (and I hope we do) find it tomorrow. But that level of increase may not be enough. We just don't know. Hence, we should make the statistical preparations for a long fight by prioritizing knowledge sectors by a) public need (in this case, number of potentially affected people) and b) any visibility we have on chances for success.
I don't want to be the one making those decisions. I'm not even sure I want to vote for that person (or committee). But I don't want the decisions happening by default, or not even being taken.
We are still 5 days short of our two-month anniversary on this weblog. I am going to try and do some more data mining before the 7th of June, but shortly after that date I am going to turn towards deeper analysis of data already collected. After the 7th, I will be doing research aimed at clarifying points brought up during the first two months' work.
What have we learned so far?
So let's see what happens next.
Well, I'm going off topic again. I've been doing this for a little less than two months, and I have some observations about the process I'd like to share.
First, I think a weblog is the most appropriate forum for me to conduct this research. I will probably test the waters to see if I can get a book out of this, but the ability to hyperlink, the opportunity to write conversationally as I work, the tagging feature of categories (as opposed to the rigidity of chapters), all have made this an easier job for me--something I can do nights and weekends--rather than a herculean labour.
Second, after everybody gets tired of using weblogs to recount their previous night's drinkng exploits, I think that efforts such as this will become the best use of weblogs. I'm not doing anything here that you could not do, if you are reading this. I've put up my principal sources of information and the major tools I use for reference, and if you want to do your own work or fact-check mine-or even take it further, I'll be happy to help in any way I can.
Lastly, as a non-academic (but one who has been exposed to a lot of academic publishing), I recognise that the work I'm doing here is not sufficient to be authoritative. However, I'm trying to ensure that if this stimulates the conversation on the topic adequately for institutional investigation, any researcher will be able to start from a higher point than if I had not done this. And you know what? That's enough for me.
Well, the previous two posts give a fairly good picture of how the U.S. federal government funds research (note that we did not examine state and local funding, nor private sector funding of R&D, nor defense funding, for that matter).
I feel satisfied that I know what's happening in the U.S. But my real frustration is that you, dear reader (icy ironic tone, please) will quite reasonably expect me to find this out for the world.
But while it only took 7 hours to compile the information for the U.S. (due to better and more available statistics), it will take weeks to get a picture of what's happening in the world.
I think I'll put a tip jar on this blog.
Oh, this hurts. I did not want to go into research funding. But now that it is fairly clear that the rate of progress varies significantly by sector, we have to examine the inputs.
The first relevant document found is a PDF from the European Commission. It states that it wants the EU to increase research 'efforts' to 3% of GDP by 2010. Ambitious, that. The document talks about the importance of 'basic research,' as opposed to directed, I assume, which is encouraging. It actually serves as a good basic primer on how funding is structured in Europe, the U.S. and Japan, but while it talks about funding for specific programmes, it doesn't talk about levels of funding at the national or international level. So we move on.
Curious Cat, a blog that bills itself as a Science and Engineering blog, posts research funding for U.S. academic R&D for the past few years (see below in the extended post). More importantly there's a link to the NSF where we find an Excel spreadsheet (also in the extended post below) that charts all federal spending on research for science and engineering between 1970 and 2003. There are other charts available for viewing and downloading here.
In 1970, combined spending by all U.S. Federal agencies for research in science and engineering totaled $4.9 billion (USD). By 2003, that had grown to $53.3 billion (USD). Not bad.
The compound annual growth rate for U.S. Federal funding for research into science and engineering is 7.28%, which means it doubles every 9.86 years.
However, adjusting for inflation to 2006 U.S. dollars, it reads a bit differently. In 2006 dollars, the spend in 1970 was the equivalent of $26 billion, while the 2003 spend rises on recalculation to a total of £58 billion. That provides a CAGR of 2.39%, which would double every 29.35 years. A bit sad, that.
But the spreadsheet breaks spending down by discipline, as well. I'll address that in the next post.
From Curious Cat (the blog mentioned above):
Spending over the last 5 years in billions: $30.7 in 2000; 32.8; 36.4; 40.1 and $42.9 in 2004. For 2004 the funding source for the spending was:
Federal Government: $27.4
State and Local: 2.8
Industry: 2.1
Institutional: 7.8
All other: 2.8
Also for 2004 of the total $32.3 billion was for basic research and $10.6 billion for applied research and development.
Here is the Excel spreadsheet with all Federal spending for basic and applied research between 1970 and 2003. Struck gold, I did.
The OECD charges for their statistical publications, but sometimes you can find a browsable 'Read It' version (sort of try before you buy?). In any event, I found a freebie copy of a 168 page PDF of their Focus on Higher Education document for 2005-2006.
I'm looking for numbers for enrollment, hopefully a time series. However, as I browse through I will put other relevant information here in bullet points. Bear with me--this is a work in progress.
And that's all. Big disappointment. I have seen elsewhere the figure of 88 million university students worldwide--it was from a UNESCO high muckamuck, and I'll link to it when I re-find it. But what I need are annual figures... for the world... going back 1,000 years, if possible--hey, you could send me a link...
According to this website published by Universities UK, In 2004/05, there were approximately 2.3 million students in the UK (Total undergraduate and postgraduate).
This chart shows growth from 1961 through 1995, going from 200,000 to 1 million in 34 years. It's evidently more than doubled in the past eleven years. Even looking only at this period, compound growth is 7.87%, which would double every 9.85 years. Looking at the entire period, CAGR is 7.02%.
Click on the image to see a bigger version. Courtesy of University of Leeds
With the recent addition of student fees, I don't see hypergrowth kicking in any time soon. Hope the rest of the world will compensate.
Charlie Stross looks at improvements in the speed of travel, information technology and bandwidth, says some very interesting things about convergence and the near future.
One idea just charms me--that our children will never have to worry about being lost, any more than we had to worry about being eaten by wolves. I suppose in about ten minutes I'll start thinking about the Big Brother implications, but these ten minutes are nice.
Hat tip Brad DeLong.
Advances in human knowledge should make life better. That's hard to measure. However, we can measure if human life gets longer (it does), healthier, richer (if not more rewarding), etc.
The rest of this post is philosophizing--feel free to skip. And in a previous post, I talk about the Outcomes Fallacy. But if you want thinking on the issue of human knowledge and outcomes, click to read more.
The human population has doubled in my lifetime. Despite this, the percentages of those who are starving, miserably poor, dying in the first five years of their life, dying while giving birth, living under brutal dictatorships, are illiterate and innumerate--all of these are going down. I think this good news is down to advances in human knowledge. (I'll put links onto each of these later.) The sad fact that so many still need to be brought under the umbrella of better living through better knowledge doesn't change the incredible improvements in living--in life--that advances in knowledge have brought us.
I almost facetiously said it couldn't be because human nature is getting better, and then I started to think that maybe advances in human knowledge, and improved access to human knowledge, might actually improve human nature. I might do some checking on this.
But the outcomes of human existence are measurably better for more than half the human race, and there are good prospects that these outcomes will be extended to large portions of those who don't have the chance of finding these good outcomes today.
But human knowledge has grown so quickly that very few are able to get a handle on what we know and how we use this knowledge. Despite the fact that Russia (quite recently) and China (5 years ago) instituded national strategies for pursuing nanotechnology, I'll wager that half the stuff I've found while writing this weblog has passed under their radar. It's just moving too quickly. In 2006 alone, one database of scientific information (Scirus) logged the publication of 7,810 journal articles and 1,668 patents relating to nanotechnology--that's a lot to keep up with. I don't think many do, whether Russian, Chinese, British or American.
This is further complicated by the fact that many of the major changes in the past 50 years are invisible. A century ago, the lighting and heating of houses was very visible, as well as their being equipped with refrigerators, washing machines and a car in front. A lot of the changes that are rocking our world don't look very dramatic. Nanotechnology, applications of genome and proteome research, computer science improvements--nothing looks different when things change in these fields.
So knowledge gets more obscure and esoteric, and its results less obvious. And this may have led to an attitude I've referred to elsewhere in this blog--a lazy assumption that knowledge has become driven by an external force with its own physical laws and a crazy momentum that is beyond human understanding, let alone control.
But if this blog has shown anything, it has shown that advances in human knowledge are the result of choices--choices on where to spend money, what to study at university, what projects to fund, whether public funds or private should be used for research and development, etc. We see that knowledge follows funding and is specific to sectors that become fashionable and and that advances in human knowledge slow down when these sectors go out of fashion.
The Western world has chosen in the past 50 years to advance human knowledge in certain areas, like nanotechnology, global warming, studying the genome, certain cancers, genetic modification of living organisms, etc. I think most of these choices were sound--but I don't know who made these choices.
I don't know if these sectors should be voted on--I come from a country that elected Richard Nixon twice--but I would like to know who made the decisions and how they were made. Because steps towards the advancement of knowledge in nanotechnology or global warming are steps away from improved understanding of other subjects.
Now, if we are ignoring possible improvements in dental technology for the sake of a better understanding and treatment of cancer, not many will object. But as research becomes more expensive, the stakes get higher, and I wonder if there's a roadmap.
A roadmap! I'd like to see one if it exists. I'd like to build one if it doesn't. I think further research into those who champion the Singularity might be helpful here. Do they know what we need to know to get to that magic point in human development?
This is another grab bag post, where I park interesting numbers for further exploration at a later date.
Well, they might want to rethink their forecasting on petroleum engineers, but there is no indication that anyone expects hypergrowth in the numbers of science and engineering workers.
We saw below that President Clinton said that human knowledge doubled every five years in at least two different speeches. We saw below that a respected German professor in Artificial Intelligence said that the number of scientific publications doubled every five years. But neither of them cited a source. I doubt if President Clinton did the research, and I can't find anything published by the German professor that deals with this. So where did it come from?
On several searches I've seen reference to UNESCO as a source of this information. And indeed, at the 11th General Conference titled Universities--Gateway to the Future, in 2000 Mahdi Elmandjra said, "Richard Knight estimates that the total knowledge of mankind doubles every seven years and adds,"90% of the present knowledge of mankind has been produced in the course of the last thirty years. But if we define knowledge as the capacity to survive on earth in a sustainable manner then 90% of human knowledge has been lost during the last 30 years."
But Richard Knight (referenced in other papers of the conference) is a professor of architecture at the University of Genoa in Italy. I cannot find anything published by him--and the quote says seven years, not five.
Where does this idea come from?
Now that I've been doing this for a month, the question of how important this all is is becoming more relevant. When you're in the middle of the hard slog of gathering data, it's normal to get frustrated. It's also normal to get a little grandiose in your thinking about the worth of what you're doing, partly to motivate yourself to keep going.
So how important is all this? If I come up with the finding that human knowledge doubles every ten years instead of every five, who will care? What will it change?
I mentioned a few things in an earlier post that I am starting to think are actually relevant questions for society. If we are convinced that human knowledge doubles every five years, then we don't need to quit smoking, as cancer will be cured before it strikes us. Similarly, we don't need to worry about pollution, because we'll sort it out before the effects can truly harm society. You can adopt this lazy attitude about any of the problems our world confronts.
But it would be a mortal pity if human knowledge doubles every six or ten or twelve years and you die of cancer the year before the cure is discovered instead of the year after.
The idea that human knowledge doubles every five years is widespread. A Google search using the term human knowledge doubles every five years returns 1,680,000 results (obviously only a fraction are relevant).
If that information is wrong, and individuals are making important decisions and organisations are misallocating resources in this mistaken belief, then yes, this research is important and worth doing. Gee, I feel reassured.
Well, this weblog has now been up for 30 days. I had actually intended to do all the basic reseach in this time frame, but life has somehow interfered. A major reorganisation at work has slowed me down.
Nonetheless, we've managed to explore the growth in human knowledge in a number of areas, so let's recapitulate:
But there's a lot more work to do, and any of those five points could change. I'm having fun doing this, so we'll just carry on.
The Singularitarians need an exponential growth of human knowledge to enable their theory of short term artificial intelligence.
But I submit they are not the only ones who are changing their behaviour and expectations because of this general idea floating around. The idea that human knowledge doubles every five years can become an excuse for inaction.
If people think that human knowledge doubles every five years, they may think that improved science and technology will provide a 'deus ex machina' last minute cavalry charge over the hill solution to something, meaning they don't have to change their current behaviour.
They might continue smoking, thinking that surely, by the time they're 69 (the average age of diagnosis for cancer), we will have found a silver-bullet solution for all cancers.
Their organisations don't modify damaging behaviour, thinking that we will find a way to turn pollution into ice cream and champagne, or replace depleted fisheries with genetically modified de-boned cod that jump into our nets with a smile.
I think this attitude, to the extent that it exists, is quite dangerous. If my first pass through publicly available data suggests anything (and even when I finish it will need to be approached academically), it suggests that human knowledge does not double every five years.
What we do see is that specific sectors, such as nanotechnology or proteomics, grow even faster than that for short periods of time:
But exponential growth then reverts to a mean, or returns to an average growth that is far slower. That growth rate varies according to the availability of inputs, such as researchers, funding and above all the availability of findings from outside the given sector--the multi-disciplinary rescue. This has rescued Moore's Law more than once, and it is applicable across fields.
Not every problem deserves the resources of a Manhattan Project, which is the prime example of how throwing money and scientists at an issue can produce results. Some problems can be solved without a Manhattan Project. But I fear that problems like lung cancer and artificial intelligence do need resources at that scale...
...and I fear even more that a general, sloppy impression that human knowledge doubles every five years without any real effort or a need to get behind the knowledge machine and push is actually harming the cause of scientific and technological progress. It relieves us of personal responsibility. Oh, the new horde of Chinese researchers will solve it, so we don't have to.
That is pernicious.
Okay. Here is the definition provided by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI):
"The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."
The Institute is described on Wikipedia here. I emailed the founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, to get his thoughts on what I am doing here. He hasn't responded as yet.
For 'Singularitarians', the Singularity is a big transformative concept, one of those spectacular theories that will change human life as we know it. When we create intelligence greater than our own, we will solve problems that we cannot solve today. Furthermore, many of the technologies (and especially nanotechnology) that will be used to create artificial intelligence will be used by the artificial intelligence to help us with healthcare, energy (PDF), space travel and more. God help us if we create an artificial intelligence that wants to sit on the couch and watch the soaps.
Those who fear artificial intelligence, nanotechnology (and perhaps big transformativc concepts), manage to create a vision of some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem waiting to be born. From fears of grey goo (nanotechnology run wild) to the destruction of human ambition, AI is a threat--perhaps the biggest outsourcing threat of all, especially if it is embodied in robots.
NASA and the Smithsonian Institute maintain a database called the Astrophysics Data System. Harvard University is kind enough to host it here. Available to you and I is an abstracting service which will return brief descriptions of articles found by keyword searches. You see where I'm going here?
For a description of coverage and limitations of the database, click here. Then, let's have some fun.
A search for the word Mars in titles and abstracts performed on April 21 2007 returned 20,978 results. Let's pretend for the sake of argument that this represents all human knowledge ever gained about Mars. (This may be as close to the truth as we will ever get on this weblog when searching for information about fields of study--but it is obviously not true, so take it with a grain of salt.)
What is the CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) in publications? Well, if we were really strict, we would measure from the date of the first document, which is... 1644. That would give us a CAGR of 2.32% and we would all get very depressed. But a more realistic starting point would be 1830, when regular publications started. This would remove only 10 documents from our total, and would yield a CAGR of 5.78%. That's much better, but far short of doubling every five years. (At that rate, human knowledge about Mars would double every 12.34 years.) Nonetheless, half of the documents in the database have been published since 1993. (Hey--that doubled in 14 years... is the rate of doubling slowing down?)
Just the metadata I got from the site is fascinating, and I'll be referring to it later, looking for short term bursts and lags (and wondering if Mars' distance from the Earth is one of the causes, for example). But here's some interesting information.
The most recent, published in April 2007, is titled "Subsurface Radar Sounding of the South Polar Layered Deposits of Mars and written by Plaut, Jeffrey J.; Picardi, Giovanni; Safaeinili, Ali; Ivanov, Anton B.; Milkovich, Sarah M.; Cicchetti, Andrea; Kofman, Wlodek; Mouginot, Jérémie; Farrell, William M.; Phillips, Roger J.; and 14 coauthors
Document #3001 is titled "Review of the trajectory and atmospheric structure reconstruction for Mars Pathfinder", written by Withers, Paul; Towner, Martin; Hathi, Brijen; Zarnecki, John
Document #6001 is titled "History and perspectives of scientific ballooning," by Frank Lefevre. Hmm. Well, document #6002 is "Stability and evolution of the climate system of Mars," written in 2001 by Stability and evolution of the climate system of Mars
Document #9001 is titled "Mobilization of dust on the Mars surface by the impact of small cosmic bodies," written in 1997 by Rybakov, V. A.; Nemtchinov, I. V.; Shuvalov, V. V.; Artemiev, V. I.; Medveduk, S. A.
Document #12001 is titled "Dry Carbonate Formation on Mars: A Plausible Sink for an Early Dense CO2 Atmosphere?", written in 1990 by Stephens, S. K.; Stevenson, D. J.
Document #15001 is titled "Stratigraphic relationships within Martian polar CAP deposits" written in 1982 by Howard, A. D.; Cutts, J. A.; Blasius, K. R.
Document #18001 is titled "The major Martian dust storms of 1971 and 1973" written in 1974 by Martin, L. J.
The very first document, written in 1644 by Grandami, Jacques, is titled "Nova demonstratio immobilitatis terrae petita EX virtvte magnetica."
If that's a little dense for you, the second, written in 1672 by Flamstead, John, is "An Extract of Mr. Flamstead's Letter Written to the Publisher from Derby Novemb. 16. 1672. Concerning the Appulses, by Him Calculated for A. 1673. of the Moon, and the Other Planets to Fixed Stars; Together with an Observation of the Planet Mars, Made by the Same"
I off-handedly chose Mars as a subject for investigation, basically because there have been several missions to the Red Planet in the past 5 years. Those missions were expensive, they were designed to gather knowledge about Mars... so if human knowledge is doubling every 5 years in any given sector, we might imagine that one of the sectors is Mars. Well, I actually have an ulterior motive, but that's for the end of this post.
The Exploration of Mars is beautifully detailed on Wikipedia. The first probe to actually get close to Mars was in 1962, the Soviet mission Beta Nu 1. It was followed by the US Mariner 4 in 1964. So we have been collecting data from space missions for 45 years. The 1996 Mars Global Surveyor effectively returned more data than all previous missions combined, and the data is available to the public.
The Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars on July 4, 1997, and a remote controlled rover called Sojourner decamped from the lander and went walkabout. Pathfinder returned 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as 15 chemical analyses of rock and soil and extensive data on winds and weather. This was followed by a spate of unsuccessful attempts to return to Mars.
In 2001 the run of bad luck ended when NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter arrived. Its mission is to use spectrometers and imagers to hunt for evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on Mars. In 2002, it was announced that the probe's gamma ray spectrometer and neutron spectrometer had detected large amounts of hydrogen, indicating that there are vast deposits of water ice in the upper three meters of Mars' soil within 60° latitude of the south pole.
NASA sent a pair of twin rovers toward the planet as part of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. On 10 June 2003, NASA's MER-A (Spirit) Mars Exploration Rover was launched. It successfully landed in Gusev Crater (believed once to have been a crater lake) on 3 January 2004. It examined rock and soil for evidence of the area's history of water. On July 7, 2003, a second rover, MER-B (Opportunity) was launched. It landed on 24 January 2004 in Meridiani Planum (where there are large deposits of hematite, indicating the presence of past water) to carry out similar geological work.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a multipurpose spacecraft designed to conduct reconnaissance and exploration of Mars from orbit. The $720 million USD spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin under the supervision of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, launched August 12, 2005, and attained Martian orbit on March 10, 2006.
The MRO contains a host of scientific instruments such as the HiRISE camera, CRISM, and SHARAD. The HiRISE camera is used to analyze Martian landforms, whereas CRISM and SHARAD can detect water, ice, and minerals on and below the surface. (In case you haven't guessed, I'm just copying from Wikipedia here.)
Now, the Wikipedia article on Mars itself is quite long. It contains very little material that could have been written before the past 45 years--the planet was mapped in 1840, some basic astronomical information has been long known, but almost all of what Wikipedia thinks is important is recent, and most of it really, really recent. Of the 79 citations at the bottom of the article, 30 were written after 2004.
So I'm ready to admit that human knowledge about Mars has doubled every 5 years since 1962. I'll be searching for more evidence to back this up. But here's my ulterior motive: I think that new sectors, or sectors that have big money thrown at it, or sectors where there is a clear public good to be obtained from applied research, might well indeed experience exponential increases in knowledge. But are they sustained? Does knowledge gained transfer readily to similar sectors? (Do we, for example, know as much about Venus or Mercury?) If new knowledge gained in the past 5 years about Mars (and I include getting to Mars, data collection design, etc.) leads to similar increases in knowledge about other planets in our solar system, then I think we're on to something here.
If you go to climateprediction.net you can volunteer your computer's spare time to help run climate models. I found the site thanks to an article at NewScientist.com. The project, started in 2002, appears to have run the Hadley model 172,229 times (at the time I checked), apparently with minor changes in assumptions to check on the different outputs that result. Check here for the aggregated results of the first 27,000 runs. (I think--I didn't spend a whole lot of time on the site.)
This is exactly what I would expect to find if human knowledge is advancing rapidly and incorporating multi-disciplinary tools and knowledge to forge ahead. Hope I find a lot more like this.
I'll be writing a lot more about the Singularity later. Let's go back to the basic building blocks that will educate my later writing.
We return to the numbers of people in higher education. If this number is growing exponentially, there might be reason to think human knowledge will too, in future. Specifically, in India, we find "India's provision for higher education rose from a meagre 200,000 at the time of Independence to an astronomical 5,000,000 college and university places by 1998." Those words come from Gajaraj Dhanarajan, President and CEO, The Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada. He was speaking in August of 2000 at the 11th General Conference--Universities as the Gateway to the Future.
Let's see--India achieved independence in 1947 (right? Might be off a year--Nope. Google says August 15, 1947). If Indian university students had doubled in number every five years since then, starting from a base of 200,000, they should now have 516 million university students. So, if they have started growing exponentially, it is recently. (How many university students should India have? Using figures from Dhanarajan's speech, to have the same rate of university enrollment as Canada {5%}, for example, India should have had 50 million university students in 2000. Room for improvement here).
This is actually fairly important. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the Indian university population is 5.51%. The CAGR needed to double in five years is 14.87%. A CAGR of 5.51% means the population doubles every 13 years, instead of five. We won't get where we need to be at this rate.
If you've been reading from the bottom up, you'll be able to join in the refrain--"Great growth. Not doubling."