Reasons for Optimism X

1. Americans today are 20% less likely to die from cancer than we were in 1991. The death rate from cancer has fallen from 215.1 to 173.1 per 100,000. The decrease has been seen in men, women and children. Although death rates for some cancers are up, death rates for the four most common types of cancer (lung, colon, breast and prostate) have all fallen by more than 30%.

2. A second person has been cured of HIV, this time a newborn treated with triple the typical dose of antiretroviral drugs. The only person to have previously been cured of HIV was Timothy Brown, cured after a bone marrow transplant from a donor who was naturally immune. This second case holds far more promise as it is cheaper and may be easier to replicate.

3. The FDA has finally approved an early version of Geordi's visor, although the manufacturer's have opted for the name "artificial retina" instead. The device wirelessly sends images from a camera to an eye implant. The downside is that the implant requires the user to have some functioning retinal cells, so this is not a full cure for blindness. The upside is that the bulk of the device can be removed just like normal glasses, making upgrades easy.

4. Don Boudreaux continues his Cleaned by Capitalism series with an entry on "health-care products supplied quite successfully by free markets on a fee-for-service basis."

5. Once again via Mark Perry, U.S. oil production continues to grow. Texas has doubled oil production in the last three years, and is now producing more domestic oil than the entire country imports from the Persian Gulf. Christof Rühl, chief economist for BP, wrote recently, "The United States is likely to surpass Saudi Arabia in daily output very soon, and non-OPEC production will dominate global supply growth over the coming decade."

Furthermore, as of October 2012, the United States is producing more oil per day than every country in Central and South America combined. As recently as 2009, those countries were consistently producing 25-30% more oil than the US.

But the shale revolution isn't just here in the United States. Global oil production for the first three quarters of 2012 was 1% higher than all of 2011. Once the numbers are in for the fourth quarter, 2012 is expected to set an all-time record. For those worried that increased oil production means we'll just run out sooner, consider that ExxonMobil discovered more new recoverable oil last year than they took out of the ground--for the 19th year in a row.

6. Mark Perry and Don Boudreaux together penned a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing against middle class stagnation. (AEI also has a copy, in case the WSJ version is eventually paywalled.) They address the CPI's overstatement of inflation, the expansion in non-wage compensation, the large-scale entry of women into the labor force, rising life expectancy, the falling cost of "basics" like housing and food at home, and falling inequality in services like air travel and goods like consumer electronics. The piece is a wide-ranging but somewhat shallow introduction to the many lines of evidence that life is actually improving for most Americans.

Boudreaux has follow-ups to the piece here, here, here and here, including responses to some critics. Perry has follow-ups here and here. There's also more on the topic from James Pethokoukis and David Henderson.

7. Via MR, a village in India has dramatically improved agriculture yields using a method called System of Root Intensification (SRI) that focuses on soil conditions and plant density. Poor farmers in Darveshpura have set new world records for rice and potatoes, and SRI seems to improve yields for other crops as well. Some doubt the claims are legitimate, but the ease of adopting the method would allow small farmers the world over to increase their yields if the claims prove true.

8. Oliver August of The Economist recently completed a wide-ranging journey across 23 African countries. In the interview, he speaks of how easy it was to complete the journey, and says, "The main experience of travelling across Africa is one of hopefulness, one of industry, one of striving amongst the many still-quite-poor people, and one of a sense of a future that is coming closer quite quickly."

Recent Reasons for Optimism V

The latest installment of recent reasons for optimism was a bit delayed on account of this being the tenth day of a ten-day workweek for me. But that doesn't mean there was any less good news! There's been lots of good news in health, but there's also reasons for optimism on the economy, civil liberties and even the threat of asteroid impact.

Health

1. First the bad news-- the cytomegalovirus (CMV) infects 50-80% of people in the US, UK and Australia, and decreases life expectancy as much as smoking or drinking because of its unique effects on the immune system. Now the good news-- researchers at the University of Birmingham are working on an antiviral drug to reverse CMV's effects, potentially adding years to life expectancy. The drug has shown promise in mice, and tests on humans will begin soon. Finally, the great news-- researchers at the University of Connecticut at Farmington have genetically modified CMV to take advantage of what it does to the immune system. The result is a self-reinforcing cancer vaccine. In a study on mice, an untreated control group died of cancer within 23 days; the CMV-treated group lived for the entire length of the study.

2. A new breathalyzer can detect some kinds of cancer on your breath (ht Jason Silva). Although currently less accurate than more complicated tests, it's also far less costly, and could provide cancer screening to the poor around the world who can't afford current tests.

3. One more on cancer: Researchers have developed a patch (that looks very much like the birth control patch) that completely eliminated a certain kind of skin cancer after wearing it just three times, for three hours each. It was a very small trial, with just ten patients, but three months later the cancer was still gone from all ten patients, and after six months, there was no cancer in eight out of ten patients.

4. In Sweden, doctors have successfully transplanted a vein into a 10-year-old girl without the use of immunosuppressive drugs. They accomplished the feat by removing all of the donor's cells from the vein and replacing them with the girl's own stem cells.

Cyborgs and Robotics

5. We're one step closer to brain implants, as a team from MIT has invented a fuel cell to convert glucose in the brain into electricity that can be used by implants or prosthetics. (ht MR)

6. Picking up different kinds of objects is difficult and expensive for robots, especially when the shape of the object may not be known in advance. In an amazing example of the simplicity of innovation, a team at Cornell has found a solution using a balloon and ground coffee.



Economics

7. I've mentioned before on this blog that world income is higher than ever before and steadily increasing. Matt Ridley shares a graph showing that not only is world income higher, it's also more equitable.

8. Great news for free-traders: Both Mexico and Canada have now joined the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. The TPP, originally an agreement between New Zealand, Chile, Brunei and Singapore, is now being expanded to include the three NAFTA countries, the US, Canada and Mexico, as well as Japan, Australia, Peru, Vietnam and Malaysia. If an agreement is reached between all these countries, the TPP would become the largest free trade area in the world, comprising a full third of world GDP.

Civil Liberties and Crime

9. The Canadian government has backed down from their plan to record private conversations at border crossings and airports. What makes this even more encouraging is that this rapid about-face came in a non-election year, with the Conservatives' majority solidly in place until 2015. And it may not be just the Canadian government-- the US Department of State has withdrawn a request for bids to develop a system to monitor social media.

10. New Yorkers are striking back against that city's "stop and frisk" policy with a new app that allows New Yorkers to easily record and share video of police encounters and report them to the NYCLU. This is a small example of advancing technology being used to protect civil liberties.

11. Crime is down across-the-board. Violent crime fell by 4% from 2010 to 2011, the fifth year in a row it's fallen. That's true across the country, with every region except the Northeast seeing a drop of 4.5% or more. Property crimes were also down for the ninth year in a row, down 0.8% from 2010.

Everything Else

12. NASA scientists say there is little to no threat of a civilization-ending asteroid strike. Lindley Johnson of the Near Earth Object Observation Program says, "We know everything out there that is that big, and there is just nothing right now that's in an orbit that's any threat toward the Earth."

13. Ed Krayewski at Reason lists the "top 5 pieces of good news in the bad news." Some of his reasoning is a bit strained, but it's nevertheless an interesting list.

14. For even more optimism, check out these "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity." Among the obligatory pictures of people rescuing animals, there's a Subway restaurant giving free food to the homeless, a dry cleaner's offering free cleaning for the unemployed for job interviews, and the story of the Japanese seniors who volunteered to clean the radiation at Fukushima so the young wouldn't have to.

Recent Reasons for Optimism IV: A New Hope

1. Robin Hanson tackles general pessimism about the future with a comparison to modern high-rise apartments.

2. The New York Times (ht MR) has a list of 32 innovations, some minor, some major, that could change the world in the near future. The innovations range from better-tasting coffee to biosensors in your underwear and on your teeth to synthetic, hangover-free alcohol.

3. The New York Times also examines the "commercial ecosystem" created by the Kinect and Kinect hackers. As I've mentioned before, the Kinect is one of the best recent examples of the Matt Ridley quote on the sidebar here: "The more we prosper, the more we can prosper. The more we invent, the more inventions become possible. The world of things is often subject to diminishing returns. The world of ideas is not."

4. We keep inching closer to a cure for cancer. Some new treatments are able to target cancer cells more directly, while others encourage the immune system to attack the cancer itself.

5. We're also inching closer to driverless cars and the benefits they would bring. A Korean company, Chumdancha, has released several videos of their car driving down a busy highway with the human in the backseat, although it doesn't seem to be as advanced as Google's yet. Also check out this video (ht Driverless Car HQ) from the University of Texas at Austin illustrating "autonomous intersection management." When crossing an intersection no longer relies on human reaction times, we'll never have to wait at traffic lights again. Starting at about 0:51 in the embedded video, you can see their simulation of what that might look like. (I hope driverless cars come with tinted windows!)



6. Moore's Law is a little more secure now. With electronic computers projected to hit up against hard physical limitations within a decade or so, quantum computers have taken a step closer to replacing electronics. A collaboration including Simon Fraser University was able to keep qubits embedded in silicon stable for over three minutes. That shatters the previous record of just a few seconds and opens the door to hybrid electronic-quantum computers.

7. Those with leprosy will be cured, but also, burn victims. A three-year-old South African girl is recovering from severe burns to more than 80% of her body thanks to new skin grafts cloned from her own skin in Boston, then flown to her hospital in Johannesburg. This story highlights not only the great potential of cloning technologies for medical use, but the increasingly globalized scope of medical care.

8. Need even more optimism? Joshua at PostLibertarian has five more reasons for optimism.

The Undiscovered Country and the Final Frontier

Tom Murphy at his Do the Math blog recounts a conversation between an "Exponential Economist" and himself, a "Finite Physicist" (ht Marginal Revolution). Murphy's basic point is this:

Earth’s physical resources—particularly energy—are limited and may prohibit continued growth within centuries, or possibly much shorter depending on the choices we make.

As the discussion continues, Murphy settles on something of an upper limit to growth at around 400 years, which roughly corresponds to two limits. First, in about 400 years the waste heat from our energy use will be so great as to raise the average temperature of Earth to the boiling point. Second, in about 400 years, the energy we use will reach the "total solar input striking Earth."

There are a few specific problems with his argument that need to be countered.

I) The economist in Murphy's discussion says that economic growth is not equivalent to energy growth, and that growth in both GDP and utility can continue even if energy use stagnates. Murphy hand-waves this away by insisting that energy underpins the entire economy and that it will drag down the rest of the economy when it stagnates. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias and the commenter Vaniver on Hanson's post both raise direct critiques of Murphy's point. Vaniver points out that even with a constant quantity of energy, the price and therefore percentage of real GDP of energy can continue to rise. Hanson shows mathematically that even if one economic factor is held constant, the economy can continue growing as long as any other factor continues to grow. Hanson agrees that exponential economic growth will eventually cease, but only because he expects "diminishing returns to everything," not just energy or other physical resources.

II) Both of Murphy's above limits rest critically on the assumption that the discussion remains "grounded to Earth," that there is no "exodus to space, colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc." When the economist for whatever reason accepts this assumption, Murphy says he sighed in relief that he wasn't dealing with "a space cadet." Indeed, in a previous blog entry, Murphy had derided the idea that we'll leave Earth as "escapism." You can read his full argument for why we won't go into space at the above link, but it basically amounts to two ideas: space is really, really big ("You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is," as Douglas Adams would say), and all the good stuff is here on Earth, so why would we even want to leave?

In other words, if we never leave Earth, we'll be doomed to economic stagnation; but we'll never choose to leave Earth, because there's no reason to. Well call me a space cadet, but the counterargument is obvious. If the only way to achieve economic growth is to go into space, why would we ever stay on Earth? Indeed, the more we find ourselves constrained by Murphy's energy limits, the more we will want to go to space and the more resources the market will make available to do so.

His two constraints on energy are easily overcome by a space-based civilization. First, the waste heat of energy use is far easier to get rid of in the depths of space than in Earth's atmosphere; here, the bigness of space works to our advantage. Waste heat is only a constraint if we stay on Earth, which no doubt is why Murphy is so keen to stay on Earth in the first place. Second, there's no reason at all to think that a space-based civilization would be limited to the amount of energy in the sunlight that strikes Earth. The total energy output of the sun is about 2.2 billion times the amount that hits Earth. Even if we don't leave the solar system, and even if we don't become any more energy-efficient than we are right now, that would give us quite a few centuries of extra growth. Even modest gains in energy efficiency will add millennia of extra growth before we hit the limit, and non-solar sources of energy will extend that even further.

Murphy might counter that the space age is over; we once went to the moon but haven't been back for decades, and now even the shuttle will never take flight again. This, of course, ignores the continuing advances being made by other countries and even private organizations, at a time when the only real economic value in space comes from tourism and national bragging rights. By the time Murphy's constraints begin to come into play, there's no reason to think that we'll still be constrained to Earth. A few centuries from now, we could easily be more of a space-based species than a planet-based one, especially once you consider likely advances in genetics and cybernetics that will help us adapt to life in space.

III) In contradiction to Cowen's and Hanson's summaries, Murphy's point is not that exponential growth will stop, but that all growth will stop. He doesn't say our limited resources may prohibit exponential growth, but rather, they "may prohibit continued growth." His epilogue makes it clear that he foresees "a model in which GDP is fixed—under conditions of stable energy, stable population, steady-state economy."

Other commenters on Hanson's post suggested that space only provides linear expansion opportunities, and that we would eventually outpace the speed of light if we grew exponentially. Once our civilization becomes large enough, this is true. If the speed of light is as fundamental a constraint as physicists believe, we will eventually run up against it. But once we've extended our growth limit to the speed of light itself, I think it's fair to say that Murphy's limit of "centuries, or possibly much shorter" has been soundly defeated. Moreover, growth even at some fraction of the speed of light is still growth! We're not going to hit that "steady-state economy" until the accelerating expansion of space pushes all other galaxies beyond the edge of the visible universe in a trillion years or so. Maybe I'm just short-sighted, but that's far enough in the future that it's not gonna keep me up at night.

(Translated from Trek-ese, the title of this post is, of course, The Future and Space.)