Deep Future

Two nerds and an Australian architect bullshitting about turning CAD software into a giant world simulating video game.

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Recently, I got to go hang out at the Idaho National Labs in Idaho Falls. There are thousands of people at those labs, working on the future of energy for the United States. They’re working on renewable energy of course. They’re working on all kinds of things that I had no idea were happening. Around recycling and waste processing, but primarily they are working on nuclear reactors. It was such a treat for me to go see all the work they’re doing. We have engineers who spent their entire careers working on the technologies for nuclear reactors. We need to make this happen at a large scale. I don’t know why we haven’t been putting these people to use and making a lot of nuclear reactors.

They know everything! They’re testing fuels, they’re testing metals, they’re testing different reactor designs. They have live reactors there, since the 1950s, that they use for this kind of testing. It’s incredible what I got to see.

And one of the folks I got to meet there was Ahmad Al Rashdan. He’s a PhD that’s working as a senior research and development scientist at the Nuclear Science and Technology Directorate at Idaho National Labs.

This is a short but important conversation for me. You get to see me asking the questions that I need to ratify my view and understanding of what’s happening with nuclear reactors and what’s possible with them. I’m getting to ask an expert who spends his entire career every day, working on these technologies and it’s very important.

I don’t want to have the wrong ideas because you hear me evangelizing nuclear reactors a lot! I want to know as much as possible, and I’m grateful to have a chance to pick some brains now and then of people who are in different parts of the entire chain of making this possible.

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Two nerds bullshitting about alternatives to college that would provide some of the same benefits.

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Frank Rieger is a hacker in Germany and one of the most well-known spokesman for the chaos computer club. This organization is unlike anything we have in the United States, unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the world. It’s computer hackers who’ve taken an interest in figuring out how to be activists for policy decisions in government that affect technology, especially computers, privacy, data. All the things that actually matter, but get thrown by the wayside by our corporate overlords.

It’s amazing getting to hang out with these guys. They’re doing something we haven’t figured out how to accomplish, how to create a lobby. They’ve been very effective. Talking to Frank about what they’ve accomplished over the years and things they’ve worked on is, both inspiring and terrifying because, they have had wins, but also losing ground at times as well.

And it’s just this sort of continual war of escalation, trying to keep governments from becoming surveillance states. Keep them from violating the sensibilities that we’ve had to develop in hard fought wars in the past. With authoritarian, dictatorships, and other despots who’ve taken control. They keep coming back in different forms. I wish we could find a way to be so engaged here in the U.S.

Personally, I started going to Germany for their event 25 years ago. I remember the first time I went with some American hackers to the Chaos Computer Congress, it happens every year in Germany between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It’ll blow your mind. These hackers are incredible. It’s inspiring to see what they can do. I think it is kind of a backlash to the very structured education program in Germany and Europe at large. The misfits, they go hard and I’ve seen them do incredible things I thought were impossible at times. If it’s of any interest to you to go to hacker convention, this is the one to go to.

I think you’ll see that Frank is a very level person. He’s smart and well-spoken. He’s standing up for what’s right. I’m thrilled to be sharing with you.

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Two nerds bullshitting about LinkedIn basically being Dungeons & Dragons for squares.

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Two nerds bullshitting about robots that can give a good massage.

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 I got to hang out with Dr. Bruce Damer recently on the beach at Kaplankaya in Turkey. Bruce is an amazing scientist, a humble guy. Who has spent his whole career trying to figure out how did life begin on Earth?

He and his co-conspirator Dr. David Deamer have figured out something that not only works as a hypothesis for how life began on Earth – but they’ve been able to reproduce it – in hot Springs.

Bruce is also a brave pioneer of using psychedelics to change his own mind, to change his own life, and to help him with insights for scientific discovery. He has also since created The Center for MINDS, which is an organization devoted to advancing scientific discovery. In part, by helping folks use psychedelics and learn about using psychedelics to go places their minds just don’t want to go otherwise.

This is a bit controversial and has been taboo for my entire life. I think it’s very important area to research. I really appreciate the people who are coming out – risking their own careers and the backlash of bias that people have – to help us figure out what’s possible with this frontier in science. Bruce has really opened up to share his own life experience with you guys and I’m really thankful to him for that.

BIOTA Institute Director and Chief Scientist Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two great questions: how did life on Earth begin, and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the cosmos? He conceived of BIOTA in 1996 and guided it through its first two decades of evolution in which it hosted four conferences and a podcast (hosted by Tom Barbalet) on the use of digital spaces to simulate evolution and natural systems. A decade of scientific research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at the UC Santa Cruz Department of Biomolecular Engineering resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life published in the journal Astrobiology in 2019 . In 2021, with growing global collaboration around the hypothesis, he determined that BIOTA was ready for its new mission: raising grants for students and young scientists to test this scenario for life’s origins and explore its implications for humanity. Dr. Damer also has a long career working with NASA on mission simulation and design and recently co-developed a spacecraft to utilize resources from asteroids. He is an avid collector of vintage computing hardware in his DigiBarn Computer Museum and enjoys a fine life with his partner Kathryn Lukas, 3 cats and one adorable chihuahua in their Gandalf-inspired house high up in the Santa Cruz redwoods. 

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Two nerds bullshitting about making amino acid Legos that kids can plug together to make proteins. This turned into a completely unrelated conversation about delivering personalized pharmaceuticals.

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 Robert Green is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He’s the director of Genetics Research at Brigham and Women’s hospital and the co-founder of Nurture Genomics, where they’re doing genomic screening for infants to detect and mitigate actionable genetic conditions.

If you don’t understand what that means, you’re in the right place because we have a long conversation, digging into that topic and picking it apart for your understanding.

This is a super exciting frontier for medicine. We are at a point where we know the science, and we know how to sequence a genome. We know how to correlate some of those things that we see in the genetic code to actual health problems that are predictive.

Some of this is just a bug in the code that causes you to get some kind of cancer or other degenerative disease. We know it’s there and in a lot of cases, we actually know what to do about it.

There is no systematic screening for people, much less for infants. That’s what Robert’s trying to solve. This is very important, very exciting stuff and It will change the future of how we take care of people and prevent genetic diseases from disrupting their lives and taking their lives.

You want to know about this. This is a great conversation. He’s very good at explaining what’s been found in the science and how they’re implementing it.  Enjoy!

Robert C. Green, MD, MPH is a medical geneticist and physician-scientist who directs the G2P Research Program in translational genomics and health outcomes in the Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Green is currently Associate Director for Research of the Partners Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine, a Board Member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a member of the Informed Cohort Oversight Boards for both the Children’s Hospital Boston Gene Partnership Program and the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative. He was the lead author of the recently published recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics for management of incidental findings in clinical sequencing.

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Two nerds bullshitting about feeding the output from one industrial process as the input for another.

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