Will Space-Based Wireless Power Beams Solve the Energy Problem?

 

A recent article in a good-news website called The Brighter Side claimed that in a few years, we may be getting lots of energy from space-based wireless power stations.  A research group at Airbus, the European aerospace firm, has built a prototype and has high hopes for the technology's future.

 

Here's how it would work.  A solar panel about 2 km (more than a mile) across would be in geostationary orbit, probably an orbit with a tilt to it so that the satellite would be in continuous sunlight 24/7 rather than going through an Earth-caused eclipse once a day.  The amount of power thus generated—comparable to a standard fossil-fueled or nuclear plant—would then be converted into microwave energy, probably the same type of microwaves that heat your pizza.  The microwaves would be beamed through a large, sophisticated antenna array to suitable locations on Earth equipped with things called "rectennas"—antennas specially designed to receive microwaves and convert them efficiently into DC power.  The power would then be converted into standard AC for transmission on a grid, or conceivably used by mobile devices such as trucks and airplanes.

 

Sounds great, doesn't it?  Compared to earth-based solar panels, the ground-based technology is cheaper.  A rectenna is a lot easier to make than a solar panel.  As solar energy is more intense in space than on earth, it takes less solar-panel area in space to generate a kilowatt than it does on earth.  And there's the flexibility of beaming the power basically anywhere you want it, just as communications satellites beam signals to different locations.  What's in the way of our putting up lots of these and throwing fossil-fuel plants, and nuclear too for that matter, in the existential trash bin?

 

As a trained microwave engineer, I can answer that question.  Microwave power from solar-energy satellites is not a new idea.  Raytheon engineer William C. Brown conceived the idea in the early 1960s, and a key component was a crossed-field amplifier that he had invented earlier.  By 1976, Brown worked with NASA to transmit 30 kW of power over a distance of 1.5 km (almost a mile) using a 26-meter dish and a rectenna that was only 7.3 x 3.5 meters—about 10 by 25 feet.  I saw a video of that demonstration in which they used the power to light up an array of spotlights, and the lights gradually came on as the beam was directed at the rectenna.  The Airbus people have so far demonstrated a link only 36 meters long. 

 

If the idea has been around so long, why hasn't it been deployed commercially yet?  I can think of several reasons.

 

First, as even the optimistic Airbus researchers admit, the orbiting part of the system has to be really big to produce a useful amount of power.  Currently, it seems that the largest structure in orbit is the International Space Station, which is a little longer than a football field.  The solar array envisioned by the Airbus people would be twenty times longer and wider, if it was square.  At the current rate of space commercialization, however, such huge projects in space may become feasible.  But not yet.

 

Once you put the orbiting microwave power station in space, you have to be careful where you aim the beam.  The focusing ability of the station's antenna depends on how big the antenna is, and while it will be smaller than the solar array, you could easily imagine an antenna, say, 100 meters in diameter.  Some simple calculations I will spare the reader tell us that the beam on the ground from an antenna of that size in geostationary orbit, using the microwave-oven wavelength, will expose an area on the ground about 24 miles square to a microwave power density of more than a watt per square meter.  This level of energy would definitely be detrimental to human health and not real good for other vertebrates, either.  So a very large area on the ground, probably covering most of a good-size county, would have to be sequestered off and devoted to a giant rectenna farm.

 

The more speculative statements by the Airbus people of directly conveying microwave energy to mobile platforms such as airplanes are pretty much pipe dreams.  Not all the microwaves would be absorbed by the plane, and so people on the ground underneath would be at risk.  The tighter the beam you want, the larger the antenna has to be, so unless the designers want to make an antenna as big as the solar array, which brings up mechanical difficulties, I don't see how they can direct parts of the beam to highly specific locations on earth, although they could probably manage as many as a dozen or so without too much trouble.

 

The Airbus people are to be congratulated for dusting off an old idea that was clearly premature at the time it originated in the 1960s.  Back then it was prohibitively expensive to launch large structures into orbit.  We can count on both launch and space-based construction costs to decrease in real terms in the future.  So that is one big factor that makes reconsidering wireless power transfer from space a good thing. 

 

The drawbacks are substantial, however:  hazards to people and animals on the ground, the possibility of a space-based error that could send the beam skidding across the countryside into a major population center (there's a sci-fi scenario for you), and the difficulties of upkeep and maintenance—I suspect you'd have to have a few people permanently in space simply to keep the station running.  But it eliminates one of the big problems with most types of renewable energy these days: the fact that it's available only when the sun is out or the wind is blowing.  A properly designed geostationary-orbit power satellite would be available 24/7, through clouds, night and day. 

 

We'll know this technology's time has come when somebody like Elon Musk starts a company to do it.  In the meantime, though, it will remain what it has been for more than fifty years:  only an engineer's dream.

 

Sources:  I thank my wife for calling my attention to the article in The Brighter Side at https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/space-based-solar-power-beams-will-soon-be-powering-our-cities.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Wireless power transfer," and my 1975 ITT Reference Data for Radio Engineers handbook for antenna-beam calculations. 

Electric Vehicles and "Ancient Modulation" Don't Mix

 

Many of the currently available electric vehicles (EVs) on the market have a wonderful array of bells and whistles you won't get in a gas-powered car, but some new EV owners are surprised by the lack of one feature:  an AM radio (referred to by radio amateurs as "ancient modulation" because it was the first radiotelephony technology to be invented).

 

Now for most younger readers, an AM radio is not going to be missed.  While radio in general still has its uses for mobile platforms that can't yet conveniently connect to the Internet (although this problem will eventually go away too), AM radio is the oldest and lowest-quality medium in the broadcast hierarchy.  Consequently, much of its programming is devoted to talk shows, sports, and the kind of music that doesn't suffer much from the thunderstorm crackles, power-line buzzes, and night-time fading that AM radio is subject to.  Nevertheless, millions of people listen to AM stations across the U. S. and in other countries, and probably a majority of them do it in their cars.

 

So why do many EV makers leave out the AM-radio feature?  It has to do with an obscure branch of electrical engineering called "electromagnetic interference" (EMI). 

 

EMI studies how electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields and their related voltages and currents go from one electronic subsystem (quaintly sometimes called the "aggressor") to another subsystem (called the "victim") and mess up the victim's functioning somehow.  As our world becomes increasingly digital, casual experience with EMI is no longer common, as the characteristic of most digital systems is to work flawlessly until the interference reaches a certain threshold.  Then the whole thing collapses and you get nothing. 

 

Analog systems—the old analog TV that went away about 2009, conventional AM radio that is still with us, and to some extent, FM radio—are different.  As the interference gets stronger, if you were watching an analog TV picture, you'd first see some little random black specks here and there, then solid rows of them, then wider bands and the sound would start to feature a buzz-saw noise, and finally you'd lose everything in a kind of snowstorm (video noise was in fact called "snow".) 

 

AM radio is the same:  a few pops in the speaker here and there, then a steady buzz, and finally the signal is overwhelmed.

 

So why don't most EVs have AM radios?  Because the thing that makes EVs go is kilowatts of electric power, hundreds of volts at dozens of amps, being switched on and off thousands of times a second.  And the efficiency of the electronics depends on how fast those switches work.

 

Unfortunately, switching large amounts of power on and off very fast generates tons (metaphorically speaking) of energy that runs roughshod through the whole AM broadcast spectrum, which ranges from 540 kHz to 1600 kHz.  And a typical EV is just full of such currents, voltages, and magnetic fields, because the currents run through cables by necessity from the battery through the control electronics to the motors. 

 

I've never tried the experiment, but if you had a Tesla or other EV running on a test stand, and you got a little cheap portable AM radio, tuned it to an empty spot in the band, and moved it close to the car, you would in all likelihood be greeted with a banshee set of howls and growls that would be a good soundtrack for a horror film. 

 

Most of the energy thus produced is probably in the form of near-field magnetic fields.  These don't radiate very far (that's why I've been passed by many Teslas on the road while listening to an AM station and never noticed a problem), but within a few feet, which is where you are when you try to put everything into one vehicle, they can be quite intense.  And in contrast to electric fields, which are fairly simple to shield against with conductive screens, magnetic fields are very hard to enclose and shield against.  It takes special types of magnetic metals that are (a) expensive, (b) fragile, and (c) hard to shape, as they are usually supplied in the form of thin tapes that have to be hand-wrapped around the thing to be shielded.

 

Despite what the automakers say, it would be possible to make an EV that wouldn't interfere with an AM radio on board.  Take a standard EV to any big military contractor and tell them what you want.  They'll put a bunch of EMI experts to work, and they'll redesign the whole vehicle.  It'll probably weigh another few hundred pounds when they're finished and cost twice as much as it did before they went to work, but you'll be able to play your AM radio and drive at the same time.

 

See the problem?  That's one of the reasons the EV makers have just quietly dropped the AM radio, because it would mess up everything else if they put it in and made it work.

 

I don't see any good outcomes of this problem for standard AM broadcast services.  There's something called HD radio, as well as several other competing digital-radio services.  The basic idea is to use the allocated FCC frequency band granted to a station (plus maybe some parts of the adjacent channels) and stick a sophisticated orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexed digital signal in there to carry as many as four audio channels.  This is being tried both with AM and FM, but I suspect the digital AM is wrecked just as thoroughly by EV EMI as the conventional AM is. 

 

So the alternative that at least one article posed, is to hope that in your metropolitan area, your favorite AM signal is also being carried by an HD-radio FM station and you can pick it up that way.  FM signals use much higher frequencies (88-108 MHz), which are much less affected by the electromagnetic trash that EV power electronics puts out. 

 

But I just went to the HD radio website and checked, and poor little San Marcos, halfway between San Antonio and Austin, doesn't have any HD radio signals.  Dallas-Fort Worth is another matter. 

 

So it may be that AM radio for cars, at least the old-fashioned kind, may go the way of buggy-whip holders on automobile dashboards.  Nobody missed those then, and maybe nobody much will miss AM radio in the future.

 

Sources:  Numerous articles are available on the absence of AM radio in EVs, and I referred to this one:  https://www.motorbiscuit.com/am-radio-absence-why-evs-dont-have/.  I also referred to the HD radio website https://hdradio.com/why-hd-radio/ and the Wikipedia article on HD radio.

How Old Is Too Old? The Dallas Air Show Crash

 

On Saturday, Nov. 12, an estimated four thousand or more spectators gathered at the Dallas Executive Airport about ten miles south of downtown to watch a Veterans Day air show put on by the Commemorative Air Force (CAF).  The CAF is a volunteer organization dedicated to keeping older military aircraft flying.  Their motto is "Educate, inspire, and honor."  Most of their inventory of 180 planes worldwide comes from World War II, and prominently featured during the show was a B-17 Flying Fortress, one of only a handful left from WW II service as heavy bombers.  Also featured were P-63 Kingcobra fighter planes. 

 

Around 1:20 PM, the B-17 had just flown low over the airport where the spectators were gathered.  As shown in a number of videos posted after the event, a P-63 approached it from the rear and appeared to collide with the rear section of the bomber.  Both planes fell out of the sky within seconds, and a fireball and black smoke rose from the site of the crash.

 

In a news conference later that afternoon, CAF CEO Hank Coates could provide few specifics out of deference to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which was scheduled to take over the investigation that evening.  He said the bomber was "fully crewed" which normally means a crew of five.  Adding the pilot of the P-63 means that as many as six people probably died in the crash, which occurred over an empty field.  Information from the Allied Pilots Association confirmed that two of its former members had died in the crash. 

 

In his news conference, CEO Coates emphasized that although all their pilots are volunteers, they spend many hours in training and certification efforts, and often have 20 or 30 years of experience as retired military or airline pilots.  Nevertheless, something went wrong Saturday, and it will take the NTSB some time to figure it out.

 

Once it does, what then?  Let's try to get some perspective on just how dangerous flying CAF planes is.

 

Statistics provided by the NTSB in an Associated Press story of the crash indicate that from 1982 to 2019, 23 people died in 21 accidents involving World-War-II-era planes.  Mr. Coates indicated that the CAF flies an average of 6500 hours a year.  If we assume that has been the case for the past 40 years, we can do a little math to come up with the average fatality rate per million hours flown. 

 

An airline-safety website tells me that for commercial airlines, the current fatality rate is about 0.34 per million hours flown.  General aviation (private planes) is about 50 times worse than that—say 17 per million hours.  If my assumptions are correct, the fatality rate up to 2019 for the CAF is at least 95 per million hours, or about one fatality per 10,000 hours flown—more than five times that of general aviation.

 

Now, no type of aviation is completely safe.  Any human activity, even getting out of bed, involves some risk.  The question here is whether the good that the CAF does—and there is much to be said for it—is worth the risk of getting pilots killed, and the small chance of a much larger number of fatalities.  If the crash had occurred a few hundred yards away from where it did, hundreds of spectators might have been killed.

 

Some will say that the risk, however small, is an essential part of the activity.  If it wasn't at least a little dangerous, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun.  I am not a pilot—the most risky thing I do typically is ride my bike two miles on city roads every day.  So far my worst accident happened when I was looking at the gears of an unfamiliar bike I was riding and ran into a trash barrel.  I rolled off the bike and did an unintentional backflip.  My back was sore for a day or so, but there were no other consequences.  I haven't ridden that bike since, however.

 

I'm sure the FAA has some kind of certification processes for both the hardware the CAF flies and the pilots who fly them.  We will have to wait for the NTSB's investigation to complete before knowing what caused this particular accident: pilot error, mechanical failure, or some combination thereof.  But judging by their fatality rate, it's clear that mostly retired pilots flying seventy-year-old planes is not as safe as flying a 747 to London.

 

I am sympathetic with CAF members who spend hundreds of volunteer hours doing difficult and sometimes dangerous things to keep their old planes in the air and educate the younger generation about what machines and people flying them did during twentieth-century wars.  I love the feel and look of old hardware, and if the CAF flew antique avionics as well as antique planes I'd be right in there with them (unfortunately ,they have to have modern equipment in that department for safety reasons). 

 

At the same time, there will come a day when the hazards of flying piles of fatigued aluminum gets to be simply too dangerous.  We are about out of pilots who flew the planes during WW II, so those who fly them now have had to learn from their elders, and you have a small cadre of skills that has to be handed on in order for the whole CAF to keep flying.  It would be sad to see all that come to an end so that the only place you could see a B-17 would be in a museum, not making a horrible racket as it actually takes off from the ground. 

 

But in the nature of things, that day will come.  Who decides when it comes?  Ideally, the CAF itself, but the other parties involved—the NTSB and the FAA to name two—will have some say in the matter.  I can picture the magnitude of this tragedy leading to public calls for such shows to cease, and that would be a shame.  But it might happen.  The prudent thing is to wait for the NTSB report, and then take stock of the whole situation.  But prudence these days seems to be in short supply.

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP story on the crash carried at https://apnews.com/article/sports-texas-dallas-transportation-air-shows-28e06a464b1f200cfe22b58cc8fdd7f6, a CBS news report at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/world-war-ii-planes-collision-crash-air-force-wings-over-dallas-event-dallas-executive-airport-texas/, a report at

https://www.fox4news.com/news/dallas-executive-airport-crash, and data on aviation safety at https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety#:~:text=If%20you're%20really%20really,times%20safer%20than%20general%20aviation.

Breathing While Black: Discrimination By Pulse Oximeters

 

For several years now, you have been able to go to your local drugstore and buy for less than $50 a device called a pulse oximeter.  It's a little thing you clip on your finger, and in a few seconds it displays two numbers.  One is your pulse rate, and the other is supposed to be the percent of maximum capacity of oxygen that your blood is carrying.  Most healthy people show a blood-oxygen percentage of around 98%, but anything considerably less than that means you're not getting enough oxygen to your tissues.

 

Hospitals and doctors have more sophisticated versions of these devices, but apparently they all share the same flaw these days:  they can give falsely reassuring readings on people whose skin has significant melanin content.  Black people, in other words.  So for decades, anyone in that category whose blood oxygen has been monitored with a pulse oximeter has been in danger of going untreated for low blood oxygen, compared to a person whose skin was lighter. 

 

This is not news.  The problem has been known for decades, but received added publicity during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Studies have shown that people of color receive less supplemental oxygen than average during medical treatment, and bad pulse-oximeter readings only exacerbate this problem. 

 

Fortunately, some engineers at Brown University are trying to address the problem.  In a report carried by the health-information site Statnews, Kimani Toussaint, a Black professor of engineering, is reported to be working with students on a patentable idea that will lead to pulse oximeters that give the correct reading no matter who is being tested, and what color their skin is. 

 

I wish them well, and hope that they can make a significant difference in what has to be one of the most embarrassing deficiencies in healthcare technology to come to light in years. 

 

It didn't have to turn out this way.  The same article cites a report in Wired on one of the first oximeters to hit the market way back in the 1970s, developed by what was then a medical branch of the instrumentation company Hewlett-Packard.  In their typically thorough way, H-P included 248 people of color in their volunteer pool of testing subjects, and made sure the readings were as good for them as for the other volunteers. 

 

Of course, the H-P device was a little fancier than the ones you get at Walgreen's.  It examined eight wavelengths of light, not one or two like the current ones do, and was about the size of a small beer cooler.  I'm sure it sold for more than fifty bucks, too.  But it got the oximetry ball rolling, and from that point on it was a question of how cheaply the device could be made, and whether inaccurate readings on a minority of the FDA-required sample population could be disregarded in the approval process, which they apparently were. 

 

I don't think anybody in the healthcare industry deliberately intended to make devices that discriminated in a purely technological way against people of color.  But beyond a certain point, ignorance was no longer an excuse, as studies were published describing the problem and cautioning clinicians not to trust readings of pulse oximeters with darker-skinned patients. 

 

But this is not a good solution.  The right fix, as Toussaint and his colleagues recognize, is to make pulse oximeters that work right for everybody, not just for white folks.  Supposing the Brown academics succeed (which seems pretty well guaranteed at some level, as H-P got it right in the 1970s with vastly inferior technology), what happens then? 

 

Like any industry, the healthcare-technology industry wants to make money and serve its customers as well as it can.  Compared to consumer products, devices sold for healthcare purposes are highly regulated and licensed, and jumping through the regulatory hoops is a cost that makes up a significant fraction of the price.  Unless the FDA insists on changing its rules so that pulse oximeters have to read equally accurately for all colors of patients, the industry doesn't have much of an incentive to adopt a newer technology that does that, whether it's patented by Brown or developed on their own.  For one thing, it means a whole new round of proof-testing and regulatory approval.  And for another thing, the market for pulse oximeters is probably not that big, and making a substantial investment in it for a benefit that will show up in only a minority of patients is a hard marketing sell.

 

I'm reluctant to use the phrase "systemic racism," but it might well apply in this case.  As I said, I don't think any individual manager or pulse-oximeter company set out to discriminate against people of color in developing devices that don't work quite as well for that group.  But somewhere along the long road of development between H-P's giant 1970s device and the $50 versions of today, somebody compromised some things and created the problem.  It would require a huge effort of investigative journalism and probably subpoenas to find out exactly how it happened, but the outcome is clear.

 

Sometimes, adverse publicity by itself will make an industry clean up its act.  Maybe if enough people of color ask questions of their clinicians about pulse oximeters, it will have an effect back up the supply chain and the companies will go to the trouble and expense of dealing with the issue.  But it's not going to happen automatically.  In the old days, a letter-writing campaign might have had some effect.  These days, social media is the obvious channel to use in letting people know there's a problem.  It's a pretty blunt instrument, though, a little like putting out a cigarette with a fire hose, and it can backfire on the user as well.

 

But as the Statnews article quoted Toussaint as saying, this problem is a poster child for increasing diversity in science.  If it's not a problem to you or people you know, you simply tend to ignore it.  Now that we know it's a problem—all of us engineers—I think it's time somebody should do something about it. 

 

Sources:  Statnews carried the article "‘A poster child’ for diversity in science: Black engineers work to fix long-ignored bias in oxygen readings" at https://www.statnews.com/2022/08/19/diversity-in-science-black-engineers-work-to-fix-long-ignored-bias-in-pulse-oximeters/.  The Wired article about the 1970s H-P oximeter is at https://www.wired.com/story/pulse-oximeters-equity/.

Tesla Knows How You Drive—Should You Care?

 

In an article in the October issue of the engineering professional journal IEEE Spectrum, Mark Harris investigates the depth and volume of customer-generated data that Tesla acquires every day from millions of its cars on the road.  The reasons for all this data collection appear to be benign for the time being, but it's truly a new thing in the automotive industry, and potential misuse of the data is something to worry about.

 

In common with all other new cars, Teslas have what are called "event data recorders" (EDRs).   Similar in function to an airliner's black box, the data recorder keeps a constantly updated 5-second record of speed, accelerator and brake conditions, steering, and other data relevant to diagnosing a crash.  In the event of a wreck, the last data set is preserved so that investigators can reconstruct the conditions leading up to the accident.

 

But Tesla cars go way beyond the EDR minimum.  Every minute, the car's GPS location and certain other data are recorded.  And when (not if) the car next gets in touch with its designated wireless hub, it uploads an anonymized version of the data to Tesla HQ through the Internet.  Technically, the car's owner is not linked to the randomized ID number that accompanies the upload, according to an engineer under the alias of Green, who has examined scrapped Teslas (as well as the one he owns) to determine what the famously close-mouthed company is doing.  But as Green points out, if you have anonymized data showing that the car leaves a certain residential address at 8 every morning and returns there at 5 every evening, it's not going to be hard to figure out whose car it is. 

 

Besides the location data, the vehicle's Autopilot system can do something called Shadow Mode, according to former AI head of Tesla Andrej Karpathy.  While the human driver is in control, Autopilot pretends to drive the car and compares its steering and control outputs with what the human actually does.  When there's a discrepancy, Autopilot can take a data sample, including camera images and other details, and upload it to Tesla HQ to enable continuous improvement of the Autopilot algorithms.  Multiply this by the several million Teslas on the road, and you have the world's best test bed for improving autonomous-driving software.  This is yet another example of the tech world's powerful largest-network advantage.  Once a player in a networked system gets to be the biggest, that organization has a huge advantage over the other players because of the synergistic effects of network nodes supporting each other, roughly speaking. 

 

Of course, Musk and his engineers say that is the only reason they're collecting all this data:  to improve the Autopilot system.  But it's come in handy in court at least once, when the father of a teenager who died in the fiery crash of his Tesla sued the company.  Tesla was able to present the judge with a detailed catalog of many times when the driver tore around town at up to 130 MPH, establishing that the teen was not driving responsibly. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, they are only doing what any sensible company would do in the same situation.  If Ford or Volkswagen had happened to climb to the top of the U. S. electric-vehicle heap first with an autonomous car, they would probably be doing more or less the same data-gathering.  In principle, even Tesla owners can decline to have any Internet connection made to the car, but no one knows of any owner who has actually done this.  This is probably because the intersection of (people who buy Teslas) and (people who don't want their hardware connected to the Internet) is the empty set. 

 

Should we worry about Tesla, or any other car company for that matter, collecting huge piles of data on where we drive every minute, and how fast we drive, and how safely we drive?  There are two entities that have strong reasons to access this data, and the main concerns may come from them.

 

The first entity is government—Federal, state, and local.  Already, state governments are beginning to wonder how they will keep collecting highway-tax revenue as more drivers turn to electric vehicles, which completely evade the X-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax that has up to now been a mainstay of highway funding.  It's always seemed to me that if you take a libertarian point of view, the people who use the roads should pay for them.  Up to now, it was impractical to tell who was using which road, but as more cars get equipped with follow-me-everywhere software, the technology to assess road taxes by miles used wouldn't be that hard to do.  But for various political reasons, the states seem instead to be leaning toward a flat annual tax on electric vehicles that will more than make up for the lost gasoline-tax revenues.

 

The other entity that would like to get their hands on the data is the auto-insurance industry.  It's not hard to imagine developing algorithms that would take in a year's worth of digital driving data on you and assess a personalized insurance cost that would precisely reflect your driving habits.  This would be very popular for safe drivers and highly unpopular for the other kind.  Of course, as Autopilot and its ilk get better, the insurance companies are going to have to deal with increasing numbers of vehicles driving themselves, and the liability implications of that situation are far from being sorted out.  But it's likely that the insurance industry will develop some kind of certification process that you'll have to deal with in order to obtain insurance on a car with a given type of autonomous driving capability. 

 

Finally, there is the general creepiness factor that some software somewhere knows where you've been.  But as we've gradually gotten used to that with mobile phones, I suppose it won't be much different if our cars know what our phones know already.

 

For now, just being aware that this data gathering is going on may be the most we can do about it.  But while improving autonomous-vehicle software is a laudable goal, it won't be surprising if hackers or other malevolent actors eventually exploit the data stream that Tesla extracts every day from their cars.

 

Sources:  "The Radical Scope of Tesla's Data Hoard," by Mark Harris appeared on pp. 40-45 of the Oct. 2022 print edition of IEEE Spectrum.

I Take It Back (But Only With iOS 16)

 

Everybody has said something they later regret saying.  If the person you're talking to is right there in front of you, there's nothing you can do to unsay it.  As country singer Jon Langston says in one of his song titles, "I Can't Take Back Words."  But according to tech guru Kim Komando, the new iOS 16 operating system for iPhones (version 8 and later) lets you do that with text messages—sort of.

 

Ever since commercial text messaging became available on mobile phones in the mid-1990s, it has shared with verbal interchanges the fact that once you send a text, it's gone and you can't take it back.  As texting has become easier, people all over the world have incorporated it into their everyday lives, with all sorts of consequences, both good and bad.

 

One might think that the same message spoken to another person in your presence is no different in its effects than one texted to the person on the other side of the world.  But consider some of the differences.

 

Suppose you are with someone whose respect you value, and you say something you immediately regret saying.  Body language, both yours and  your listener's, is a crucial part of the exchange.  If your listener's expression shows hurt or surprise, you have a clue right away that you've said something you shouldn't have.  If the listener moves away, you can try to follow and explain yourself, or at least apologize. 

 

On the other hand, texting the same injudicious message to the same person who is not in your presence can have graver consequences.  The recipient may be so mad that you don't hear back at all, and so you may have no idea how your poorly chosen message was received.  It's also possible that a sentence uttered in jest is clearly a joke in person, but in cold text looks like an insult, leading to misunderstandings and possibly even a breach in the relationship. 

 

I'm not aware of any surveys on this subject, but I wouldn't be surprised if millions of relationships over the last three decades have been damaged by ill-chosen text messages.  Finally, Apple comes to the rescue with the take-it-back option on iOS 16 for iPhones.

 

According to Komando, the feature isn't quite as good as it's advertised to be.  Say you send a text message to someone and change your mind and want to take it back.  First off, both you and the recipient must be running iOS 16 on iPhones.  That's a problem with Android right there. 

 

If your operating systems match, the recipient will be able to see your text until you unsend it.  And you have only two minutes to do so—after that, it's carved in digital stone and Steve Jobs himself couldn't take it back (well, maybe he could, but ordinary mortals can't).

 

And even if you succeed in jerking the message away before your recipient sees it, the receiving phone shows a notification that you sent something and took it back.  Depending on how imaginative your recipient is, this could be even worse than letting the message stand.

 

What if you don't regret the whole message, but just want to take out parts of it—a few cusswords, for example?  The new iOS lets you edit messages, but only within 15 minutes of sending them, and guess what—the recipient can see all your edits if they know to tap your message.  What's the point in that? 

 

Tongues (and now thumbs) get us into more trouble than almost any other part of the body.  As St. James says, ". . . no human being can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison."  (James 3:8).  Most of us are at least teenagers before we learn to control our tongues with even partial success, and some people never learn at all. 

 

Writing emails and texting only makes ill-chosen words worse, for the reasons I stated above, so we need to be especially careful when using electronic media.  Unfortunately, the pressure brought to bear by Facebook, Twitter and company is all the other way.  The last thing they want people to do is text mild, well-considered, and charitable statements back and forth.  The mean zingers get the attention, especially from people with millions of followers. 

 

Apple's move to allow retraction and editing of texts is a move in the right direction, but obviously isn't going to solve all the problems that thoughtless or mean texts cause.  If the texter is thoughtless or mean, it's going to come through in the texts, no matter what kinds of fancy software is in use.  But those of us who try not to be harsh sometimes slip up anyway, and the editing and retraction features may help some.

 

For what it's worth, I follow some practices that have kept me out of trouble with texts and emails many times.  I own a flip phone for which it is rather tedious to send texts—the screen is so small I have to use a stylus, and it gets about every fifth letter wrong and I have to back up and fix it.  I know this would drive 90% of the mobile-phone public insane, but the intentional slowness with which I have to text gives me time to think about what I'm saying. 

           

And for any emails that I want a record of, I usually keep a log of activity and write a draft of the email first.  Only when I think it's what I really want to say do I copy it into the email software and send it. 

 

And for any messages that contain bad news, I usually just call or meet the person face to face.  Texting and emails can be misunderstood, and I'd rather hear or see a person's reaction in real time than just hope it goes okay.

 

I'm glad that those with iOS 16 can now take back or change what they text, but even Apple can't run time backwards, so think before you type.

 

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried Kim Komando's article "What really happens when you edit and unsend iPhone texts?" on p. 6F of the USA Today portion of its Sunday online edition for Oct. 23, 2022.  Jon Langston can be heard singing "I Can't Take Back Words" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6KrHxPfXyE.

 

The Case for Nuclear Power

 

In the fall 2022 issue of the technology-and-society journal The New Atlantis, authors Thomas and Nate Hochman examine the pros and cons of building new nuclear power plants in the U. S.  The case of nuclear power is fraught with political issues that are inextricably tied up with technical issues, but the Hochmans do a good job of laying out the problems facing nuclear power and some possible solutions.

 

If nuclear power had not been invented until 2010, say, it would probably be welcomed as the keystone in our society's answer to climate change.  Imagine a source of the most fungible type of energy—electricity—that takes teaspoons of nuclear fuel compared to carloads or pipelines full of fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases, and when properly engineered runs more reliably than wind, solar, hydro, or sometimes even natural gas, as the misadventure of Texas's Great Freeze of February 2021 showed.  What's to oppose?  Well, a lot, as the Hochmans admit.

 

It is perhaps unfortunate that the first major use of nuclear technology was in the closing days of World War II, when the U. S. became the only nation so far to employ nuclear weapons in wartime, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The long shadow of nuclear war has cast a darkness over the technology of nuclear power ever since, despite optimistic but misguided attempts to promote peaceful uses in the 1950s. 

 

The Hochmans describe the golden era of U. S. nuclear power plant construction, which ran roughly from 1967 to 1987, as a period in which the two major U. S. manufacturers—GE and Westinghouse—offered "turn-key" plants that were priced competitively with coal-fired units.  The utilities snapped them up, and the vast majority of existing plants were built in those two decades.

 

The turn-key pricing turned out to be a big mistake, however.  Manufacturers expected the cost per plant to decline as economies of scale kicked in, but for a variety of reasons both technical and regulatory, the hoped-for economies never materialized.  The particular pressurized-water technology that was used was adapted from early nuclear submarines, and in retrospect may not have been the best choice for domestic power plants.  By the time the companies realized their mistake and switched to cost-plus contracts, they had lost a billion dollars, and utilities became much less enthusiastic when they had to pay the true costs of building the plants.

 

In the meantime, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970, making it much harder to obtain permits to build complicated things like nuclear plants.  In the pre-Act days, permitting a plant sometimes took less than a year, but once NEPA passed, such speediness (and the resulting economies of fast construction) was a thing of the past. 

 

Then came the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl plant fire and disaster in 1986, further blackening the reputation of nuclear power in the public mind.  Add to that the not-in-my-back-yard problems faced by attempts to find permanent storage locations for nuclear waste, and by 1990 the U. S. nuclear industry was in a kind of coma from which it has not yet recovered. 

 

The Hochmans point to France as a counterexample of a nation that made a conscious decision to go primarily nuclear for its electric power, and even today about 70% of France's power is nuclear.  But even France is having problems maintaining their aging plants, and French nuclear promoters face the same sorts of political headwinds that prevail in the U. S.

 

Now that climate change is an urgent priority for millions of people and dozens of governments, the strictly technical appeal of nuclear power is still valid.  It really does make zero greenhouse gases in operation, and when properly engineered, it can be the most reliable form of power, providing the essential base-load capacity that is needed to stabilize grids that will draw an increasing amount of energy from highly intermittent solar and wind sources in the future.  Eventually, energy-storage technology may make it possible to store enough energy to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables, but we simply don't have that now, and it may not come for years or decades.

 

In the meantime, there are plans on drawing boards for so-called "modular" plants.  If every single automobile was a custom design from the ground up, including a from-scratch engine and body, only the likes of Elon Musk could afford to drive.  But that was how nuclear plants were made back in the day:  each design was customized to the particular site and customer specifications.

 

If manufacturers had the prospects of sales and freedom to develop a modular one-size-fits-all design, they could turn the process into something similar to the way mobile homes are made today:  in factories, and then shipped out in pieces to be simply assembled on site.  And newer designs favoring gravity feeds over powered pumps can be made much safer so that if anything goes wrong, the operators simply walk away and the plant safely shuts itself down.

 

Standing in the way of these innovations are (1) the prevailing negative political winds against nuclear power, enforced with more emotion than logic by environmental groups and major political parties, and (2) the need to change regulations to allow such technical innovations, which currently are all but blocked by existing laws and rules. 

 

In the Hochmans' best-case scenario, the U. S. begins importing modular plants from countries where an existing base of nuclear know-how allows efficient manufacturing, which these days means places like China.  Even if the U. S. nuclear industry turned on full-speed today, it would take a decade or more to recover the expertise base that was lost a generation ago when the industry collapsed.  Regulations and regulatory agencies would change from merely obstructing progress to reasoned cooperation with nuclear-plant manufacturing and installation.  And we would derive an increasing proportion of our energy from a source that has always made a lot of technical sense. 

 

On the other hand, things may just go on as they are now, with old plants closing and no new ones to take their place. That would be bad for a number of reasons, but reason hasn't been the only consideration in the history of nuclear energy up to now.

 

Sources:  Thomas Hochman and Nate Hochman's "Nuclear Power Comeback?" appeared on pp. 3-19 of the Fall 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.

Social Media Faces the Supreme Court

 

In an insightful article in National Review, Dan McLaughlin lays out the spectrum of how discussion platforms, online video, search engines, and the whole social-media megillah are regulated by a 1994 law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and why the U. S. Supreme Court is probably going to weigh in soon on some apparently irreconcilable lower-court decisions.  While at first glance this may seem to be an obscure matter for legal specialists, it has the potential to affect everything from childrens' mental health to the survival of democracy.

 

When the Act was passed in 1994, there was no Google, Facebook, or YouTube, and legislators felt that the infant web-based communications industry needed some special protections to keep it from being nipped in the bud by lawsuits.  So they passed the two parts of Section 230 which now receive intense attention, because they do complementary things.

 

The first part protects providers of interactive computer services (e. g. Google, Facebook, etc.) from being treated as though they originated stuff that a third party came up with.  This sharply distinguishes them from conventional print publishers, for example.  National Review itself was the target of a costly lawsuit by climate scientist Michael Mann, who claimed the magazine and its writer Mark Steyn defamed him.  If Steyn had instead posted his article as a blog in online-only form, it's possible that the magazine could have claimed Section 230 immunity.

 

The second part of Section 230 more or less exempts private companies operating interactive computer services from being liable for consequences of their own censorship actions.  This almost makes it seem like the services can have their cake and eat it too.  If someone objects to a third party's content on a company's site, the firm can claim they aren't publishers and they're protected under the first part of Section 230.  But if the firm squashes a client organization's posts, as for example banning Donald Trump from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021 riots, the company can claim it can't be held liable because of its protection under the second part of Section 230. 

 

In general, organizations such as Facebook have tried to steer a middle ground between the two extremes of letting absolutely anything show up (protected by the first part of Sec. 230) and being the Mrs. Grundy of the Internet (protected by the second part of Sec. 230).  As there isn't much profit in censoring salacious material, the main abuses of censorship that have been most widely objected to concern political speech or postings on controversial topics such as abortion. 

 

Compared to the pre-Internet days when anyone could print nearly anything they wanted, but distribution was a difficult and expensive proposition, the Internet has reduced the cost of distributing speech to nearly zero (or even negative numbers, if you consider monetizing).  And a feature of social media which is not really addressed by Section 230 at all is the fact that in order to increase hits and thus advertising revenue, social media companies have developed sophisticated and exquisitely tuned algorithms to make using their platforms as habit-forming as possible.

 

As with other habit-forming enterprises such as alcohol and tobacco, users of social media form a spectrum.  Some like me rarely deal with it, and others spend eight or ten hours a day on it.  With the exception of Prohibition, now conceded by all hands to be a failure, society has chosen to deal with such habit-forming enterprises by restricting their use to adults and by taxation which is not prohibitive, but definitely inhibitory. 

 

Most of the commerce in the form of advertising and data sales that goes on in social media avoids direct taxation, and although some voices have been raised in favor of restricting the use of social media to those over 18, it's hardly a groundswell of opinion.  So for the time being, social media will continue on its merry way doing unknown but tremendous things to the democratic process and exerting incalculable powers to mold public opinion.

 

While it is probably a good thing that the Supreme Court will finally get to pass judgment on some issues regarding Section 230, the two extremes that the law regulates are more like guard rails than they are like lane markers.  By the time someone is either kicked off a social-media platform or decides to sue one for something online, some pretty serious damage has been done, at least in the eyes of the person getting censored or suing.  It's unlikely that the Court will turn the steering wheel violently toward one or the other guard rail.  I don't think anybody wants to see a completely unrestricted social-media world, although the type of restrictions that are currently imposed have huge blind spots influenced by profits (I'm thinking especially of online porn).  And it's just as obvious that we aren't likely to see companies clamping down on all sorts of questionable content, because it would cut into their revenues.

 

The problems caused by social media today are real.  Teen suicides, the polarization of political speech and resultant paralysis of government functions, online bullying, and many other abuses cry out for some sort of solution, or at least a mollifying influence.  Unfortunately, given the choices that the Court will face, its response will probably amount to tinkering with technical legal details, rather than making any wholesale revolutionary changes to Section 230 or how it is enforced. 

 

In any event, the Court—or any court, for that matter—is not where we should look first for improvements in human behavior.  As G. K. Chesterton responded to a question posed by a newspaper:

 

"The answer to the question, 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, 'I am wrong.'  Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.  But this original sin belongs to all ages, and is the business of religion."  (from The Daily News, Aug. 16, 1905)

 

Neither the Supreme Court nor Google nor Facebook can do anything about original sin.  But they can make it easier for people to avoid sinning, and let's hope for some progress in that direction.

 

Sources:  Dan McLaughlin's article "The Supreme Court Joins the Section 230 Fight—Halfway" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-supreme-court-joins-the-section-230-fight-halfway/.  I also referred to an article about the true origin of the Chesterton quote, which is often misquoted, at https://www.jordanmposs.com/blog/2019/2/27/whats-wrong-chesterton.

Artemis versus Apollo: An Invidious Comparison?

 

In Greek mythology, the sun god Apollo and the moon god Artemis were twins born to Leto after she had an extramarital affair with Zeus.  As the main point of  NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s was to land men on the moon, not the sun, Artemis would have been a better name for it. 

 

There's an old saying in engineering that if there's not enough time to do it right, there's somehow always enough time to do it over.  I'm not sure that applies to NASA's Artemis program, which is currently aimed at what looks to me like an Apollo do-over, but it all depends on your point of view.

 

One point of view that's very popular in some circles these days is what might be called the Original Sin of the White Male.  In the dark ages preceding the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and second-wave feminism of the 1970s, if you were not a white male you were out of luck.  Most doors to professions were slammed in your face, and these injustices tainted any cultural or national achievements with racism and sexism, including the successful landing on the moon in July of 1969 by—you guessed it—white males.

 

In many historical religions, people tried to make up for their past sins by sacrifices designed to please the gods.  If you look at the main webpage for NASA's Artemis program, the first sentence you will see is this:  "With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before." 

 

When I read somewhere that one of the main goals of the Artemis program was to remedy the white-males-only record of lunar flights, I didn't want to believe it.  But there it is, in—pardon the expression—black and white, right on their webpage.  When you look into the history of the program, it's a little more complicated than just wanting to make up for Apollo by sending women and people of color to the Moon.  But obviously, NASA has chosen to make that feature a big selling point to the public.

 

The problem that democracies have with any large-scale program that lasts longer than four years is to keep them going despite the winds of political change that blow through Washington at least that often.  In the early 2000s, NASA conceived something called Constellation, which was its effort to put people back in space after the end of the Space Shuttle, which wound down in 2011.  The Obama administration cancelled Constellation except for the Orion spacecraft, which was then folded into something called the Space Launch System (SLS).  One way or another, with various name changes (the name was changed to Artemis during the Trump administration), the program has limped along with funding that is, relatively speaking, a pittance in fraction-of-GNP terms compared to Apollo. 

 

Well, not that much of a pittance, actually.  One estimate places the total cost of Artemis, assuming it actually gets off the ground by 2025, at $93 billion.  If expressed in 2020 dollars, the 1960s Apollo program cost $257 billion, not quite three times as much.  So Artemis isn't that much of a bargain.  And we still haven't got a single person—of any color or sex—off the ground under its auspices, while Apollo spent most of the 1960s in rehearsals of various kinds.

 

Until Hurricane Ian came along, NASA was planning to launch Artemis 1, the first shot in the Artemis series, on Sept. 23.  Problems with fuel tanks on Sept. 12 led launch officials to postpone the scheduled launch, and then concerns about Hurricane Ian pushed the next tentative launch date to November of this year. 

 

Artemis 1 will not be a manned (womaned?) flight.  Only some satellites and flight-test dummies will be aboard.  The SLS rocket is attributed to (I kid you not) the Aerojet Rocketdyne Northrop Grumman Boeing United Launch Alliance.  If that isn't a creature of politics, I don't know what is.  The newer private-rocket company SpaceX is prime contractor for the Human Landing System (HLS), which is planned to get people from lunar orbit down to the moon.  But that won't be an active part of the Artemis 1 launch, which is mainly to see if the launch rocket works.

 

After a certain point, large organizations develop a kind of default mode that they will operate in unless strong external forces are brought to bear on them.  NASA's default mode, for the last decade at least, has been to seek funding for projects that have a political appeal wide enough to motivate enough federal support to provide contracts for as many contractors as possible, while keeping one eye on a goal that can be achieved if NASA only had about twice as much funding as it ever gets. 

 

For a time, around 2010, several of my undergraduate engineering students spoke admiringly of space programs and expressed a desire to get involved in them.  One of them, the smartest undergraduate woman I've had in my electromagnetics class in twenty years, even ended up working for Blue Origin.  But lately, the bloom has come off the space-exploration rose, and the highest ambitions many students have these days is just to land a job that will let them pay off their student loans before they retire. 

 

When Neil Armstrong uttered his first words on the moon—"one giant leap for mankind"—I wasn't aware of any women or girls who felt excluded because he said "mankind" and not "humanity."  He couldn't get away with that today, because the original sin of the white male plays such a prominent role in the public's consciousness these days.  It's an open question as to whether redressing this wrong at a cost of $92 billion is worth it.  Of course, a lot of other good and useful things may be done by returning to the moon with an eye toward using it as a base for wider-ranging exploration of space.  But can't we concentrate on the job at hand, and take integration of people of color and women and other minorities in stride, rather than making it the main focus, which is what NASA seems to want it to be?  The problem with that is that we'd have to decide what the main job is, and the answer to that question is far from clear.

 

Sources:  NASA's Artemis webpage is at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/. 

The Artemis project cost estimate is from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/years-late-and-billions-over-budget-nasas-most-powerful-rocket-finally-set-for-takeoff, the Apollo cost estimate is from https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo, and I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on the Artemis program and the Artemis HLS development program.