Sex, Bombs and Burgers (38 page)

The kitchen, meanwhile, may as well be a lab. There is, of course, the microwave, supplemented by the ancient Westinghouse stove and refrigerator. Westinghouse is a company rich in military history, having designed radar systems, jet engines and scores of other war technologies. All the cleaners and detergents under the sink are made by chemical companies that became wealthy supplying the military. Even the humble aerosol can, which houses air fresheners, spray paints and other fun substances, was derived from that most fearful of war weapons, the flame thrower. The food itself is a cornucopia of technology, from the frozen fries and strawberries in the fridge to the retort pouches of soup on the shelves, not to mention the chemicallyladen Little Debbie’s chocolate Swiss rolls I love so much. Even the fresh apples have a thin veneer of wax to make them look shinier, while the bananas and tomatoes have been artificially ripened with ethylene gas (don’t worry, it’s harmless—these fruits produce the gas naturally anyway).

That’s my home, in a nutshell. I suspect it’s pretty typical, a real-world example of the comforts that have evolved from the technology of humanity’s vices. It’s proof that technology is neutral—it’s what we do with it that matters.

The Good That Bombs Do

The atomic bomb, the most destructive invention in history, is a good example of technology’s dual nature. The bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands and instilled a chill that caused millions to live in fear for decades. But the technology behind the weapon has evolved over the years to the point where it now promises to heal as well as harm.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about eighty kilometres west of San Francisco, has been researching nuclear weapons for more than half a century. The lab was founded in 1952, in the midst of the Cold War, to augment the work being done at the Los Alamos base in New Mexico, where the original bomb was created. Physicist Ernest Lawrence, a key figure in the building of the weapon, had set up a lab at the Berkeley campus of the University of California modelled on the process used in the Manhattan Project. His multidisciplinary team of scientists pursued large-scale research, leading to some early successes including the creation of small nuclear warheads that could be launched from submarines, more powerful computers and strides in fusion energy.

In the sixties Livermore scientists broadened their research into peaceful uses of nuclear power and the effects of radiation on humans, and in the seventies they expanded into lasers. Today, the lab is one of the pre-eminent laser facilities in the world, prompting some to joke that LLNL doesn’t actually stand for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but rather Lasers, Lasers ‘n’ Lasers. In 1992, after the United States stopped nuclear testing, Livermore, Los Alamos and the Sandia lab in New Mexico were charged with overseeing the Stockpile Stewardship Program, an ongoing project to maintain the safety and reliability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Livermore has produced a plethora of weapons technology. But, as with all such science, there has been a considerable upside as well—the lab has churned out beneficial mainstream technologies by the truckload. Dyna, a collision-modelling software program, is just one example. Developed in 1976, the program gave scientists a way to measure how bombs respond
to ground impacts, or how the weapons’ nose cones react when they hit. This sort of data is vital in munitions design because engineers need to know how the weapons will explode against different surfaces such as concrete, sand or metal. Early versions of the software did simple numerical analyses, but as the eighties came and computers acquired graphical interfaces, these evolved into visual representations. It didn’t take Livermore scientists long to realize the possible commercial applications of the software, and in 1980 they began sharing it with industry.

Car companies were the first to jump on board. Because actual car-crash simulations are expensive—up to $1 million or more each—the companies were keen to try out the virtual equivalent. “They realized that they can do practical crash analysis using a simulation tool,” says Ed Zywicz, one of Livermore’s Dyna programmers.
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As the software’s code is available for free, it spread quickly through the industry and has been in perpetual development since, with improvements shuttling back and forth between the lab and companies. So are carmakers contributing to building weapons by giving code improvements back to Livermore? “Definitely,” Zywicz says. “There’s give and go in both directions.”

The software, and variations such as the French-designed Radios, is now being used by just about every company that needs to predict collisions. It is used by train makers, by Boeing to see how bird impacts affect jet engines and even by Coors to simulate beer-can mishaps on production lines. It’s hard to gauge how many lives Dyna has saved, but it must be many.

Livermore’s biggest contribution to the civilian sector has been in genetics, a field it got into naturally when it began exploring the effects of radiation on human physiology. In the
early nineties, scientists at the lab made a huge breakthrough with the invention of “chromosome painting,” a process that allows researchers to label individual chromosomes with fluorescent “tags,” thereby making them more visible. The technology, which was licensed and made available to industry relatively cheaply—one “painting kit” for twenty tests sold for just $400 in 1992—greatly simplified the identification of disease and genetic defects. Through the nineties, scientists used kits to identify the genes behind a host of health issues, including muscular dystrophy, kidney disease, migraines and dwarfism, which helped in the development of many treatments.

Livermore’s genetic research was a key factor in launching the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the full human DNA sequence. Scientists at the lab began mapping out chromosome nineteen, one of the twenty-three pairs humans have, in 1987. When the worldwide project was launched in 1990, Livermore was given the responsibility of mapping out three full chromosome pairs. The project was completed in 2000, ahead of schedule, and the results are only now starting to be understood. This research has deepened our fundamental understanding of human biology, and its potential applications are vast. In the years ahead, scientists may use the knowledge that stems from it to stamp out many diseases, with the ethical debates about whether they should do so sure to follow.

Today, Livermore sprawls over a 333-hectare campus and employs more than seven thousand people, half of whom are scientists, with an annual budget of about $1.5 billion. Researchers there are now promising to revolutionize treatment of that ageold scourge of humanity: cancer. With all sorts of lasers and other beams at their disposal, they have developed a cancer treatment
method that uses protons instead of x-rays. The technology was first used to determine the safety of nuclear missiles by scanning their insides with proton beams, but researchers eventually discovered the same trick could be applied to humans.

The problem with x-rays, according to George Caporaso, who leads the lab’s proton project, is that they aren’t very accurate when blasting cancer cells. If you hit someone with an x-ray beam, a lot of the rays are absorbed by the surface of the skin while others penetrate beyond the cancer cells, deeper into the body than desired. Proton beams can be modulated so that they enter the body at a low frequency, spike in intensity just as they hit the cancer cells, then quickly wane afterward. The difference, which is “revolutionary, not evolutionary,” is akin to using a scalpel rather than a baseball bat to slice away cancer cells, Caporaso says.
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“I’m not a medical physicist, but from what I know about it, it is paradigm-changing.”

In 2007 Livermore commercialized the technology through a licensing agreement with TomoTherapy, a Wisconsin-based cancer treatment company. The proton-accelerator machines are still huge and expensive—they’re as big as a basketball court and cost upward of $200 million, which means that as of 2009, there were fewer than thirty treatment centres worldwide and therapy was generally only available to the wealthy. Caporaso and his team are working to bring the size and price tag down over the next few years. They’re aiming for a machine that is only two metres long and costs $20 million, which will make proton cancer therapy available to the general public.

There probably isn’t a better example of technology’s dual nature than Livermore. On one hand, scientists there have contributed inventions that can destroy the world many times
over; on the other, they’re working diligently to save lives and improve the world. Zywicz sums it up best: “It’s amazing how all the defence applications over the years have spun off into things like Dyna, which are so vital and useful to the civilian section. Without that defence research spending, it never would have happened.”

Enemies Today, Friends Tomorrow

War-inspired technology isn’t just helping with health problems, it’s also paradoxically presenting new opportunities for peace. While some believe a superpower showdown between the United States and China is inevitable, technologists think such a war is highly unlikely because of how interwoven the two countries’ economies have become through internet-based supply chains. If the United States went to war with China, the flow of manufactured goods would stop dead. Americans would be forced to do without everything, from new computers to clothes to diapers. China, meanwhile, would see its biggest market close its doors. Both countries would plunge into an economic meltdown and take the rest of the world with them, making the Great Depression look like a gentle dip in the stock market.

When the world was less interdependent, wars were commonly started over a desire for more territory, as was the case with the Second World War. That seems silly now. If technologydriven economies in tiny countries such as Luxembourg and Ireland can pull in more gross domestic product per capita than big nations such as the United States, Canada or Australia, land grabs simply don’t make sense anymore. Resource grabs, such as the American invasion of Iraq, are still happening, but technology
may provide the answer there too. If the developed world can wean itself off oil—hybrid and electric cars are the early steps in this process—peace may finally come to the Middle East. We are starting to move beyond wars fought by nation against nation and toward those fought by nations against marginalized groups. That seems to be a step forward. If only we could solve the growing problem of food shortages.

And let’s not forget the final barrier of language is set to fall, thanks to technology. The people of the world are about to become a lot closer. The internet united and inextricably linked the economies of China and India with Western countries; we’re about to take the next step to deepening such relationships, which means there is hope that the future will bring better understanding, and perhaps fewer wars.

A Porn Star President?

Pornography has had its negative effects, not the least of which was paving the way for talentless hotel heiresses to achieve fame. But advances in the technology used to sell porn have also brought us closer together. As a trail-blazing communications medium, albeit an often naughty and sometimes obscene one, pornography has funded the development of technologies that let us connect with one another. Whether it’s laying phone lines in developing countries, giving VCR makers a market or adding functionality to the internet, porn companies have often been willing to put down the dollars when no one else would, and we’ve all benefited from their actions. And there’s no reason to believe we won’t continue to do so.

Here’s one example. Researchers at Scotland’s Distance Lab, an organization devoted to better connecting people separated
by long distances, are working on something called Mutsugoto, an internet-based system that lets users have sex with each other through remote-controlled lights. On one end, the user sets up an electronic light rig over his or her bed, which then connects through the internet to another system anywhere else in the world. Users on both ends wear special rings that control the lights over the other’s bed, which they then use to sensually “draw” on the other person’s body. As the Distance Lab puts it, “drawings are transmitted ‘live’ between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture.”
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It’s a way-out-there idea, but it’s also a fascinating take on communications technology that only hints at untold-of possibilities. Like AEBN’s Real Touch and other teledildonics, applications of sexual technologies are poised to take communications in directions we’ve never considered.

With new connections opened up, we are in fact communicating better, particularly on sexual issues. As pornography has gradually encroached on mainstream media, we have been forced to re-evaluate and re-define what is socially permissible every step of the way. While some people lament how sexualized our society has become today, bringing sex out to a place where it is openly discussed has surely been one of the most positive developments of the past century. Gay rights, though they still have a long way to go, simply didn’t exist a few decades ago, while being a single or divorced parent used to earn social scorn. Though porn and technology are by no stretch of the imagination responsible for all of this, they have played key roles. As porn star Joanna Angel says: “I don’t know if I can give porn the credit for really starting the chain, but it’s definitely part of the chain.”
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Porn technology is continuing to change our views on sex. As Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild have shown, porn is expanding from its traditional role as a professionally produced product that is sold to consumers to something that anyone can partake in. Social websites such as MySpace, ubiquitous cameras and cellphones are allowing for the instantaneous mass spread of amateur porn and giving young people a very different attitude toward sex and nudity from the one their parents likely had. Stoya, the young porn star from Philadelphia, says she got into the business professionally because half the people she knew were putting naked photos and videos of themselves on the internet just for fun anyway. “It’s not a big deal. The kids I meet don’t necessarily look at it as these big scary adult companies holding guns to people’s heads, exploiting them and forcing them to do things they don’t want to do, because they have a friend or have talked to someone on MySpace [who’s involved].”
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