Now I'm as anti-terrorism as the next guy, but I've had a growing feeling in me for the last while regarding issues of the last few months, and beyond, and into the future.

We're right to think of terrorism as a scourge, of terrorists as Really Bad Guys, and of terrorist acts as Really Bad Things. Now - how do we stop it? Have a look at this - now terrorists may be using teddy bear bombs as a tool. They've already used box-cutters i.e. craft knives, famously on Sept. 11th last year. Where's it going to stop? It's already possible to buy reinforced nylon knives, plastic/ceramic guns, and other things that are lethal yet don't show up on airport scanners.

And you know what? It's only going to get worse. A BT researcher has come up with another timeline of the future that's pretty scary. Of course, it's great in parts, but the bits I want you to think about for the purpose of this article are as follows:

• By 2004, smart paint will be available, with embedded "chips"
  
• By 2005, cheap miniature cameras will be everywhere, including in toy soldiers
  
• By 2006, fire-fighting robots that can find and rescue people
  
• By 2010, he sees devices roaming around blood vessels under their own power
  
• By 2015, nanotechnology toys will be available
  
• By 2020, nanobots in toothpaste will attack plaque, "smart skin" will be available (clothing replacement, automatic repair)
  
• By 2025, "real" toy soldiers, i.e. nanotech miniature soldiers, cybernetic gladiators
  

He has an entire section on conventional war and how it will develop, aiming squarely at the idea that conventional military strategy and tactics will focus on disabling systems and infrastructure more than people. This makes a certain amount of sense. But the most chilling conclusion he reaches is that potentiallyin 2005, terrorism rises beyond capability of government systems.

If we add these ideas together, add the fact that terrorists are often very creative in their methods, are historically impossible to root out by conventional means, and are usually not too far behind conventional military science, we get to the inevitable conclusion that Terrorism is not defeatable, will increase in effect, and will ultimately result in the collapse of society. This is not idle scaremongering. Remember that terrorism is the "systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion", terror is "a state of intense fear" (both definitions from Merriam Webster online). Terrorists thrive on high-profile targets, generally designed to incite fear in a large group of people. What better way to use such fear than to use everyday tools in creative, destructive ways, or worse, to use undetectable technology in fearful ways.

Currently, bioterrorism is a major fear, that is, the use of pathogens such as anthrax or smallpox to cause massive human destruction, and even more massive terror. Various novels have highlighted the possible use of Ebola for such a task. Now imagine "intelligent" pathogens - this is what nanotechnology (to pick one of the aforementioned advances) is capable of. Microscopic robots capable of synchronised effort. A nanotechnology threat would be virtually unstoppable without equally advanced detection technology. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out some of the more creative ways an invisible permeable technology could be used against political targets or even the general public. I don't need to discuss what effects other weapons of mass destruction - also becoming more available - can have on the general public, either in effect, or in fear.

Here is the nub of the argument - if we can't prevent acts of terrorism, the only way we can continue as a society - and I mean globally - is to root out its causes in some other way. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of people are moderate "live and let live" types - I include our currently unfashionable Islamic friends in that designation - with just a tiny tiny few living within an idealogical framework that demands the spreading of fear and chaos to further their cause, which invariably includes a distaste for the way the remaining vast vast majority of us live. To paraphrase a southern fighter in the US Civil War, we will lose this war for they cannot abide the way we live, yet we care not how they live (if anyone knows the source or the quote, please let me know - I've just spent ages trying to find it). The current chief proponent of anti-terrorism, Mr George W. Bush, is not going about this the right way. It is beyond time that we tried figuring out why the militant extremists feel how they do, and how we can change that. Until then, their methods will get more complex, their attacks more intense, and our global society will cease to exist.

posted by Jeremy Smyth 16:36  |  

Friday, February 01, 2002

Got into an interesting chat last night. Conversation started nicely enough, with an offer between two of us of flowers... then began the fun. A particularly vocal participant raised the point that in offering flowers, one is effectively killing a living thing for the purpose of unnecessary self-gratification. That's an interesting point, but one that is culturally alien to us. Hmm. Got me thinking.

• Most western societies view killing plants indifferently, except perhaps where there is a potential human environmental effect, e.g. deforestation, genetic modification, over-farming.
  
• The same societies will hunt game, vermin, fish, birds for sport
  
• The same societies generally frown on hunting medium-large mammals for anything except food. Moose, reindeer, buffalo, etc. All fine for food, but when hunted for sport, we get our hackles up.

So if we draw a scale of living things - an arbitrary subjective scale -from least aware to most aware, from say amoeba, bacteria, through moss, fungus, lichen, grasses, flowers, trees, etc., to more mobile living things including molluscs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, getting eventually to creatures whose self-awareness is visible - creatures who recognise themselves in the mirror. Cats, humans, other primates. Now - currently our "sport" versus "foodstuff" line of acceptable killing is quite high up that scale. The point made by my counterpart last night was that we (as co-inhabitants) have no right to choose where to draw this line, that we should in fact avoid killing anything living, without need.

Sounds plausible? Well there are some problems with that... as well as "sport" (or self-gratification, or luxury) and "food", we also have a third category - "utility" - which includes hemp and cotton, animal skins, wood for structural building, medicinal herbs, and so on. The problem with choosing to draw the line at food (which itself is controversial - see later), is that natural wastage is not enough to fulfill our survival needs. Dead things tend to decompose very quickly, if they are not already decomposed beyond utility. A dead tree contains little structurally sound wood, and is good perhaps only for fuel. Similarly, dead plantstuff is not good for eating, and probably not for the fibres it contains either. An animal that has died of natural causes does not make for a healthy dinner. That leaves us with fruit and berry windfall, or animals that have been killed by other animals or by accident. Hardly a balanced or predictable diet.

So let's raise the bar a little. Let's say it's OK to kill for food. Herein lies yet another problem - "survival" versus "luxury". Is it OK to kill for chocolate? Or only for grains, pulses, and green vegetables? If again we draw an arbitrary scale with subsistence at one end, and decadence at the other, then it's fairly easy to see that the "decadence" end of the scale - things like chocolate, caviar, foie gras, veal, truffles - is practically identical to killing for unecessary self-gratification. Stumped again.

Let's try another arbitrary scale - what's "living" and "non-living"? Earlier I used the "self-awareness" measure, which is only partially proven. Another measure (and one used last night by my conversational adversary) would be "ability to feel". I can feel pleasure and pain, we pretty much know that cats and dogs feel pleasure and pain too, other creatures react to stimuli similarly, and certain controversial experiments have shown that some plants can to a greater or lesser extent respond to external stimuli such as music, the spoken word, kind advances by an owner. We are still in the same quagmire, regardless of the changed measure, as to where to draw the line. The only safe bet is to avoid killing living things, in which case we die.

The unfortunate fact appears to be that we are carbon-based life forms, and as such rely on carbons to survive. Most of these are generated by living things. Even mineral oil, natural gas, plastics, are the results of very long term decomposition of living things. We would find it very difficult to rely on minerals for our structural needs. Stone requires too much destructive energy to work with, energy which would have to come from carbohydrates. Metals require large amounts of energy to mould, energy which would come from a combination of human effort (carbohydrates), and heat (from combustible hydrocarbons in wood or other ex-living fuel such as oil). Our food needs would have to be provided for by accidents like windfall or animal finds. And we would only have each other for sport. Not even a leather football to kick around...

posted by Jeremy Smyth 10:43  |  

Last geekathon of the week, I promise. Don't need squid anymore, because I have masquerading working on my server. That means all machines on the network think they're connected to the internet, because the server's doing some trickery to the connection stuff, translating "my" addresses to "internet" addresses, and back again, for each connection. Phew. Had to jump through hoops, though, because the usual way it's done doesn't work for my server. Typical. I'm using an older kernel.

Anyway, time for bed. posted by Jeremy Smyth 00:49  |