Dr. David Luke x

Physicists describe method to observe timelike entanglement

January 24, 2011 by Lisa Zyga (PhysOrg.com) –

< More information: S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph. “Extraction of timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum.” arXiv:1101.2565v1 [quant-ph]>

In “ordinary” quantum entanglement, two particles possess properties that are inherently linked with each other, even though the particles may be spatially separated by a large distance. Now, physicists S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph from the University of Queensland have shown that it’s possible to create entanglement between regions of spacetime that are separated in time but not in space, and then to convert the timelike entanglement into normal spacelike entanglement. They also discuss the possibility of using this timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum for a process they call “teleportation in time.”

“To me, the exciting aspect of this result (that entanglement exists between the future and past) is that it is quite a general property of nature and opens the door to new creativity, since we know that entanglement can be viewed as a resource for quantum technology,” Olson told PhysOrg.com. “The greatest significance of our result is almost certainly in some application that is yet to be imagined.”

Olson and Ralph’s paper, which is posted at arXiv.org, describes how timelike entanglement can be converted into spacelike entanglement using two detectors.

“Essentially, a detector in the past is able to `capture’ some information on the state of the quantum field in the past, and carry it forward in time to the future — this is information that would ordinarily escape to a distant region of spacetime at the speed of light,” Olson said. “When another detector then captures information on the state of the field in the future at the same spatial location, the two detectors can then be compared side-by-side to see if their state has become entangled in the usual sense that people are familiar with — and we find that indeed they should be entangled. This process thus takes a seemingly exotic, new concept (timelike entanglement in the field) and converts it into a familiar one (standard entanglement of two detectors at a given time in the future).”

In their study, the scientists also proposed a thought experiment in which they move a quantum state into the future using timelike entanglement as the resource. They call the process “teleportation in time.”

In the thought experiment, the physicists described two qubit detectors, one of which is coupled to the field in the past and one to the field in the future. First, the detector coupled to the past operates on a qubit and generates information about how the qubit can be detected. The qubit is then teleported into the future, essentially skipping over a middle period of time. Then the first detector is removed and the second, future-coupled detector is placed in the first detector’s spatial location, so that the detectors are separated in time but not in space. After a certain amount of time, the second detector receives the information from the first detector, which it uses to reconstruct the teleported qubit.

The physicists emphasized that there is an important symmetric time correlation that must be followed in order for the procedure to work. If the qubit is teleported at t=0, then the first detector must have operated the same amount of time before t=0 as the second detector operated after t=0. For example, if t=0 is 12:00, and the first detector operated at 11:45, then the second detector must wait to operate at exactly 12:15 in order to achieve entanglement. The scientists also noted that between 12:00 and 12:15, it’s impossible to recover the teleported qubit.

According to the physicists’ previous work, such timelike entanglement should generate a new thermal effect arising from the quantum vacuum (the quantum vacuum is thought to exhibit several thermal effects, including Hawking radiation from black holes, though none of these thermal effects have been observed). The physicists predict that the new thermal effect may be easier to observe than other thermal effects using current technology. If such a procedure for extracting and converting timelike entanglement can be realized, then it could provide a way for scientists to directly observe the quantum entanglement inherent in the space-time vacuum for the first time.

“Entanglement is observed every day,” Olson said. “However, direct observation of entanglement in the vacuum state would be new, and being able to observe it would potentially enable us to use this entanglement as a resource for quantum technology. Since the vacuum state is the closest thing we have to `nothing’ in physics (it is the state with zero ordinary particles around), observing and using the entanglement inherent in the vacuum as a technological resource would potentially give us a way to build quantum devices with just empty space as the most fundamental ingredient.”

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

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Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All

Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he’d spent the day squiring Venter around campus.

By John Bohannon for Wired Magazine

But Sasselov’s thoughts were light-years away. Two months earlier, a Delta II rocket had blasted off into the darkness above Cape Canaveral carrying the Kepler space telescope; Sasselov is on the team using Kepler to hunt for Earth-like planets around the Cygnus constellation—looking, ultimately, for extraterrestrial life. And he was frustrated. Because no matter how much data he and his colleagues collect—gases in the atmosphere, a fingerprint of color on the surface—they’ll never actually see aliens themselves. And that makes it impossible to answer one of the most basic questions of astrobiology: How diverse is life in the universe? If there is life somewhere other than here, does it look like earthly life, with DNA and protein? Or could it run on something else? Venter’s lecture about artisanal bacteria mapped suddenly onto Sasselov’s frustration. Why not just do what Venter was doing? If Sasselov wanted to study aliens, why not just make them himself—or at least the next-best thing? He imagined himself looking at synthetic aliens on a lab bench, “gazing at the other,” as he puts it, “similar to us but not the same.” He uncapped his red pen and scribbled a note: “Arrange a mtg/chat w Jack & GMC,” it read. “Chiral E. coli w GMC and put it into a vesicle w Jack & subject two cultures to planetary environments.”

Translation: Go to the synthetic biologists Jack Szostak and George Church. Ask them to create a life-form that runs on an operating system different from our own, based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. Let these alien cells grow and mutate, and see how they survive. If it worked, those new cells—Church called them “mirror life”—could answer one of the deepest questions about the origin of life, not just here on Earth but everywhere in the universe. They might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn’t have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. They would have to keep an eye on that.

Four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean eon: Volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So in some wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shore of a shallow pond, organic molecules started to replicate. No one knows exactly where or when or how, but life began.

It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today’s living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago.

Since then, life has been busy. At last count, there were as many as 100 million species on the planet, and billions more have gone extinct. And yet, at the most basic level of biochemistry, it has just been more of the same. Every organism runs on the same operating system that LUCA invented. Peel back a cell’s membrane and you’ll find a blur of activity, thousands of chemical reactions taking place all at once. The conductors of this biochemical ballet are the proteins, nano-size building blocks and machines that control the speed and timing of every reaction. From breaking down sugars to clearing waste to repairing the membrane, the unique shape of each protein determines its job, as specifically as a lock to its key.

The LUCA operating system was an ingenious solution to keeping track of all those thousands of proteins. Biochemists call it the central dogma: Genetic material, in the form of a long nucleic acid polymer called DNA, stores a digital record of every protein’s design. Another nucleic acid, RNA, carries the information to a molecular machine called a ribosome, which reads the RNA and strings together amino acids to form the protein. Once the string is complete, the protein snaps itself into the right shape and gets to work.

But there is at least one viable alternative to LUCA: the mirror image of the entire system. Biochemistry is the story of shapes, and this is its strange plot twist. Lots of molecules come in multiple conformations—sticking together the same atoms can sometimes yield different three-dimensional structures that are the mirror images of each other, a property called chirality. Indeed, most of the basic molecules of life—from the nucleic acids of the genome to the amino acids of the proteins—have mirror-image versions. And all cells have enzymes called isomerases, which flip certain molecules into their mirror versions. But for some reason, in the machinery of living things on Earth, one side of the mirror goes almost wholly unused. All of us earthlings, from algae to elephants, have proteins made of left-handed amino acids and a genome of right-handed nucleic acids. (When chemists say handed, they’re generally referring to the direction that polarized light skews when beamed through a pure solution of the molecule.) No one knows why LUCA picked one side of the mirror and not the other.

Theoretically, a cell could be based on “wrong-handed” molecules. Its biochemistry would work just like ours—DNA to RNA to proteins—but it would be completely incompatible with earthly life, its chiral twin. And now, thanks to recent advances in genomics, cell membrane science, and synthetic biology, an ambitious researcher could go beyond theory and build it from the ground up. The tools are here (well, almost here) to make mirror life from scratch.

Photo: Spencer Higgins

Sasselov is the ultimate talent scout for a problem like this. Because of his job at the Origins of Life Initiative, he knew George Church was already trying to build mirror-flipped molecular machines that could translate genes into proteins, and he knew that Church didn’t have anything to put them in. The membranes of earthly cells are built of fat and protein molecules with the wrong chirality. But Sasselov also knew that if there was anyone in the world who could create a membrane that would work, it was Jack Szostak. “They’re both pioneers, but in different ways,” Sasselov says. “They are my favorite people, and my mentors.”

So he brought them both to a café in Cambridge and made his pitch: Build a fully functioning mirror cell made of molecules they themselves would synthesize. Or, to put it another way: Don’t just create new branches on the tree of life, as Venter was doing with his tweaks of existing cells. Instead, create an entirely new tree.

Church went for it immediately. He’d been looking at similar ideas for years. But Szostak didn’t think it would work. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he says, sitting in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital a year after that first meeting. “I’m just saying it requires a lot of hard steps.” Nevertheless, he agreed to support the project.

A soft-spoken 58-year-old Canadian with boyish good looks, Szostak won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on telomeres, the protective end caps of chromosomes. He also created the artificial yeast chromosome, critical to advances in DNA cloning and gene mapping. Lately, Szostak has been working on the origin of those membranes that somehow came to enclose and protect LUCA and every cell since. Inside test tubes in his lab float microscopic, hollow spheres of fat—primitive membrane bubbles. Given the right molecular ingredients, they spontaneously self-assemble, grow, and divide, but they’re much simpler than a naturally occurring cell membrane. The fatty acids have no chirality; their mirror image is the same molecule. So if they were injected with, say, the guts of mirror life, there would be no wrong-handedness to get in the way.

And that’s where Church comes in. He’s 6′5″, with a gnarly beard and a science fiction fan’s optimism. It’s his job to build the genome and protein infrastructure for mirror life. But … could mirror cells actually survive on Earth? “Everything I know from chemistry and physics says that this should work,” he says. Then he gets a little silly: “Hey! I know a great shortcut to get our mirror ribosome! I just need a four-dimensional being to pick me up, rotate me in 4-D, and put me back as my mirror self.”

Szostak still says he’d bet against their success. The cautious scientist in him can’t see how the mirror cell, once full of chirally flipped molecular machinery, will come to life. “Forget about all the technical issues of making mirror ribosomes, mirror peptides, and mirror DNA,” he says. “The complexity of reconstituting a normal cell, or even a simplified cell with 1,000 components, is mind-boggling. You don’t just mix these things up and get it to work.” Still, he agreed that if Church got his part figured out, they could use his membranes to keep everything in. Szostak hopes that even attempting to make mirror life could lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes work and cells evolved. He doesn’t mention the possibility that mirror life could earn someone serious money.

The week that Sasselov met with Szostak and Church to discuss mirror life, a catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Two of its top sellers—medicines for treating the rare genetic disorders Gaucher’s disease and Fabry disease—are proteins. In people with these maladies, fats accumulate in the blood, organs, and brain, causing symptoms from burning pain to kidney failure—unless they get the drugs, produced by genetically modified cells suspended in giant nutrient pools called bioreactors. But that week, a virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down.

It was a hard summer for Genzyme, as well as for the people who rely on its medications. While the company decontaminated its bioreactors, thousands of patients around the world rationed their drug supplies. Genzyme’s stock price dropped 20 percent.

When Church talks about mirror life’s quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. “Viruses can’t touch a mirror cell,” he says. No virus has evolved to infect it. And even if a normal virus did figure out how to get past the membrane of a mirror cell—which usually requires a mechanism that would be thwarted by wrong-handed molecules—the mirror genome would be unreadable to the attacker. Viruses work by hijacking their victims’ genomes, taking over the cellular machinery for making proteins to build more of themselves; a normal virus wouldn’t have any effect on a mirror cell’s factory. This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech.

As it happens, the cell that Sasselov ultimately wants to create—a chiral twin of E. coli—couldn’t make proteins like Genzyme’s cells. It would make the chirally flipped versions, which would almost certainly be useless.

But that’s not the sort of mirror cell Church has in mind. The problem, he says, is that billions of years of evolutionary R&D have made today’s bacterial cells tough, adaptable, and very good at making more of themselves—but inefficient at spitting out designed-to-order molecules in a bioreactor. Church wants a “minimal mirror cell” to produce specific proteins: mirror, normal, and even mixes of the two but far more efficient than a bioreactor full of finicky, genetically engineered cells.

THE CASE FOR MARS

THE POETRY OF REALITY

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he’s older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. “It would be a good place to retire,” he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one’s excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd’s unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship.

From the Guardian by Paul Harris

This is Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur who made a fortune from the internet and has invested vast amounts of it in building his own private space rocket company, SpaceX. Indeed, far from being crazy, Musk is the real-life inspiration for the movie character Tony Stark, the playboy scientist hero of the Iron Man franchise.

There are some similarities. Outside the SpaceX plant in the baking southern California sun, Musk’s sexy electric sports car sits in a reserved parking space (he co-founded Tesla, the firm which makes the vehicle), resembling the sort of motor Stark would drive. Musk is also engaged to the beautiful British actress Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian’s and St Trinian’s 2, and he used to get thrills from flying his own private military jet fighter.

What’s more, like Stark, Musk is on a mission to save the world. But while Stark’s aim was to battle evil-doers and achieve world peace, Musk’s mission is a little grander. He wants to secure humanity’s future by turning the human race into a space-faring people able to colonise other planets. It’s the only way, Musk believes, that we can be saved, either from destroying ourselves or from some outside calamity. To put it mildly, Musk thinks big and takes the long view. “It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now,” he says in an accent hinting at his childhood in South Africa. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.”

SpaceX is Musk’s attempt to do that something. Its headquarters are situated within earshot of the busy runways of Los Angeles International airport. The company’s logo stands proudly on an otherwise nondescript hangar-sized building. But inside, a revolution in space travel could be taking place.

The factory floor has been roughly organised into an assembly line to make space rockets, part of a process of wresting the future of space travel out of the hands of government bodies, such as Nasa, and into the hands of private businesses. Using its hyper-efficient Merlin engines, SpaceX has successfully flown its first rocket, Falcon 1, up into space, where it put a satellite into orbit. Then it successfully flew the much bigger Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year. Now the company is working on Dragon, a space capsule that will sit on top of a Falcon 9 and deliver first cargo – and then, hopefully, astronauts – to the International Space Station.

That is stunning stuff. SpaceX, which was only founded in 2002, is not even a decade old. Yet it is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved. “When we launched the initial rocket actually leaving the launch pad, that was awesome,” Musk says, gazing at the Dragon module being built. “Getting into orbit was when a lot of people thought: OK, it’s real. That’s something that South Korea tried a couple of times and they failed. Brazil tried three times and they failed. This is normally something a country does, and only a few countries have succeeded.”

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms have joined in a new space race. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is building a suborbital rocket called the Blue Origin New Shepard. John D Carmack, the man behind video games Doom and Quake, has his eyes on a lunar landing. Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson is aiming to kickstart space tourism with his Virgin Galactic project. Yet SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future voyages.

Incredibly, however, SpaceX does not feel like a huge operation. It defeats the received wisdom that only major world powers, or gigantic corporations such as Boeing, can truly set their sights on leaving the grip of Earth’s gravity. Instead, SpaceX feels like a dotcom company. Inside the factory are all the accoutrements one expects of a booming Silicon Valley enterprise. All the office space is open-plan and even Musk has an open cubicle like everyone else. Employees – who dub themselves SpaceXers – wear casual T-shirts and are not afraid to sport goatee beards and a smattering of tattoos. They often travel around the assembly floor on tricycles and until recently, before SpaceX’s employee roster topped 1,000 people, Musk was personally involved in every single appointment. He believes the “all in it together” work culture of a start-up is vital to achieve the firm’s staggeringly ambitious agenda. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”

In fact, SpaceX’s Silicon Valley-style culture springs from Musk’s own background as one of the most successful – and wealthy – figures to emerge from the internet. His interest in technology began early. He bought his first computer at the age of 10 when he was growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Musk taught himself to write computer programs and sold his first commercial software – fittingly, a space game called Blastar – when he was just 12. He left at 17 to work on a relative’s farm in Canada, before going to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with two degrees, one in physics and the other in economics, before winning a place in 1995 at Stanford as a graduate student. He stayed there for two days before fleeing to start his first internet company, Zip2, which produced publishing software. In 1999, he sold it for more than $300m (£193m) and co-founded X.com, which eventually turned into PayPal. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn.

All of which left Musk wealthy beyond belief and could have led to a life of idle bliss. But besides being a very rich man, Musk is a determined one. Talking to him is a slightly unsettling experience. He is open and friendly, but there is a sense that – on some level – he is operating on a slightly higher plane. Asked why he does what he does, he gives an answer that seems rehearsed but rings totally sincere. “When I was in college there were three areas that I thought most would affect the future of humanity. Those were the internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration and ultimately extending life beyond Earth and making it multi-planetary.”

For Musk, the best way to achieve that third goal was to popularise space travel and make it affordable. Thus SpaceX and its fleet of rockets were born. He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right. SpaceX’s Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

The Dragon module is also a throwback. It looks nothing like the space shuttle, which it essentially hopes to replace as the “taxi” service to the International Space Station. Instead, it resembles something from the 60s, being shaped like a shuttlecock. Not that Musk cares about looks. He just cares about the fact that it is being designed with windows: a sign of his commitment to one day put astronauts, including himself, inside it. “I would like to go up in a Dragon at some point,” he says. A few years after its first flying. I think it would be great, huge amounts of fun. A very life-changing experience.”

Of course, Musk’s life has already changed. You can’t be a real-life Tony Stark with plans to retire to Mars and not generate publicity. But it has not been easy for him. Musk, beneath his shell of otherworldliness, is charming and funny, but he finds being in the public eye difficult. He would prefer to spend his time happily working on his rockets, not giving interviews. “I had to learn to be a little more extroverted,” he says. “Ordinarily, I would sit in design meetings all day, exchanging ideas with people. But if I don’t tell the story then it doesn’t get out, and I want to try and get public support for extending life beyond Earth.”

Unfortunately, Musk has discovered that celebrity has a dark side. In his case, that was a painful divorce from his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Musk, with whom he has five children. The split generated its fair share of media attention, not least because Justine has blogged extensively about the epic legal tussles over the terms of their settlement. As more details emerged, Musk decided to publish his version of events on the Huffington Post. The lengthy piece, in which he wrote about his finances and his relationship with Talulah Riley, began with the words, “Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life.”

Musk’s desire for privacy is perhaps surprising in a man so driven and successful. “I hate writing about personal stuff,” he says. “I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.”

Outside work, where he spends up to 100 hours a week, Musk says he devotes nearly all his spare time to being a good dad. His children are the reason he gave up flying his military jet. “I have five kids and Iron Man does not have any kids,” he says. “After having kids and running companies, I had so many responsibilities I decided it was not wise to take personal risks.”

So are Musk and his entrepreneurial kin the future of space travel? As Nasa, the big daddy of the global space business, struggles with reduced budgets and a sceptical public, it seems perfectly possible. SpaceX is getting into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle programme. It aims to make money as an ongoing business concern, rather than draining an ever-tightening public purse. It wants to drive the costs down and improve reliability and make space travel something that is open to everyone. Only private business, Musk thinks, can do that. “The fundamental barriers are improving reliability and reducing cost, and the government is not that good at either. Would you prefer to fly Virgin Atlantic or Soviet-era Aeroflot?”

But Musk remains a dreamer, not just a businessman. He did not create SpaceX to get rich for the second time. Instead, he is risking his fortune to start a company in a field most people said could not support a project like SpaceX. Again and again, he returns to the themes that keep him going. He sees what SpaceX is doing as part of humanity’s destiny. “I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring even if it is vicarious. When the US landed on the moon it was for all humanity. We count that as a human achievement. Anyone who could get near a TV got near a TV. If there was one TV in an African village and you had to walk 50 miles to get there, you’d do it,” he says.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. “One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

Musk’s belief that this can be achieved in two decades is something that most experts would scoff at but Musk, characteristically, finds it frustratingly slow. “Twenty years seems like semi-infinity to me. That’s a long time,” he says, as if surprised that anyone could doubt his aims. It is certainly tempting to dismiss it as a flight of fancy. Except, behind him on SpaceX’s factory floor, Musk’s nascent fleet of working space rockets are already being built.

Space race: the private firms aiming to fly you to the stars

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms, set up by billionaires, most of them former CEOs or founders of dotcom or IT companies, have joined in a new space race. These space-age entrepreneurs include:

■ Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now America’s largest online retailer. He set up his space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, though its existence only became public in 2003 when Bezos started buying land in Texas so that he could build a test site for his spacecraft. Blue Origin’s main project is New Shepard, a vertical take-off and landing rocket, that is designed to take tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere: the edge of space .

■ John Carmack, the man behind video games such as Doom and Quake, has set up a company called Armadillo Aerospace which is developing a series of spacecraft including a lunar landing vehicle and a spacecraft which is also aimed at taking tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Fares will cost around $100,000, says Carmack. The Virginia-based travel firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo to sell tourist seats on its spaceships.

■ Richard Branson, is planning to start suborbital space-tourist flights on his Virgin Galactic spaceplanes within the next two years. In 2004 he signed a deal with the US inventor Burt Rutan to use the spaceplane technology that he had just developed. When flights begin, a small craft carrying half a dozen passengers – who will pay up to $200,000 – will be flown to the edge of the atmosphere. After a few minutes, the spacecraft will then spiral back to the ground. Branson says he expects first flights to begin within two years.

■ Jeff Greason’s XCOR Aerospace also aims to start suborbital tourist flights. XCOR is based in California where it designs, builds and operates rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles to government and private markets. The Lynx spacecraft – fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene – is a two-seat rocket plane that can take off and land on a runway. The spacecraft has been designed to make up to four flights a day, carrying a single passenger into space where he or she can briefly experience weightlessness before returning to Earth.

■ Steve Bennett is Britain’s principal space engineer. His company, Starchaser, is developing rockets that are intended to blast paying passengers on 20-minute long suborbital flights that will include several minutes in which they will experience the delights of zero gravity.

■ However, SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious player in the field. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future payload launches.

Camilla Turner

Ice and organic chemicals found on an asteroid back the theory that asteroids provided the Earth with the bare necessities of life

Astronomers have detected a coating of ice and organic chemicals on one of the largest asteroids in the solar system.

From the Guardian

The space rock, called 24 Themis, is roughly the size of Sicily and orbits the sun in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, more than 300 million kilometres from Earth.

Asteroid 24 Themis and two small fragments resulting from an impact more than 1bn years ago. Scientists were surprised to find ice and organic chemicals on the asteroid’s surface. Artist’s impression: Gabriel Pérez/Servicio MultiMedia

The discovery supports the idea that asteroids may have brought plentiful supplies of water and organic material to Earth in the distant past and so set the stage for the emergence of life.

Two independent groups confirmed the composition of the asteroid’s surface after observing the 200km-wide rock using Nasa’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) which sits on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Analysis of infrared light glinting off the surface of the asteroid revealed that some wavelengths were being absorbed by water molecules. Further investigation suggested complex organic molecules were also present. The findings are reported in two papers in the journal Nature.

“The organics we detected appear to be complex, long-chained molecules,” said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee and lead author on one of the studies. “Raining down on a barren Earth in meteorites, these could have given a big kickstart to the development of life.”

The discovery of frozen water on the asteroid has surprised some scientists because the sun warms the surface enough for ice to melt. One possible explanation is that ice in the core of the asteroid is heated into water vapour, which seeps through pores in the rock and freezes temporarily when it reaches the surface.

In the second study, a team led by Humberto Campins at the University of Central Florida timed its observations to take account of the asteroid’s rotation every eight hours and produce a crude map of the surface. It shows that the entire surface of the asteroid is coated with a layer of frost no more than one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick.

In an accompanying article, Henry Hsieh, a planetary scientist at Queens University in Belfast, likened the ice to a “living fossil”: a remnant of the solar system that many considered long gone.

“This is a thin layer of ice. It’s not like going outside on a snowy day,” he told the Guardian. “But we didn’t really think water would survive in the asteroid belt, and certainly not on the surface of an asteroid.”

The discovery is intriguing because it may finally explain how two thirds of the Earth came to be submerged in water, turning a parched rock into a haven for life.

The Earth formed close to the sun as a dry boulder 4.5bn years ago, but asteroids from cooler regions of space would have slammed into the surface for millennia, releasing any water they contained on impact. At the time, asteroids were more numerous and may have carried far more water than has been found on 24 Themis.

Some scientists believe asteroids may have delivered water to every planet in the solar system, but Earth’s rocky surface, size and orbit ensured water condensed and remained on the ground, ultimately forming vast seas and oceans.

“Each asteroid might not have carried a lot of water, but if you strike a planet with a few thousand or million of them, it would gradually build up,” Hsieh said.

The finding of frozen water as far out as the main asteroid belt suggests water might also be spread throughout alien solar systems. “The building blocks of life – water and organics – may be more common near each star’s habitable zone,” said Emery. “The coming years will be truly exciting as astronomers search to discover whether these building blocks of life have worked their magic there as well.”

By Tom Jenks

You’ve waited patiently and now you’re up at bat. You want to take a few practice swings before the real thing right? Here, lie down on this comfy memory foam, inside a chamber fitted with noise canceling material, and wrapped in wire mesh and aluminum foil to block any stray electromagnetic radiation. “Here, put these on and just float on a sea of bliss,” the facilitator says as he hands you a pair of glasses, headphones and GSR meter for your finger. A flicker of doubt crosses your mind. “What the hell, it’s Burning Man, man,” your inner psychonaut reassures you as the lid closes. Inside you hear the GSR on your finger driving the sound in your headphones. You’re agitated and so is the sound. The light from the special glasses also indicates significant stress. “Shit, I’m a mess.” Bhvvvv. More agitated sound. Bhvvv. “Damn it!” Bhvvvvvvvv. “Forget this crap I’m just going to get comfy on this memory foam and float through the clouds.” Beewwwww. The sound is calm, the light is serene. “Wow, that was easy. I just let go of fears and relaxed into the moment.” The lid opens, you step into the hot seat, slide on the GSR meter, and instantly the cymatics projection explodes into the most beautiful shimmering fractal the crowd has ever seen.

This galvanizes the mass of onlookers into a frenzy. You whisper to yourself, “I never thought such beauty was possible!” As you stand there in a state of unrivaled ecstasy, the crowd catches your fire and starts chanting – beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty!!! Bvvvhhaaaaaoo! “What the?” The pyramid of lights whirs to life as the sound amps up and lights go from red to orange to green up towards the top. The crowd is overjoyed! A facilitator notices your perplexed gaze and tells everyone, “Beneath the pyramid is a Random Event Generator and the lights and sound goes up or down depending on the coherence or odds against chance of the outcomes. It has been found that focusing intently on it can raise the coherence and thus elevate the light, pure white light being the highest level of coherence at the top.” The energy is electric. A bolt of lightning blasts through your head and ripples out through the people concentrating on raising the pyramid of light. The words come out of nowhere and past your lips, “We are infinite potential!” The light races through indigo, violet and ultraviolet – a sudden collective gasp – boom. Pure white light blasts out of the top and bathes all in the primordial essence of being. All you can do is wonder. You’ve disregarded Terrence and have given in to astonishment. You think it’ll never end, but something creeps up, like a serpent through your veins, a nagging doubt – “is it real?” Immediately the light is gone, the pyramid plummets to a dull red and blackness envelops all. Guess not. You walk off the stage, kick the dust, and choke down a sugary drink at the nearest bar. A single tear rolls down your cheek and splashes in the playa dust. “For a moment… it was real.”

And it could be. It’s all technically possible – just a matter of connecting a few cords to a few computers and whatnot. I’m not an audiovisual or computer technician by any stretch, but I don’t see why it can’t be done with a little group mind and elbow grease. If this project piques your interest, join up and let’s make it happen!

Some operational thoughts: The above is only one permutation of many amazing possibilities. I’d like your input to improve it! For example:

We could use brainwave entrainment with an audiovisual synthesizer (using specific light and sound frequencies) to drive the brainwaves into say, an Alpha or hypnagogic state, and see how that affects the GSR and cymatic patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
Audiovisual synthesizer: http://www.mindmodulations.com/light-sound-mind-machines.html?TreeId=1

Perhaps a dance floor covered with salt, with a massive transducer underneath, pumping in the vibes from wireless GSR meters on the dancers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

Could the cymatic pattern be projected as a 3d hologram instead of merely on a flat screen? Or we could throw on a mixture of cornstarch and water to create a non-Newtonian fluid and grow some 3d cymatic creatures!
Cymatics in action – video of changing sand patterns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedgubRZva8&feature=related
General Cymatics info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics
http://www.cymatics.org/

We could have 4 participants each with GSR meters hooked up to the original setup, with one side getting as agitated as possible and the other trying to remain calm, and have emotion battles! Perhaps the tones from each side would be averaged together to produce 2 different cymatic patterns, one the product of restlessness, and the other the result of serenity.

Other measures of biofeedback could be used, such as the coherence of heart rhythms, pulse rate, or even an EEG of brainwaves. The raw data from each of these could be displayed on a separate screen, with a high/low record holder list.
Biofeedback devices: http://www.mindmodulations.com/biofeedback-neurofeedback.html?TreeId=1

The Random Event Generator idea could be expanded to have 3 separate towers of lights with three different REGs, with one mega tower in the middle averaging the coherence of all three. We could add some kind of reward, like a beautiful sound when the lights reach certain levels of coherence, with a loud gong at the top. Perhaps integrate specific chakra sounds from the root (red) with a C sound to crown (white) B sound.
Chakra sounds: http://www.cymascope.com/chakrasacredsound.html
REG general info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_event_generator
REG light: http://www.psyleron.com/lamp.aspx
REG capable of linking with computer: http://www.psyleron.com/reg1.aspx

The original color progression was inspired by the levels of consciousness chart here: http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/levels-of-consciousness.jpg

The REG aspect would be interesting to simply record and correlate it with events such as Burning the Man or the Temple, or even with the level of ambient sound or light levels on the playa.

We could strategically place some dream machines around the REG pyramids to help entrain brainwaves to an Alpha or hypnagogic state. These are rotating cylinders with slits cut up the sides, on top of record players with light bulbs inside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Finally a very basic option is to simply have microphones for people to sing, chant or play music into and see what cymatic patterns they produce.

I would also propose we develop a short survey of people’s experiences, to get data on how well it works (how mystical/transpersonal the experiences are) for different people, and particularly of interest would be to record a rough estimate of people’s value structure (developmental stage) and also note any pharmacological agents at work. This data, when correlated with people’s biofeedback record, would be invaluable!

This entire setup may seem like an impossible dream, but so has every idea that ever tested the perceived boundaries of creation. I cannot think of a more empowering or trans-formative technological achievement to devote resources to. Let’s use our ingenuity, our technical expertise, our vision, and our burning passion to do what has never been done, to manifest the mind, and will novelty into being. Let’s go to moon, 21st century style.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

The system that Yarynich helped build came online in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the ’70s, the USSR had steadily narrowed the long US lead in nuclear firepower. At the same time, post-Vietnam, recession-era America seemed weak and confused. Then in strode Ronald Reagan, promising that the days of retreat were over. It was morning in America, he said, and twilight in the Soviet Union.

Part of the new president’s hard-line approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was unafraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers had long advocated modeling and actively planning for nuclear combat. These were the progeny of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and an expressed readiness to use it would gain leverage during every crisis.

Illustration: Ryan Kelly

You either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

The new administration began expanding the US nuclear arsenal and priming the silos. And it backed up the bombs with bluster. In his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings, Eugene Rostow, incoming head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, signaled that the US just might be crazy enough to use its weapons, declaring that Japan “not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack” of 1945. Speaking of a possible US-Soviet exchange, he said, “Some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population.”

Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department. US troops swooped into tiny Grenada to defeat communism in Operation Urgent Fury. US naval exercises pushed ever closer to Soviet waters.

The strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. “The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination,” Soviet marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a gathering of the Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff in September 1982. “In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming,” Ogarkov said, referring to the German invasion of his country. “Thus, the situation is not only very serious but also very dangerous.”

A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative moves of the Cold War. He announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as “Star Wars.”

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan’s shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you’re dead.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it’s no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The US did build versions of these technologies, deploying command missiles in what was called the Emergency Rocket Communications System. It also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor for nuclear tests or explosions the world over. But the US never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.

Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War. Their mission was similar to Perimeter’s, but the system relied more on people and less on machines.

And in keeping with the principles of Cold War game theory, the US told the Soviets all about it.

Great Moments in Nuclear Game Theory

The first mention of a doomsday machine, according to P. D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, was on an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical system of hydrogen bombs that could cover the world in radioactive dust and end all human life. “Who would want to kill everybody on earth?” he asked rhetorically. Someone who wanted to deter an attacker. If Moscow were on the brink of military defeat, for example, it could halt an invasion by declaring, “We will detonate our H-bombs.”

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly “cobalt-thorium-G.”

“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” cries Dr. Strangelove. “Why didn’t you tell the world?” After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, “It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday.”

In real life, however, many Mondays and many party congresses passed after Perimeter was created. So why didn’t the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? No evidence exists that top Reagan administration officials knew anything about a Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, secretary of state for most of Reagan’s presidency, told me that he had never heard of it.

In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. “I was never told about Perimeter,” says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won’t talk about it today. In addition to Yarynich, a few other people confirmed the existence of the system to me—notably former Soviet space official Alexander Zheleznyakov and defense adviser Vitali Tsygichko—but most questions about it are still met with scowls and sharp nyets. At an interview in Moscow this February with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former official in the Strategic Rocket Forces, I was ushered out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military’s extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn’t fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”

And Perimeter bought the Soviets time. After the US installed deadly accurate Pershing II missiles on German bases in December 1983, Kremlin military planners assumed they would have only 10 to 15 minutes from the moment radar picked up an attack until impact. Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe. Indeed, all these events actually occurred at some point. If they had happened at the same time, Armageddon might have ensued.

Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. “That is why we have the system,” Yarynich says. “To avoid a tragic mistake. ”

The mistake that both Yarynich and his counterpart in the United States, Bruce Blair, want to avoid now is silence. It’s long past time for the world to come to grips with Perimeter, they argue. The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now “just another cog in the machine”—but Dead Hand is still armed.

To Blair, who today runs a think tank in Washington called the World Security Institute, such dismissals are unacceptable. Though neither he nor anyone in the US has up-to-the-minute information on Perimeter, he sees the Russians’ refusal to retire it as yet another example of the insufficient reduction of forces on both sides. There is no reason, he says, to have thousands of armed missiles on something close to hair-trigger alert. Despite how far the world has come, there’s still plenty of opportunity for colossal mistakes. When I talked to him recently, he spoke both in sorrow and in anger: “The Cold War is over. But we act the same way that we used to.”

Yarynich, likewise, is committed to the principle that knowledge about nuclear command and control means safety. But he also believes that Perimeter can still serve a useful purpose. Yes, it was designed as a self-deterrent, and it filled that role well during the hottest days of the Cold War. But, he wonders, couldn’t it now also play the traditional role of a doomsday device? Couldn’t it deter future enemies if publicized?

The waters of international conflict never stay calm for long. A recent case in point was the heated exchange between the Bush administration and Russian president Vladimir Putin over Georgia. “It’s nonsense not to talk about Perimeter,” Yarynich says. If the existence of the device isn’t made public, he adds, “we have more risk in future crises. And crisis is inevitable.”

As Yarynich describes Perimeter with pride, I challenge him with the classic critique of such systems: What if they fail? What if something goes wrong? What if a computer virus, earthquake, reactor meltdown, and power outage conspire to convince the system that war has begun?

Yarynich sips his beer and dismisses my concerns. Even given an unthinkable series of accidents, he reminds me, there would still be at least one human hand to prevent Perimeter from ending the world. Prior to 1985, he says, the Soviets designed several automatic systems that could launch counterattacks without any human involvement whatsoever. But all these devices were rejected by the high command. Perimeter, he points out, was never a truly autonomous doomsday device. “If there are explosions and all communications are broken,” he says, “then the people in this facility can—I would like to underline can—launch.”

Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There’s a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.

Wouldn’t any officer just launch? I ask Yarynich what he would do if he were alone in the bunker. He shakes his head. “I cannot say if I would push the button.”

It might not actually be a button, he then explains. It could now be some kind of a key or other secure form of switch. He’s not absolutely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded.

Senior editor Nicholas Thompson (nicholas_thompson@wired.com) is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

From the New York Times by Kenneth Chang

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” said Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station.

If this business plan unfolds as it is written — the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already — Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after, providing ample business for the private companies that the Obama administration would like to finance for the transportation of astronauts into orbit — the so-called commercial crew initiative.

President Obama’s budget proposal for 2011 calls for investing $6 billion over five years for probably two or more companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying people into space. Then, instead of operating its own systems, like the space shuttles, NASA would buy rides for its astronauts on these commercial space taxis.

“This represents the entrance of the entrepreneurial mind-set into a field that is poised for rapid growth and new jobs,” Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said in February. “And NASA will be driving competition, opening new markets and access to space and catalyzing the potential of American industry.”

Officials have been careful not to say their commercial crew plan relies on a market beyond NASA, but for now, Bigelow appears to be the only non-NASA buyer for commercial crew services.

“Nobody,” Mr. Bigelow said of competition he sees on the horizon.

Thus, the rosier promises of the president’s plan rest on this enigmatic, 100-employee company located on 50 acres of desert not far from the casinos and strip clubs and the ability of Mr. Bigelow, an iconoclast who made his fortune in real estate including the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, to get his dreams off the ground.

He has spent about $180 million of his own money so far and has said he is willing to spend up to $320 million more. An expansion of the factory will double the amount of floor space as the company begins the transition from research and development to production.

Mr. Bigelow only occasionally gives interviews, and except for Michael N. Gold, the director of Bigelow’s Washington office, the employees almost never speak publicly. A company document titled “Some Important Bigelow Aerospace Cultural Values” implores employees, “Keep your work and the work of your co-workers very private from people outside the company.” (Mr. Gold said that the confidentiality stems from federal regulations designed to protect technological information and that the engineers are busy working.)

The Las Vegas site is hemmed by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.

The soundness of the business case is unknown to outsiders. Mr. Bigelow declines to say if he has firm commitments from any countries or companies to rent space on his space stations. In recent years, he has played down the notion that he is building a space hotel for rich tourists, although he says space tourism could provide a part of his business.

Over the past year, Mr. Gold visited countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, England and Sweden to gauge interest. A stay on a Bigelow station, including transportation, is currently priced at just under $25 million a person for 30 days. That is less than half the more than $50 million a seat that NASA is paying for rides alone on Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Doubling the stay to 60 days adds just $3.75 million more.

For a country or company willing to sign up for a four-year commitment, the lease for an entire six-person module would cost just under $395 million a year, and that would include transportation for a dozen people each year. “You see why this is attractive for the sovereign client market,” Mr. Gold said.

The Bigelow prices are good through 2018, and Mr. Bigelow said the prices would drop by then if, as he expects, rocket prices drop.

“We’re very comfortable with our numbers,” he said, although he declined to discuss the details. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, which is the most optimistic in reducing launching costs, estimates that rides to space on its Falcon 9 rockets would be $20 million a seat.

“You have to trust a little bit that we’re making these investments because we think it’s going to make sense economically at the end of the day,” Mr. Bigelow said. “We won’t execute our business plan if those numbers aren’t there.”

His space stations are not his only interest in space. “I’ve been a researcher and student of U.F.O.’s for many, many years,” Mr. Bigelow said. “Anybody that does research, if people bother to do quality research, come away absolutely convinced. You don’t have to have personal encounters.”

He added: “People have been killed. People have been hurt. It’s more than observational kind of data.”

Other views that run counter to mainstream science include a belief in the power of prayer and a disbelief in the Big Bang theory.

The idea of inflatable spacecraft dates back almost to the beginning of the space age, solving a stubborn conundrum with putting stuff in space. Rockets are tall, but not particularly wide. With inflatable spacecraft, the structure can be packed tightly into the payload and then filled with air once in orbit.

NASA’s Echo I and Echo II satellites, launched in 1960 and 1964, were large Mylar balloons. NASA commissioned Goodyear to build prototypes of an inflatable space station, which looked like a big rubber inner tube.

The rubber space stations never flew, in part because of an obvious design weakness — they could pop if hit by meteoroids.

The idea remained dormant until the 1990s, when NASA started exploring how to build living quarters for a human mission to Mars. William C. Schneider, then the senior engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, returned to the inflatable design.

Instead of rubber like the 1960s Goodyear design, Dr. Schneider used an airtight bladder surrounded by Kevlar straps. “It dumps its pressure load into the straps,” Dr. Schneider said. “Those two together make a very efficient design.”

Outside the straps, alternating layers of aluminized fabric and foam absorb and disperse the impacts of micrometeoroids, providing better protection than metal structures, Dr. Schneider said.

Even though he was sure the design was sound, he built two prototypes of the TransHab module and demonstrated their resilience in a swimming pool and a vacuum chamber. “People would think of it as a balloon,” said Dr. Schneider, who now is a visiting professor at Texas A&M University. “In cases, it was six times as good as needed. It’s absolutely verified.”

In the meantime, the Mars plans were shelved as too expensive, and TransHab was reimagined as a crew quarters module for the International Space Station. Then the space station costs grew, and in 2000, Congress prohibited NASA from spending any more money on TransHab.

Mr. Bigelow, 66, said that he was inspired by NASA’s successes of the 1960s, culminating with the Moon landings, and that he always hoped to invest in space someday. He read about TransHab in 1998, and learning of the project’s imminent demise, he established Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 and bought an exclusive license to the NASA patents.

Dr. Schneider joined Bigelow as a consultant. The Bigelow designs are essentially very close to his NASA work, Dr. Schneider said, with some changes like replacing the Kevlar with Vectran, another bullet-resistant fabric. There are also some notable improvements like the addition of small windows, already tested on the Genesis I and II test modules that were successfully launched from Russia using converted ballistic missiles.

“He had great manufacturing capability,” Dr. Schneider said. “They have some real good engineers as well. I’m sure they will be very successful.”

The biggest hole in his plans, Mr. Bigelow said, is the one not entirely in his control: getting to and from the space stations.

For a while, Bigelow and Lockheed Martin were collaborating on a small capsule that would launch on an Atlas V rocket, which currently launches Air Force satellites and other payloads. Lockheed Martin won the NASA contract for building the Orion crew capsule for NASA’s Constellation program and dropped out of the work with Bigelow.

Mimicking the $10 million X Prize that spurred the development of the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, Mr. Bigelow offered $50 million to anyone who could build an orbital spacecraft. No one tried to claim the prize before it expired in January.

Bigelow is collaborating with Boeing using $18 million that NASA has provided for preliminary design of a commercial crew capsule.

Keith Reiley, the program manager at Boeing for the capsule, said he was not very familiar with Bigelow’s space station plans, but was impressed with what Bigelow has contributed to Boeing’s capsule. “They’re a lot more entrepreneurial than we are,” Mr. Reiley said, “and it’s refreshing for us.”

If the Boeing spacecraft is ready by 2014, that is when the dance of Bigelow space station modules will begin.

A habitat called Sundancer, with an inflated volume of about 6,400 cubic feet, would launch first. A separate rocket would then carry two Bigelow astronauts to take up residence in Sundancer as additional pieces — a second Sundancer, a larger habitat of about 11,700 cubic feet, and a central connecting node — are launched. The modules are to dock by themselves with the astronauts present to fix any glitches.

Once the stations are up, Bigelow still needs to demonstrate that it can juggle the logistics of supplying food, water and air, as well as fix the inevitable glitches that will arise. Mr. Bigelow said that he would hire people with the needed experience and skills, and that space stations were not all that different from hotels.

“I’ve had four decades of serving people, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people, all over the southwest part of the United States,” he said. “I have four decades of building all kinds of things. The principles are the same.”

As a private company, Bigelow can operate space stations much more efficiently than NASA and its governmental partners can operate the International Space Station, Mr. Bigelow said. (Another of the company values declares: “Make up your mind quickly. Don’t take forever, people are waiting, the company is waiting, the future is waiting and time costs money.”)

NASA’s interest in inflatables has also been revived once again. Among several large technology demonstration projects proposed in the president’s 2011 budget is an inflatable module for the International Space Station. Bigelow is currently talking to NASA about that.

Mr. Bigelow envisions variations of the inflatable modules being used for a Moon base or a mission to Mars.

“Our hope is that we can serve NASA,” he said. “Because we can do it so much more economically.”

By John Hanna for Erowid.org

During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History” at a 1983 University of California at Santa Barbara conference, Andrew Weil mentioned in passing, “Dimethyltryptamine [...] is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.” Meanwhile, at U.C. San Diego, Rick Strassman had begun to wonder whether or not the pineal might produce psychedelic compounds. That same year, in his booklet Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, Albert Most claimed that: “A pair of naturally occurring pineal enzymes [...] is capable of converting serotonin into a number of potent hallucinogens.” Most stated that the pineal could transform serotonin into 5-methoxy-N-methyltryptamine, and then make that into 5-methyoxy-N,N-dimethyltrptamine. Alas, no references were provided to support Most’s description of pineal catabolism. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this general line of thinking–that some psychoactive tryptamine is created in the pineal–was birthed in the early 1980s.1

It took a couple of decades for the meme to spread into the wider drug-geek pop culture, more recently and rapidly due to the Internet, after the 2001 publication of Strassman’s popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Consider the following transcription from a radio rant [audio file online here] given circa 2005/2006 by the actor-comedian Joe Rogan, host of the TV show Fear Factor:

It’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland [...] that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man. Literally. But the craziest thing [about it is that] it’s natural, and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, and right before human death, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine. Nobody knows what sleep is all about. Nobody knows why dreaming is important. But dreaming is hugely important. If you don’t dream, you’ll go fucking crazy and you’ll die. While you’re dreaming, while you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, you are going through a psychedelic trip. And very few people know about this. But it’s been documented.

There’s a great book on it called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by a doctor named Dr. Rick Strassman. And he did all of these clinical studies at the University of New Mexico on it. And you take this shit, and literally you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like, you feel like you’re in another dimension. I mean you’re in another dimension. [...] There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three-dimensional space; and it’s like they’re arteries, except there’s not blood pumping through them, there’s fucking light–pulsating lights with no boundaries. And you couldn’t really understand it. And there’s an alien communicating with me. There’s a dude who looks like, like sorta like a Thai Buddha, except he’s made entirely of energy and there’s no, there’s no, like, outline to him–he’s just one thing. And he’s concentrating on me, and he’s trying to tell me not to give in to astonishment. Just relax, and try to experience this. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be fucking shittin’ me.’ And I’m a stand up comedian, you know. ‘Cos as a stand up comedian, we pride ourselves in being able to describe things. So I’m like, ‘How the FUCK am I gonna talk about this?!’

Rogan does an excellent job of expressing a number of bullet points from Strassman’s book in a humorous manner. But the problem is that none of these points are known to be true. And although Strassman clearly states that his ideas about DMT and the pineal gland “are not proven”2, many people have accepted them as fact. As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT, much less any evidence for the more far-out speculations that Strassman makes about DMT being a chemical modulator of the human soul. When Strassman examined the pineal glands from “about ten” human corpse brains, there was nary a trace of DMT to be found in them. This doesn’t invalidate his theory, since DMT is metabolized quickly, and none of the corpse brains were fresh-frozen. Further tests on fresh-frozen brains could be done. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

By the end of his book, Strassman proposes that DMT may provide access to parallel universes (and alien beings) via superconductive quantum computing of the human brain at room temperature, or via interactions with dark matter. Strassman states: “Because I know so little about theoretical physics, there are fewer constraints reining me in regarding such speculations.” And for those who know virtually nothing about any given topic, there appear to be no constraints on speculation. It is for exactly this reason that Strassman’s theories have both been accepted as fact by many people, and then expanded into creative new directions. A few offshoot theories include the idea that ancient prophets produced more DMT, that electro-magnetic fields increase DMT production, that spending a couple of weeks in total darkness increases DMT production, and that fluoridated water suppresses DMT production. An Internet search will turn up a bounty of wacky spin-offs, all of which cite Strassman’s speculations as the facts backing up their further claims.

Is DMT produced by the pineal gland? Maybe…

1. Albert Most is perhaps better-known for his 1984 booklet Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which explains how to collect and smoke the 5-MeO-DMT-containing secretions from this animal. Coincidentally, Most was one of the first two volunteers in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, which started in 1990 and ended in 1995. And during the period when Strassman was researching DMT, Andrew Weil went on to co-author two journal articles with Wade Davis on the topic of B. alvarius’s psychoactive secretions.
2. Strassman’s DMT: Spirit Molecule on DMT in the Pineal :
   

   These hypotheses are not proven, but they derive from scientifically valid data combined with spiritual and religious observations and teachings. [...]

   The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. Specific examples of this phenomenon are the following:

   When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.

   Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.

   In some of us, pineal DMT mediates the pivotal experiences of deep meditation, psychosis, and near-death experiences.

   As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001)