Yesterday China successfully tested its first anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) by blowing one of its own aged weather satellites (Feng Yun, or “wind and cloud,” according to the NYTimes) out of the sky (BBC, Aviation Week). The missile had no explosive warhead, and merely disabled its target by force of collision. This is disturbing in itself, of course, but equally disturbing are the implications for future escalation of space-borne weaponry by other militant nations with space technology (US, Russia, China, India). Especially disturbing was the mention of ground based anti-satellite lasers thought to be under development by the US Air Force. Such lasers supposedly achieve long-distance energy transmission by utilizing adaptive optics technology, pioneered by astrophysicists to improve our vision of celestial bodies by compensating for atmospheric distortion with rapidly moving flexible mirrors (work on these weapons is apparently underway at our own Lawrence Livermore National Labs). All this makes me terribly sad.
It also brings to mind two questions:
- What would happen if all the satellites died? Let’s assume mutually assured destruction confines itself to the heavens (a man can dream). What happens here on Earth? Planes and ships go astray without GPS navigation, resulting in loss of life and property. Spying and precision missile guidance becomes more difficult. What else?
- Has any civilization ever uninvented a technology? One of our professors mentioned uninvention the other day (or at least I jotted a note about it). We tend to think of knowledge in Biblical terms, that once obtained it can never be forgotten. But is that true? Can a group of people destroy a body of knowledge, by eliminating the documentation and, possibly, killing the knowledgeable? Has this ever happened? The West forgot Roman architecture with the fall of the Empire, but not willfully. I remember reading about the Chinese willfully forsaking their naval prowess in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but is that what happened? Maybe they kept the blue prints…
digital cable wins over dish!! lololol ok seriously, i need more time to think about this. good questions.
but for now, check out: LASERS ON A PLANE
The US military has successfully destroyed satellites on multiple occasions:
The US Air Force killed a satellite using a missle launched from an F-15 in 1985.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/asat.htm
And they are planning on testing a laser-based ASAT system in the next year or so.
http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=3411
The US Army destroyed a satellite using a chemical based laser in 1997. http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/miracl-asat.htm
WRT uninventing a technology: I don’t know if a technology has ever been uninvented, but I do know of cases where technology implementation have been rendered unrecoverable. The best example is the SR-71 blackbird aircraft, which still holds the world airspeed record for a manned aircraft (>3,500km/h). Unclassified time trials included St Louis to Cincinnati in 9 minutes, Los Angeles to DC in 65 minutes, New York to London in 1hr 55m, and London to Los Angeles in 3hr 48m. In 1968 a presidental order mandated the destruction of all molds and tools used to build the aircraft.
why did we destroy the blackbird molds?
and what exactly is the barrier from making the same one? or blackbird TWO POINT OH!?
My understanding was that there was an express desire that no-one ever be able to build another one again. I am under the impression that the plans were destroyed as well.
I’m intrigued by your visions of sudden annihilation of things or people, and what would happen to life thereafter, and by the questions you ask - worthy of a final 203 paper! About the Chinese naval power, it seems to me like a case of technology (or invention? or social construct? 203 is confusing me) that was forgotten more by chance than by active decision. Although there are a lot of debates about the actual numbers, Admiral Zheng He’s fleet is reckoned to have been huge, both in terms of number of ships (estimates vary from 50 to over 300) and in terms of their size, with the main ship reported to have been over 300 feet, although it’s unclear how such a giant could have been built using existing technologies.
Running a similar fleet was a very expensive business, and Zheng He’s voyages, however incredible and exotic, didn’t bring back to the court (that was footing the bill) anything that was deemed worthy of the investment needed. A series of circumstances (Zheng He’s death, a new emperor, military threats from the inland that required that the army be given preference over the navy when deciding how to spend money) drew the court’s attention away from the fleet, and since nobody else could invest in such an expensive and rather extravagant enterprise, the ships began to be abandoned and to decay. Later on, when China had already lost her maritime supremacy, a new, extremely conservative group of bureaucrats had all the remaining ocean-faring ships burnt. I don’t know, though, if they were still in use at the time (I am sure they were not used for transoceanic voyages, and suspect that they were too bulky and expensive for coast sailing), and whether the blueprints were also destroyed or just happened to get destroyed (or lost!) later - the only thing I’m sure of is that nobody knows for sure how these ships looked, how they were built, how many people manned them, etc. I wouldn’t say that there was an active decision to ‘forget’ the technology, though - rather a combination of political and economical factors let to the loss of importance of that particular technology.
Cool replies, folks. Matt, thanks for the links on ASAT. I was aware the US already had ASAT missiles, but didn’t know we already had functional lasers. Scary indeed. Regarding the Blackbird, just because the tool molds were destroyed doesn’t mean the information necessary to build a Blackbird has been lost, correct? The Air Force didn’t willfully abandon the spy plane technology. Presumably, they just made a better datamouse trap (datamouse being Danger Mouse’s nerdier and less capitalized cousin).
Elisa, to phrase your response in 203speak (forgive me), you are saying that the loss of the Chinese navy was due to arbitrary, non-deterministic forces, right? It was just a twist of fate, and if this was Sliders, we could just jump to a continuity in which Nelson was crushed by a Chinese armada and the Brits still made terrible grey bland food except out of rice. I wish I had a copy of Guns/Germs/Steel on me, because I think Diamond had some determinisitic explanation. He would be a geographical determinist, I guess…
[...] Just thought I might abuse the blog for some shameless self-promotion: there’s an interesting discussion going on over at localoaf on the inevitability of technology and the potential for uninvention, in case anyone wants to jump in. [...]
Ken-ichi, I’ll never catch up with your science-fiction knowledge, and I haven’t read Diamond yet, so I’ll have to limit myself to 203 speak… I hadn’t thought of uninvention or oblivion of technology in terms of technological determinism. I suppose that if you make the argument that “technology is out there” and the role of mankind is to discover it, then it makes sense that it can be “covered” again (and then recovered later). If this is what you mean, then indeed, I don’t attribute the loss of the Chinese fleet to any kind of determinism. I find the SCOT theory (and the hard-core one, even) much more convincing - the social processes of the China of the 15th and 16th centuries, which include the political and economical situation and a group of particularly powerful individuals that really, really didn’t like big ships, constructed the demise of the Chinese naval power. Whether or not my negligible knowledge of Chinese history coupled with my ignorance of technological development theories makes up a plausible explanation is a whole different matter, though…
The ironic thing (ironic, at least in terms of this discussion) was that the decision was made in the 1990s to retire the blackbirds because satellites could do the same job much more effectively….
The question still arises as to whether destruction of the means of the production of the first instance of an emerging technology results in uninvention: if others are aware of the “uninvented” technology and have sufficient resources/motivation they can perform reverse engineering- or come up with alternate methods of achieving the same goal.
I’ve only read the abstract, but this paper
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/jott/2002/00000027/00000003/05087992
seems to argue “failure to preserve tacit knowledge could lead to uninvention”
Well, here’s an interesting take on things. Government restriction on trade (or suppression of ideas) is the only impediment to global technology transfer, which is itself rather inexpensive. Perhaps those of you relentlessly monitoring the cutting edge have become so inured to the dazzle of newness that obsolescense and latent anarchic primitivism (boats running aground?!) are suddenly fresh. That is, old is the new new. How delightfully barbaric.