THIS IS THE DOCUMENTARY GEJ DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb3VHCcgXL0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

THE SECRET TO ETERNITY: THE ERA OF DIGITAL IMMORTALITY.

How do you want to be remembered? As Simon Parkin
discovers, we may eventually be able to preserve our
entire minds for generations to come – would you?
A few months before she died, my grandmother made a
decision.
Bobby, as her friends called her (theirs is a generation
of nicknames), was a farmer’s wife who not only
survived World War II but also found in it justification
for her natural hoarding talent. ‘Waste not, want not’
was a principle she lived by long after England
recovered from a war that left it buckled and wasted. So
she kept old envelopes and bits of cardboard cereal
boxes for note taking and lists. She kept frayed
blankets and musty blouses from the 1950s in case she
needed material to mend. By extension, she was also a
meticulous chronicler. She kept albums of photographs
of her family members. She kept the airmail love letters
my late grandfather sent her while he travelled the
world with the merchant navy in a box. Her home was
filled with the debris of her memories.
Yet in the months leading up to her death, the
emphasis shifted from hoarding to sharing. Every time I
visited my car would fill with stuff: unopened cartons of
orange juice, balls of fraying wool, damp, antique
books, empty glass jars. All things she needed to
rehome now she faced her mortality. The memories too
began to move out. She sent faded photographs to her
children, grandchildren and friends, as well as letters
containing vivid paragraphs detailing some experience
or other.
On 9 April, the afternoon before the night she died, she
posted a letter to one of her late husband’s old
childhood friends. In the envelope she enclosed some
photographs of my grandfather and his friend playing as
young children. “You must have them,” she wrote to
him. It was a demand but also a plea, perhaps, that
these things not be lost or forgotten when, a few hours
later, she slipped away in her favourite armchair.
The hope that we will be remembered after we are gone
is both elemental and universal. The poet Carl Sandburg
captured this common feeling in his 1916 poem Troths:
Yellow dust on a bumblebee’s wing,
Grey lights in a woman’s asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing sunset embers:
I take you and pile high the memories.
Death will break her claws on some I keep.
It is a wishful tribute to the potency of memories. The
idea that a memory could prove so enduring that it
might grant its holder immortality is a romantic notion
that could only be held by a young poet, unbothered by
the aches and scars of age.
Nevertheless, while Sandburg’s memories failed to save
him, they survived him. Humans have, since the first
paintings scratched on cave walls, sought to confound
the final vanishing of memory. Oral history, diary,
memoir, photography, film and poetry: all tools in
humanity’s arsenal in the war against time’s whitewash.
Today we bank our memories onto the internet’s
enigmatic servers, those humming vaults tucked away
in the cooling climate of the far North or South. There’s
the Facebook timeline that records our most significant
life events, the Instagram account on which we store
our likeness, the Gmail inbox that documents our
conversations, and the YouTube channel that
broadcasts how we move, talk or sing. We collect and
curate our memories more thoroughly than ever before,
in every case grasping for a certain kind of immortality.
Is it enough? We save what we believe to be important,
but what if we miss something crucial? What if some
essential context to our words or photographs is lost?
How much better it would be to save everything, not
only the written thoughts and snapped moments of life,
but the entire mind: everything we know and all that we
remember, the love affairs and heartbreaks, the
moments of victory and of shame, the lies we told and
the truths we learned. If you could save your mind like a
computer’s hard drive, would you? It’s a question some
hope to pose to us soon. They are the engineers
working on the technology that will be able create
wholesale copies of our minds and memories that live
on after we are burned or buried. If they succeed, it
promises to have profound, and perhaps unsettling,
consequences for the way we live, who we love and
how we die.
Carbon copy
I keep my grandmother’s letters to me in a folder by my
desk. She wrote often and generously. I also have a
photograph of her in my kitchen on the wall, and a
stack of those antique books, now dried out, still
unread. These are the ways in which I remember her
and her memories, saved in hard copy. But could I have
done more to save her?
San Franciscan Aaron Sunshine’s grandmother also
passed away recently. “One thing that struck me is how
little of her is left,” the 30-year-old tells me. “It’s just a
few possessions. I have an old shirt of hers that I wear
around the house. There's her property but that's just
faceless money. It has no more personality than any
other dollar bill.” Her death inspired Sunshine to sign
up with Eterni.me, a web service that seeks to ensure
that a person’s memories are preserved after their death
online.
It works like this: while you’re alive you grant the
service access to your Facebook, Twitter and email
accounts, upload photos, geo-location history and
even Google Glass recordings of things that you have
seen. The data is collected, filtered and analysed before
it’s transferred to an AI avatar that tries to emulate your
looks and personality. The avatar learns more about you
as you interact with it while you’re alive, with the aim
of more closely reflecting you as time progresses.
“It’s about creating an interactive legacy, a way to
avoid being totally forgotten in the future,” says Marius
Ursache, one of Eterni.me’s co-creators. “Your grand-
grand-children will use it instead of a search engine or
timeline to access information about you – from photos
of family events to your thoughts on certain topics to
songs you wrote but never published.” For Sunshine,
the idea that he might be able to interact with a legacy
avatar of his grandmother that reflected her personality
and values is comforting. “I dreamt about her last
night,” he says. “Right now a dream is the only way I
can talk to her. But what if there was a simulation? She
would somehow be less gone from my life.”
While Ursache has grand ambitions for the Eterni.me
service (“it could be a virtual library of humanity”) the
technology is in still its infancy. He estimates that
subscribers will need to interact with their avatars for
decades for the simulation to become as accurate as
possible. He’s already received many messages from
terminally ill patients who want to know when the
service will be available – whether they can record
themselves in this way before they die. “It’s difficult to
reply to them, because the technology may take years
to build to a level that’s useable and offers real value,”
he says. But Sunshine is optimistic. “I have no doubt
that someone will be able to create good simulations of
people's personalities with the ability to converse
satisfactorily,” he says. “It could change our
relationship with death, providing some noise where
there is only silence. It could create truer memories of a
person in the place of the vague stories we have
today.”
It could, I suppose. But what if the company one day
goes under? As the servers are switched off, the people
it homes would die a second death.
As my own grandmother grew older, some of her
memories retained their vivid quality; each detail
remained resolute and in place. Others became
confused: the specifics shifted somehow in each
retelling. Eterni.me and other similar services counter
the fallibility of human memory; they offer a way to fix
the details of a life as time passes. But any simulation
is a mere approximation of a person and, as anyone
who has owned a Facebook profile knows, the act of
recording one’s life on social media is a selective
process. Details can be tweaked, emphases can be
altered, entire relationships can be erased if it suits
one’s current circumstances. We often give, in other
words, an unreliable account of ourselves.
Total recall
What if, rather than simply picking and choosing what
we want to capture in digital form, it was possible to
record the contents of a mind in their entirety? This
work is neither science fiction nor the niche pursuit of
unreasonably ambitious scientists. Theoretically, the
process would require three key breakthroughs.
Scientists must first discover how to preserve, non-
destructively, someone's brain upon their death. Then
the content of the preserved brain must be analysed
and captured. Finally, that capture of the person’s mind
must be recreated on a simulated human brain.
First, we must create an artificial human brain on which
a back-up of a human’s memories would be able to
‘run’. Work in the area is widespread. MIT runs a course
on the emergent science of ‘connectomics’, the work to
create a comprehensive map of the connections in a
human brain. The US Brain project is working to record
brain activity from millions of neurons while the EU
Brain project tries to build integrated models from this
activity.
Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute
at Oxford University, who in 2008 wrote a paper titled
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap , describes these
projects as “stepping stones” towards being able to
fully able to emulate the human brain.
“The point of brain emulation is to recreate the function
of the original brain: if ‘run’ it will be able to think and
act as the original,” he says. Progress has been slow
but steady. “We are now able to take small brain tissue
samples and map them in 3D. These are at exquisite
resolution, but the blocks are just a few microns across.
We can run simulations of the size of a mouse brain on
supercomputers – but we do not have the total
connectivity yet. As methods improve I expect to see
automatic conversion of scanned tissue into models
that can be run. The different parts exist, but so far
there is no pipeline from brains to emulations.”
Investment in the area appears to be forthcoming,
however. Google is heavily invested in brain emulation.
In December 2012 the company appointed Ray Kurzweil
as its director of engineering on the Google Brain
project, which aims to mimic aspects of the human
brain. Kurzweil, a divisive figure, is something of a
figurehead for a community of scientists who believe
that it will be possible to create a digital back-up of a
human brain within their lifetime. A few months later,
the company hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer
scientist who is one of the world's leading experts on
neural networks, essentially the circuitry of how the
human mind thinks and remembers.
Google is not alone, either. In 2011 a Russian
entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov, founded ‘The 2045
Initiative’, named after Kurzweil’s prediction that the
year 2045 will mark the point at which we’ll be able to
back up our minds to the cloud. While the fruits of all
this work are, to date, largely undisclosed, the effort is
clear.
Neuroscientist Randal Koene,science director for the
2045 Initiative, is adamant that creating a working
replica of a human brain is within reach. “The
development of neural prostheses already demonstrate
that running functions of the mind is possible,” he says.
It’s not hyperbole. Ted Berger, a professor at the
University of Southern California’s Center for
Neuroengineering has managed to create a working
prosthetic of the hippocampus part of the brain. In 2011
a proof-of-concept hippocampal prosthesis was
successfully tested in live rats and, in 2012 the
prosthetic was successfully tested in non-human
primates . Berger and his team intend to test the
prosthesis in humans this year, demonstrating that we
are already able to recreate some parts of the human
brain.
Memory dump
Emulating a human brain is one thing, but creating a
digital record of a human’s memories is a different sort
of challenge. Sandberg is cynical of whether this
simplistic process is viable. “Memories are not neatly
stored like files on a computer to create a searchable
index,” he says. “Memory consists of networks of
associations that are activated when we remember. A
brain emulation would require a copy of them all.”
Indeed, humans reconstruct information from multiple
parts of the brain in ways that are shaped by our
current beliefs and biases, all of which change over
time. These conclusions appear at odds with any effort
to store memories in the same way that a computer
might record data for easy access. It is an idea based
on, as one sceptic I spoke to (who wished to remain
anonymous) put it, “the wrong and old-fashioned
‘possession’ view of memory”.
There is also the troubling issue of how to extract a
person’s memories without destroying the brain in the
process. “I am sceptical of the idea that we will be able
to accomplish non-destructive scanning,” says
Sandberg. “All methods able to scan neural tissue at
the required high resolution are invasive, and I suspect
this will be very hard to achieve without picking apart
the brain.” Nevertheless, the professor believes a
searchable, digital upload of a specific individual’s
memory could be possible so long as you were able to
“run” the simulated brain in its entirety.
“I think there is a good chance that it could work in
reality, and that it could happen this century,” he says.
“We might need to simulate everything down to the
molecular level, in which case the computational
demands would simply be too large. It might be that the
brain uses hard-to-scan data like quantum states (an
idea believed by some physicists but very few
neuroscientists), that software cannot be conscious or
do intelligence (an idea some philosophers believe but
few computer scientists), and so on. I do not think
these problems apply, but it remains to be seen if I am
right.”
If it could be done, then, what would preserving a
human mind mean for the way we live?
Some believe that there could be unanticipated
benefits, some of which can make the act of merely
extending a person’s life for posterity seem rather plain
by comparison. For example, David Wood, chairman of
the London Futurists, argues that a digital back-up of a
person’s mind could be studied, perhaps providing
breakthroughs in understanding the way in which
human beings think and remember.
And if a mind could be digitally stored while a person
was still alive then, according to neuroscientist Andrew
A Vladimirov, it might be possible to perform
psychoanalysis using such data. “You could run
specially crafted algorithms through your entire life
sequence that will help you optimise behavioural
strategies,” he says.
Yet there’s also an unusual set of moral and ethical
implications to consider, many of which are only just
beginning to be revealed. “In the early stages the main
ethical issue is simply broken emulations: we might get
entities that are suffering in our computers,” says
Sandberg. “There are also going to be issues of
volunteer selection, especially if scanning is
destructive.” Beyond the difficulty of recruiting people
who are willing to donate their minds in such a way,
there is the more complicated issue of what rights an
emulated mind would enjoy. “Emulated people should
likely have the same rights as normal people, but
securing these would involve legislative change,” says
Sandberg. “There might be the need for new kinds of
rights too. For example, the right for an emulated
human to run in real-time so that they can participate
in society.”
Defining the boundaries of a person’s privacy is already
a pressing issue for humanity in 2015, where third-
party corporations and governments hold more insight
into our personal information than ever before. For an
emulated mind, privacy and ownership of data becomes
yet more complicated. “Emulations are vulnerable and
can suffer rather serious breaches of privacy and
integrity,” says Sandberg. He adds, in a line that could
be lifted from a Philip K Dick novel: “We need to
safeguard their rights”. By way of example, he suggests
that lawmakers would need to consider whether it
should be possible to subpoena memories.
Property laws
“Ownership of specific memories is where things
become complex,” says Koene. “In a memoir you can
choose which memories are recorded. But if you don't
have the power of which of your memories others can
inspect it becomes a rather different question.” Is it a
human right to be able to keep secrets?
These largely un-interrogated questions also begin to
touch on more fundamental issues of what it means to
be human. Would an emulated brain be considered
human and, if so, does the humanity exist in the
memories or the hardware on which the simulated brain
runs? If it's the latter, there’s the question of who owns
the hardware: an individual, a corporation or the state?
If an uploaded mind requires certain software to run (a
hypothetical Google Brain, for example) the ownership
of the software license could become contentious.
The knowledge that one’s brain is to be recorded in its
entirety might also lead some to behave differently
during life. “I think it would have the same effect as
knowing your actions will be recorded on camera,” says
Sandberg. “In some people this knowledge leads to a
tendency to conform to social norms. In others it
produces rebelliousness. If one thinks that one will be
recreated as a brain emulation then it is equivalent to
expecting an extra, post-human life.”
Even if it were possible to digitally record the contents
and psychological contours of the human mind, there
are undeniably deep and complicated implications. But
beyond this, there is the question of whether this is
something that any of us truly want. Humans long to
preserve their memories (or, in some cases, to forget
them) because they remind us of who we are. If our
memories are lost we cease to know who we were, what
we accomplished, what it all meant. But at the same
time, we tweak and alter our memories in order to
create the narrative of our lives that fits us at any one
time. To have everything recorded with equal weight
and importance might not be useful, either to us or to
those who follow us.
Where exactly is the true worth of the endeavour? Could
it actually be the comforting knowledge for a person
that they, to one degree or other, won’t be lost without
trace? The survival instinct is common to all life: we
eat, we sleep, we fight and, most enduringly, we
reproduce. Through our descendants we reach for a
form of immortality, a way to live on beyond our
physical passing. All parents take part in a grand relay
race through time, passing the gene baton on and on
through the centuries. Our physical traits – those eyes,
that hair, this temperament – endure in some diluted or
altered form. So too, perhaps, do our metaphysical
attributes (“what will survive of us is love,” as Philip
Larkin tentatively put it in his 1956 poem, ‘An Arundel
Tomb’). But it is the mere echo of immortality. Nobody
lives forever; with death only the fading shadow of our
life remains. There are the photographs of us playing as
children. There are the antique books we once read.
There is the blouse we once wore.
I ask Sunshine why he wants his life to be recorded in
this way. “To be honest, I'm not sure,” he says. “The
truly beautiful things in my life such as the parties I've
thrown, the sex I've had, the friendships I’ve enjoyed.
All of these things are too ephemeral to be preserved in
any meaningful way. A part of me wants to build
monuments to myself. But another part of me wants to
disappear completely.” Perhaps that is true of us all:
the desire to be remembered, but only the parts of us
that we hope will be remembered. The rest can be
discarded.
Despite my own grandmother’s careful distribution of
her photographs prior to her death, many remained in
her house. These eternally smiling, fading unknown
faces evidently meant a great deal to her in life but
now, without the framing context of her memories, they
lost all but the most superficial meaning. In a curious
way, they became a burden to those of us left behind.
My father asked my grandmother’s vicar (a kindly man
who had been her friend for many years), what he
should do with the pictures; to just throw the
photographs away seemed somehow flippant and
disrespectful. The vicar’s advice was simple. Take each
photograph. Look at it carefully. In that moment you
honour the person captured. Then you may discard of it
and be free.

HOW TO CURB OBESITY

There may be a simple way to lose weight using only
the power of thought. You just have to know how, says
David Robson.
Eric Robinson has a surprising tool for weight loss. It’s
something we all have, but perhaps don’t use it as
much as we’d like: our memory.
Dieters often feel that they are waging war with their
stomachs, but psychologists like Robinson believe that
appetite is formed as much in the mind as our guts. So
much so that if you try to remember the last food
you’ve eaten, thinks Robinson, you can get thinner
without the hunger pangs.
“Lots of research has now shown that subtle
psychological factors can impact how much you eat –
but people still aren’t aware of the influence,” he says.
“And that’s important, given the worldwide obesity
problem.” If this is true, how could it work?
The inspiration for this latest thinking comes, in part,
from people with very poor memories, suffering from a
deficit known as anterograde amnesia. You could meet
these people and have a deep, involved conversation –
but after 20 minutes they wouldn’t have the faintest
idea who you were. “Something happens to them, but
you come back 20 minutes later and they have no
recollection of it,” says Robinson, who is based at the
University of Liverpool.
Forgotten food
The same is true of the food they eat. One of the key
studies involved a former musician and a former banker,
both of whom had developed anterograde amnesia after
a herpes infection damaged parts of the temporal
cortex, the part of the brain that lays down new
memories. They were first given a plate of sandwiches
and cake, which they ate until they were full. The plates
were taken away – only to be returned with more
helpings 15 minutes later. While healthy volunteers
would tend to feel too full to eat more, the two amnesic
subjects happily filled themselves a second time . “They
forget they’ve had their last meal, and so if they are
offered another one, they’ll eat that too,” says Glyn
Humphreys, at the University of Oxford, who conducted
the study.
Despite their poor memories, the amnesic pair weren’t
completely oblivious to what they had just eaten. In
another part of the experiment, they were allowed to
taste a range of foods – rice pudding, crisps, or
chocolate, asked to wait a bit, and then offered the
plates again. Most people, like you or I, seek a variety
of flavours, so we change our preference a second time
round – a phenomenon called “sensory specific
satiety”. Like us, the two amnesic volunteers also felt
less tempted by their previous choice – even though
they said they had no recollection of having eaten it.
Their changing preference suggests they didn’t have a
problem with the sensory processing of the dishes –
it’s just they couldn’t form an explicit, conscious
memory of the meal. And without that recollection, they
still felt hungry, even when their stomachs were full.
You might suspect that a healthy brain is smart enough
to take notice of what you’ve eaten, but recent research
shows it is easily fooled. Consider this ingenious
experiment by Jeff Brunstrom at the University of
Bristol. His subjects thought their task was simple: to
eat a bowl of soup. Unbeknown to them, Brunstrom had
hooked up a pipe that passed through the table and
into the bowl, which allowed him to top-up some of his
subjects’ soup without them noticing. He found that
their later snacking depended almost entirely on the
appearance of the bowl at the start of the meal –
whether it seemed big or small – and very little on the
actual amount he had fed them.
All of which weakens the common notion that hunger is
governed solely by the hormones from the gut. “I’m not
suggesting that kind of signalling isn’t important, but
the role of cognition has been under represented,” says
Brunstrom. And in some circumstances it may be more
important.
That could easily have an impact in our hectic, modern
lives. Working lunches are now commonplace in most
offices, and many people watch TV or play with their
smartphones and laptops during evening meals. All of
these distractions might affect your memories of what
you’ve eaten. Brunstrom, for instance, asked subjects
to eat with one hand while they played solitaire with
the other . Thanks to the distraction, they struggled to
recall the meal, and pigged out on more biscuits later in
the day.
Sensory boost
It is for this reason that the researchers are now
looking into ways of boosting the sensory memory of
food. Robinson recently tested whether a recording,
played during a meal, could help a group of obese
women to eat some ham sandwiches more mindfully.
The instructions were simple: the 3-minute clip asked
them to focus on the full sensual experience of the
meal – the sights, the taste, and the smell. A second
control group ate with the pleasant sound of a cuckoo’s
melodious calls. As Robinson had hoped, the people
asked to savour their food gave fuller descriptions later
on, and snacked less 3 hours later – consuming 30%
fewer calories.
The approach may not work for everyone, but Robinson
has other ideas for alternative techniques; in another
experiment, asking people to consciously remember
what they had eaten earlier in the day seemed to
discourage over-eating later on. Your imagination may
even offer a helping hand: a team in Pennsylvania has
found that visualising your cravings, in full detail,
seems to trick the mind into thinking it has actually
eaten the snack – reducing desire and actual
consumption .
Robinson is currently working on an app that could
remind someone to recall their previous meals
throughout their daily routine. But despite all these
efforts, he points out that we still need bigger clinical
trials to test if memory tricks are really effective in the
ongoing battle with obesity. He’s also concerned that
people might find the procedures tiresome –
particularly if they have to listen to a recording every
time they eat.
Promisingly, “attentive eating” does not seem to reduce
his subjects’ pleasure of their meals; on the contrary,
they actually seemed to find it more enjoyable to
absorb themselves in the sea of flavours hitting their
tongues. “It’s not unimaginable that savouring food
could actually be a good thing.”
If they work, these memory tricks could therefore offer
that rare thing: a slimming programme that actually
enhances your pleasure in food. And surely that would
be one of the more palatable solutions to the fight
against obesity.

SPACE 2020: WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD

What will our space ambitions actually look like a
decade from now? Three experts tell Richard
Hollingham.
Space has not been this exciting since the 1960s.
Nasa recently launched Orion , its first new spacecraft to
carry astronauts since the Space Shuttle, and is
developing a massive new rocket to rival the Saturn V.
Europe has landed a space probe on a comet 510 million
kilometres (317 million miles) away and China is
developing its next space station.
Meanwhile private companies are changing the
economics of space by forging ahead with plans for
human spaceflight, space tourism and even missions to
Mars .
The next few years will also see the final construction
of the James Webb Space Telescope – a space
observatory the size of a tennis court.
So in the decade from 2020, can we look forward to a
glorious new space age of Moon bases, Mars colonies
and more remarkable cosmic discoveries? To try to find
out, we canvassed the opinions of an expert panel for
their predictions beyond 2020.
Our experts are:
SP: Scott Pace, Director of the Space Policy Institute in
Washington DC
DB: David Baker, ex-Nasa engineer, author and editor of
Spaceflight magazine
MG: Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space
sciences at the UK’s Open University
As you would expect, there are plenty of uncertainties
in the coming years in space – not least the impact of
domestic and international politics. Nor do our
panellists always agree. However, here are the six
predictions they came up with:
1. Humans will go back to the Moon
DB: If only because it’s up there, you can see it in the
night sky. The Moon’s just three days away and it
requires very little extra capability to send astronauts
there for relatively short periods of time. China is very
much targeting the Moon as a place it wants to put its
astronauts.
MG: I envisage a semi-permanent habitation of the
Moon. This is not colonisation; this is going to the
Moon and using it for a launch pad for rockets to Mars
– a lunar base for future exploration of the Solar
System.
SP: The problem with the current US space policy is
that not only did it get rid of the Moon as the next step
and substituted this rather vague path to Mars and
asteroids, it left out our international partners. We had
many potential partners that were interested in the
Moon. It belongs on the agenda because it’s driven by
the geopolitical, technical and economic interests of
the US and our major partners.
2. But not – yet – to Mars
MG: Although Mars is a goal for human exploration,
once you’ve gone there and planted a flag there, I’m not
exactly sure what happens next.There are discussions
about whether we should make Mars a protected habitat
in the way that we have protected habitats on Earth.
SP: When we said we’re going to Mars, a lot of our
fellow space agencies said, ‘well that’s nice but it’s a
lot more than we can handle’. Strategically we picked a
direction that left out the most crucial thing in today’s
world, which is international partnership.
DB: One has to realise there’s never been a time in
Nasa’s history when it hasn’t been as controlled by its
public relations department hooked into the White
House. The view the public is being presented with
from Nasa is very different to the capabilities of the
agency.
The new Orion spacecraft is capable of three weeks of
autonomous operations in space. It’s not capable of
providing human habitation on the way to Mars. Going
to Mars is drastic, dangerous and premature.
3. China and India will become major space nations
DB: We are starting to see a space race between India
and China and I think that is going to play out gradually
over the next few years.
SP: I don’t really think there’s a race in that sense. For
China space is a way of instilling national pride and
support for the Communist Party, a way of improving
industrial quality and of attracting young people into
the science and technology fields.
DB: In the West we get a new space policy with every
new president or government. There is a general lack of
continuity and a lot of time and money are wasted.
China has the advantage in this – it has a non-
democratic political system that can lay out plans
several years in the future and expect to see those
accomplished.
4. The future of the International Space Station (ISS) is
uncertain
SP: The Americans are committed to be there until 2024,
the problem is whether our partners will be there
through that time and that depends on the future
relationship with Russia. Both the US and Russia are
very tied to the ISS, it’s a deeply mutually dependent
exercise. Every effort is made to insulate that from other
problems in our relationship.
DB: The Russians can’t continue to operate the ISS on
their own, as it’s not owned by them. I think the whole
thing will be deorbited. By the time we get to 2020 it
will be more than 20 years since the initial elements
were launched.
SP: The future of the space station depends on the
future of international partnership. And if we don’t have
a clear path on what we do next after the space station,
the real answer is we’re going to be going out of
business. Human spaceflight will certainly continue but
it won’t be led by the West.
DB: We are seeing a number of quite serious concerns
about keeping it running. Over the last year we’ve seen
a lift in the number of hours spent on maintenance.
SP: By the mid 2020s we’ll see a Chinese station up
there and Europe is in discussions with China over
having one of its astronauts on board.
5. Private ventures could eclipse the agencies
DB: I think we’re going to get XCOR and Virgin Galactic
flying people. You’ll have your high-rise joyriders but I
think the real promise is sending scientists and
experiments on sub-orbital flights.
MG: First of all it will be the super-wealthy and the tech
geeks (or the super-wealthy tech geeks), in the same
way that the super-wealthy took the first aeroplane
flights. When the airlines were getting going, we forget
that many of them such as British Airways were
government-owned. It will be the same with rocket
flights to the Moon. At the moment it’s the agencies
but eventually it’s going to be companies like SpaceX,
Virgin Galactic or their successors.
SP: The lack of future [US] government plans beyond
the ISS are quite dangerous for the emerging
commercial space sector. Without clear government
demand, it’s difficult to see how they can thrive on
their own. If you look at the development of SpaceX’s
and Orbital’s capabilities there are billions of dollars of
Nasa funding to meet Nasa’s needs.
DB: The future lies not with grand visionary mega-
concepts of the Von Braun era but the solid
consolidation of private corporations wresting it away
from government. Then I think you’ll see performance.
6. Humans will continue to boldy go
SP: Defining what it is to be human involves answering
questions like: ‘Where can we go? What can we see?
What can we learn and bring back?’ In partnership with
robotic systems, we want to go to as many places as
we can. And we should.
MG: No doubt the robots will be able to do everything
the humans do and they’ll be no need, for scientific or
technical purposes, to send people. However, there is
curiosity – what people what to do and find, there’s
the aspiration and inspiration. People will still go once
the robots have shown us how to do it.
DB: I think while there are going to be these mega
projects – I would love to see these happen – I don’t
think that’s the way space is unfolding. It’s going to be
market-led, people-led, we’re seeing the
democratisation of the space programme.
MG: We are seeing the tech benefits that come from the
space programme. There are jobs in it. The UK space
industry, for instance, is one of the biggest providers of
income to government. I’m optimistic because I don’t
think that the inspiration value of space exploration has
changed.

THE MAN WHO STUDIES EVIL

Why are some people extraordinarily selfish,
manipulative, and unkind? David Robson asks the
scientist delving into the darkest sides of the human
mind.
If you had the opportunity to feed harmless bugs into a
coffee grinder, would you enjoy the experience? Even if
the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells
painfully crunching? And would you take a perverse
pleasure from blasting an innocent bystander with an
excruciating noise?
These are just some of the tests that Delroy Paulhus
uses to understand the “dark personalities” around us.
Essentially, he wants to answer a question we all may
have asked: why do some people take pleasure in
cruelty? Not just psychopaths and murderers – but
school bullies, internet trolls and even apparently
upstanding members of society such as politicians and
policemen.
It is easy, he says, to make quick and simplistic
assumptions about these people. “We have a tendency
to use the halo or devil framing of individuals we meet
– we want to simplify our world into good or bad
people,” says Paulhus, who is based at the University
of British Columbia in Canada. But while Paulhus
doesn’t excuse cruelty, his approach has been more
detached, like a zoologist studying poisonous insects –
allowing him to build a “taxonomy”, as he calls it, of
the different flavours of everyday evil.
Self-regard
Paulhus’s interest began with narcissists – the
incredibly selfish and vain, who may lash out to protect
their own sense of self-worth. Then, a little more than
a decade ago, his grad student Kevin Williams
suggested that they explore whether these self-
absorbed tendencies are linked to two other unpleasant
characteristics – Machiavellianism (the coolly
manipulative) and psychopathy (callous insensitivity
and immunity to the feelings of others). Together, they
found that the three traits were largely independent,
though they sometimes coincide, forming a “Dark Triad”
– a triple whammy of nastiness.
It is surprising how candid his participants can often
be. His questionnaires typically ask the subjects to
agree with statements such as “I like picking on weaker
people” or “It’s wise not to tell me your secrets”. You
would imagine those traits would be too shameful to
admit – but, at least in the laboratory, people open up,
and their answers do seem to correlate with real-life
bullying, both in adolescence and adulthood . They are
also more likely to be unfaithful to their spouses
(particularly those with Machiavellian and psychopathic
tendencies) and to cheat on tests.
Even so, since Paulhus tends to focus on everyday evil
rather than criminal or psychiatric cases, the traits are
by no means apparent on the first meeting. “They are
managing in everyday society, so they have enough
control not to get themselves into trouble. But it
catches your attention here or there.” People who score
particularly high on narcissism, for instance, quickly
display their tendency to “ over-claim ” – one of the
strategies that helps them boost their own egos. In
some experiments, Paulhus presented them with a made
up subject and they quickly confabulated to try to
appear like they knew it all – only to get angry when he
challenged them about it. “It strikes you that yes, this
fits into a package that allows them to live with a
distorted positive view of themselves.”
Born nasty
Once Paulhus had begun to open a window on these
dark minds, others soon wanted to delve in to answer
some basic questions about the human condition. Are
people born nasty, for instance? Studies comparing
identical and non-identical twins suggest a relatively
large genetic component for both narcissism and
psychopathy , though Machiavellianism seems to be
more due to the environment – you may learn to
manipulate from others. Whatever we’ve inherited
cannot take away our personal responsibility, though. “I
don’t think anyone is born with psychopathy genes and
then nothing can be done about it,” says Minna Lyons
at the University of Liverpool.
You only need to look at the anti-heroes of popular
culture – James Bond, Don Draper or Jordan Belfort in
the Wolf of Wall Street – to realise that dark
personalities have sex appeal, a finding supported by
more scientific studies. Further clues to the benefits
might come from another basic human characteristic –
whether you are a morning or evening person. Lyons
and her student, Amy Jones found that “night owls” –
people who stay up late but can’t get up in the morning
– tend to score higher on a range of dark triad traits.
They are often risk-takers – one of the characteristics
of psychopathy; they are more manipulative – a
Machiavellian trait – and as narcissists, they tend to be
exploitative of other people. That might make sense if
you consider our evolution: perhaps dark personalities
have more chance to steal, manipulate, and have illicit
sexual liaisons late while everyone else is sleeping, so
they evolved to be creatures of the night.
Whatever the truth of that theory, Paulhus agrees there
will always be niches for these people to exploit.
“Human society is so complex that there are different
ways of enhancing your reproductive success – some
involve being nice and some being nasty,” he says.
Dark corners
Recently, he has started probing even further into the
darkest shadows of the psyche. “We were pushing the
envelope, asking more extreme questions,” he says –
when he found that some people will also readily admit
to inflicting pain on others for no other reason than
their own pleasure. Crucially, these tendencies are not
simply a reflection of the narcissism, psychopathy or
Machiavellianism, but seem to form their own sub-type
– “everyday sadism”. For this reason, Paulhus now
calls it a “dark tetrad”.
The “ bug crushing machine” offered the perfect way for
Paulhus and colleagues to test whether that reflected
real life behaviour. Unknown to the participants, the
coffee grinder had been adapted to give insects an
escape route – but the machine still produced a
devastating crushing sound to mimic their shells hitting
the cogs. Some were so squeamish they refused to take
part, while others took active enjoyment in the task.
“They would be willing not just to do something nasty
to bugs but to ask for more,” he says, “while others
thought it was so gross they didn’t even want to be in
the same room.” Crucially, those individuals also scored
very highly on his test for everyday sadism.
Arguably, a rational human being shouldn’t care too
much about bugs’ feelings. But the team then set up a
computer game that would allow the participants to
“punish” a competitor with a loud noise through their
headphones. This wasn’t compulsory; in fact, the
volunteers had to perform a tedious verbal task to earn
the right to punish their competitor – but, to Paulhus’s
surprise, the everyday sadists were more than happy to
take the trouble. “There wasn’t just willingness to do it
but a motivation to enjoy, to put in some extra effort to
have the opportunity to hurt other individuals.”
Importantly, there was no provocation or personal gain
to be had from their cruelty – the people were doing it
for pure pleasure.
Troll tracking
He thinks this is directly relevant to internet trolls.
“They appear to be the internet version of everyday
sadists because they spend time searching for people
to hurt.” Sure enough, an anonymous survey of trollish
commentators found that they scored highly on dark
tetrad traits , but particularly the everyday sadism
component – and enjoyment was their prime
motivation. Indeed, the bug-crushing experiment
suggested that everyday sadists may have more muted
emotional responses to all kinds of pleasurable
activities – so perhaps their random acts of cruelty are
attempts to break through the emotional numbness.
More immediately, his discoveries have attracted the
attention of police and military agencies, who want to
collaborate with Paulhus to see if his insights might
explain why some people abuse their positions. “The
concern is that these people might deliberately select
jobs where you are given the mandate to hurt
individuals,” he says. If so, further work might suggest
ways to screen out the dark personalities at
recruitment.
He’s also excited about new work on “moral
Machiavellianism” and “communal narcissists” – people
who perhaps have dark traits but use them for good (as
they see it). In some situations, ruthlessness may be
necessary. “To be prime minister, you can’t be namby
pamby – you need to cut corners and hurt people, and
even be nasty to achieve your moral causes,” he says.
After all, the dark personalities often have the impulse
and the confidence to get things done –even Mother
Theresa apparently had a steely side , he says. “You’re
not going to help society by sitting at home being
nice.”
All of which underlines the false dichotomy of good and
evil that Paulhus has been keen to probe. In a sense,
that is a personal as much as a professional question.
He admits to seeing a dark streak in his own behaviour:
for example, he enjoys watching violent, painful sports
like Mixed Martial Arts. “It didn’t take long to see I
would stand above average on these dark traits,” he
says. “But given my abiding curiosity as a scientist and
my enjoyment of investigating such things – I thought
that perhaps I was in a good position to take a closer
look at the dark side.”

ORIGIN OF BED BUGS

"Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite," goes the
familiar phrase. Unfortunately the statistics aren't in
your favour, because these apple-pip-sized bugs are
everywhere.
Hardly a week goes by without a news story of yet
another infestation, and yet they are relatively
understudied, says Warren Booth of the University of
Tulsa in Oklahoma, US.
Booth and his colleagues have used genetics to unveil
the origin of bed bugs. They found that there are two
lineages in Europe. They are so diverse, they have
almost split into two species.
What's more, their origin lies with bats.
The research, published in the journal Molecular
Ecology , provides the first genetic evidence that bats
were the ancestral host of the bed bugs that plague
human residences today.
Bed bugs have been around for a long time, as has their
association with humans. There are references to them
in ancient Egyptian literature, and archaeologists have
even discovered what seem to be fossilised bed bugs
thought to be about 3,500 years old .
While you sleep at night they are feeding on your
blood
A single pregnant female bed bug can infest an entire
apartment building and the creatures are able to go
through many rounds of inbreeding with no detrimental
effects at all. All they need are human hosts to satisfy
their thirst.
But in the 1950s they largely disappeared from our
homes and hotels, due to an effective pesticide
campaign. However, 15 years ago they came back with
a vengeance.
Infestations are hard to treat, as 90% of common bed
bugs now have a mutation that makes them resistant to
the insecticides, known as pyrethroids, used to kill
them.
Booth's team sampled hundreds of bed bugs from
human and bat dwellings from 13 countries around
Europe.
An analysis of their DNA showed that there was no gene
flow occurring between the human and bat bed bugs,
even though some bats lived in churches or attics and
could therefore have come into human contact.
We're living in a time where they're becoming
much more common
The bat lineage probably dates back to when bats and
humans once shared caves, says Booth. Even today it
shows much more genetic diversity than the human
form.
So different were the two that when previously bred
together in the lab, the offspring were less fertile.
While their bites are not known to spread disease, they
can cause itchy bumps and rashes not to mention the
stigma of living or coming from an infected area.
"While you sleep at night they are feeding on your
blood, you are a meal ticket for them," says Booth.
"That can lead to enormous psychological issues."
There's two types of people, says Booth: "the type that
have had bed bugs and the people that will still get
them. We're living in a time where they're becoming
much more common."

God

God is good

God is indeed good