In Chicago this weekend mainly to catch Freeman Dyson’s speech tonight at ISDC 2010, as well as visit relatives in both Chicagoland and up the sparkling west coast of Michigan. Incidentally, I flew into O’Hare Friday from San Diego. While still on the ground in Southern California, the pilot warned that we were taking on an hour’s worth of extra gas in case President Obama landed as we arrived, because we’d have to do circles in the sky. As it turned out, we only had to do them on the ground because he landed before us. I got a glimpse of Air Force One in it’s solo security mode a few runways away from us as we taxied in. But I was on the wrong side of our plane, so I couldn’t get you an image for this post. Sorry.

Mary recommends the view from Adler Planetarium of the spectacular Chicago skyline. Click .

I did happily connect with Mary Cordell Kulberg, whose grandfather is the brother of my grandfather; she took me on a tour of the sensational Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake Michigan. Not so incidentally, both our grandfathers came to the U.S. from Germany in the 1890s just before the Peary/Panama/T. Roosevelt Maslow Window — perhaps the most ebullient decade in U.S. history. They were smart, because the Maslow Window concept itself was still a century in the future!

The Adler Planetarium offers one of the most beautiful settings in the world as you can see above. Having grown up just a few hours up the Michigan coast, Adler was the first major planetarium I ever saw. It made a lasting impression and is always a special place to me, but it has changed dramatically. For example, it has expanded in all directions to take advantage of the spectacular Lake Michigan and City views, as well as featuring excellent state-of-the-art shows on the cosmos.

Who could resist Whoopi Goldberg offering us a tour of the stars? (Neither Mary nor I could.) Click .

Since 2000, two important events have influenced Adler. One is that Boeing moved their world headquarters to Chicago. Another is that astronaut Jim Lovell became a major donor to the planetarium. Most of the upper level of Adler is now devoted to interactive, futuristic space displays funded largely by Boeing, as well as an inspiring exposition of Lovell’s life.

An impressive statue of Jim Lovell adorns the area to the right of Adler’s main entrance. Click .

Jim Lovell is one of the most famous astronauts in history. Known mostly for Apollo 13, he was also Command Module pilot on Apollo 8 in 1968, humanity’s first voyage to the Moon’s vicinity. On Christmas Eve from lunar orbit the Apollo 8 crew read the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis on a live television broadcast; at the time, it was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8 and 13 gave him the distinction of being one of only 3 humans to go to the Moon twice, and the only one of the three to not land.

Several inspiring exhibits feature Lovell’s life from his childhood through college and his astronaut career, including interesting details about his Earth orbital flight on Gemini XII with future Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. One of our favorites is an animated robot who is only too happy to demonstrate the hazards (e.g., radiation, meteorites) of being unprotected on the Moon’s surface, while Lovell explains the advantages of a lunar base. The lake-side of the Upper Level is devoted to hands-on exhibits by Boeing designed mostly for kids, although we enjoyed them too.

Whether you’re a parent, a child, or someone interested in the human future in space, Adler is definitely the place to go if you want to learn about why the new international space age — due to arrive by 2015 — will be so exciting.

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day; those in the service — present and past — deserve our thanks!

Author Matt Ridley — The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010) — explores current thinking about the key factors in human social and technological evolution and what set us apart from early human competitors such as the Neanderthals. After all, they were “nice” people too with big brains who even buried their dead, but never flourished culturally or economically and ceased making headlines 30,000 years ago; (Wall Street Journal, 5/22/10).

What do technology, sex, and the future have in common? (Ans: Collective Intelligence) Click

Ridley’s theme – “collective intelligence” – intriguingly illuminates the way humans surge forward technologically, economically, and culturally even today during epochal, twice-per-century Maslow Windows (e.g., the 1960s… ).

Apparently Neanderthals suffered because they were not gregarious enough! According to Ridley, the key to a “big bang in human consciousness” is not genetic as much as it is collaborative, “what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals.” In his book, The Nature of Technology (2009), W. Brian Arthur concurs that today “innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange.”

Ridley comments that,

We tend to forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to invention, far more important than governments, money or individual genius. It’s no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities … are the places where invention and discovery happened.

After all, even Einstein initially worked at a patent office — by definition a stimulating attractor of new ideas.

“So here is the answer to the puzzle of the human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.”

Although today, humans connect more often than ever before because of global networking and transportation, even by the late 18th century, humans had apparently accidentally invented a highly collaborative and effective arrangement for societal quantum leaps — the Maslow Window.

Over the last 200 years, great human explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark), macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal), and even major wars (e.g., WW I) cluster together exclusively every 55 to 60 years. The most recent example of these spectacular decades is the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window. According to the editors of the Sixties journal, “No recent decade has been so powerfully transformative in much of the world as have the Sixties.” The Sixties decade “has become plainly iconic.” It continues to “not only define us but remains urgently with us.”

Because of the “punctuated equilibria” nature of Maslow Windows — brief pulses of unprecedented activity separated by 55 to 60 years — and the fact they obey Bak’s law, Maslow Windows are most likely self organized criticality (SOC) phenomena characteristic of complex adaptive systems. In the weak SOC environment outside a Maslow Window, elements of the complex system — e.g., companies, people, agencies — do not interact strongly and so the system evolves in a fairly stable fashion. However, as a Maslow Window is approached the system becomes fractal — i.e., system elements become strongly interactive systemwide — and large changes (both good and bad) can be triggered by small stimuli without much warning.

On a global level, the fractal Maslow Window is a modern, intense example of Ridley’s concept of “collective intelligence”; i.e., a brief, transformative interval of focused collaboration and exchange when we are most likely to experience the best (e.g., Apollo Moon program; Peace Corps) and the worst (e.g., Cuban Missile Crisis; Vietnam War) of modern society.

Ridley reminds us that,

The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency — subsistence — is poverty.

Pulsed progress — technologically, economically, culturally — provided by a succession of fractal Maslow Windows over the last 200 years has had a stunningly expansive effect on human specialization and exchange. All we have to do is compare Lewis and Clark’s canoes with the Saturn V rocket of Apollo!

And this progression will continue. The anticipated arrival of the next Maslow Window by 2015 suggests another golden age of prosperity, exploration, and technology is not far away. Ridley concurs that, “the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead — because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.”

He means, of course, that bright ideas are being intensely exchanged in formats like 21st century Maslow Windows.

New York Times Magazine (5/16/10; B. Wallace-Wells) features a revealing profile of former Chicago professor and current Obama regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein. A profound devotee of behavorial economics — which assumes that human irrationality is predictable — Sunstein commented that its elaboration “is the most exciting intellectual development of my lifetime.”

Did positive Keynesian Animal Spirits drive both the Panama Canal in 1914…
Click
… and the Apollo program in 1969? Click .

The Times’ piece is of interest to us at 21stCenturyWaves.com because John Maynard Keynes — the first prominent behavorial economist — invented the concept of “animal spirits” to explain the crucial role of confidence (both optimism and pessimism) in the economy. Conceptually, animal spirits appears related to “ebullience” which — through the psychologically expansive effects of Maslow’s hierarchy — triggers public support for great explorations and MEPs.

In fact, animal spirits and ebullience may be two sides of the same coin. For example, positive animal spirits stimulate actors in the economy to produce a boom. While ebullience, although typically affluence-induced, operates in the elevated Maslow (self-actualizing) mode and makes great expectations and MEPs seem almost irresistible. Negative animal spirits rapidly terminate the boom, erode ebullience, collapse society’s elevated Maslow state, and “close” the Maslow Window.

But the Times explains that not everyone is happy with Sunstein’s vision.

Conservatives see a Big Brother strain in Sunstein’s philosophy (Glenn Beck called him “the most dangerous guy out there”), while some liberals worry that behavorial economics is too immature to handle the weight of guiding policy.

This is partly because of two Sunstein beliefs:
1) the idea that the human quality of irrationality can be predicted,
and, according to the Times,
2) “this is the controversial part — that if the social environment can be changed, people might be nudged into more rational behavior.”

Animal Spirits Exist
More interesting at this point — given the still-embryonic state of the science — is the recent discovery by a University of California, Irvine economist that animal spirits are actually important to business cycles (Investers Chronicle, 3/26/10; C. Dillow). Fabio Milani compared the expectations of individual economic forecasters (from the Survey of Economic Forecasters) with a learning model featuring a “rational expectations solution” to the system. According to Milani,

Private sector agents in some periods may be overly optimistic — by forecasting a higher future output or lower inflation rate, for example, than implied by their learning model — or overly pessimistic. These waves of over-optimism and over-pessimism, which are exogenous to the state of the economy, are defined as the expectation shocks in the model.

Milani’s “expectation shocks” can account for more than half of the variation in the U.S. GDP over the last 40 years. Not only did his expectation shocks fall before each of the last 7 recessions, they are near an all-time low now. Thus animal spirits, expectation shocks, and ebullience are apparently at work during business cycles.

The Market is a Complex Adaptive System
Herbert Gintis (3/31/2009) of the Santa Fe Institute modeled the market in 2007 as an agent-based complex adaptive system. In his review of Akerloff and Shiller’s book, Animal Spirits (2009), Gintis suggests that animal spirits are only part of the story:

The major thesis of the book is only partially correct in attributing macroeconomic instability to human foibles … Akerlof and Shiller do not have enough evidence to assert confidently that people are driven by irrational animal spirits to produce market volatility. People imitate the successful, both in my agent-based model and in real life. This is generally quite rational behavior, but it can produce “behavioral cascades” that are destabilizing

Part of the confusion apparently arises because of evolving conditions that affect the notion of “rational” versus “irrational.” Is it rational for investors and businesses to join the bandwagon when a strong upward economic trend has been established? Probably yes. On the other hand, is it irrational for investors and businesses to assume that the boom will continue forever? Yes, for sure.

Therefore, investors who were initially rational may become irrational as the boom peaks. This is especially true when the system becomes strongly fractal and increasingly unpredictable.

It appears that animal spirits have an empirical foundation and, together with ebullience, are able to explain the psychological rationale behind widespread public support for great explorations and MEPs during Maslow Windows. The fact that public support is short-lived and that Maslow Windows display punctuated equilibrium — e.g., are separated by 55 to 60 years — is consistent with the idea that we’re dealing with a complex adaptive system that requires 5 – 6 decades to repeatedly self-organize into a critical state (the Maslow Window).

Greece’s “financial meltdown” has again brought into question the firmly held Keynesian belief that you can spend your way to prosperity. According to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial (5/10/10), “Greek politicians in particular lived beyond their means … Europe isn’t experiencing a currency crisis. It’s a debt crisis driven by overborrowing, large and inefficient government, and insufficient economic growth.”

Europe’s crisis suggests that big government policies being enacted in the U.S. may delay the return to prosperity here too.

Over the last 200 years, prosperity is the hallmark of every Maslow Window from Apollo all the way back to Lewis and Clark, and is expected to drive the approach to ebullience near 2015. It’s clear that prosperity enhances the financial feasibility of typical macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal; Apollo). What’s not so obvious is that their political feasibility is momentarily ensured by affluence-induced ebullience that elevates many in society to higher states of Maslow’s hierarchy. And the large international audiences typically riveted by great explorations — e.g., the still-famous, mid-19th century greeting of Henry Stanley in central Africa, “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” — are enabled largely by the same effect.

Prosperity Is a Technological Imperative
The connection between prosperity and superpower status was emphasized recently by Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (WSJ, 3/25/10),

When Europeans after World War II chose to skimp on defense and spend lavishly on social welfare, they abdicated their claims to great power status. That worked out well for them because their security was subsidized by the U.S..

But what happens if the U.S. switches spending from defense to social welfare? Who will protect what used to be known as the “Free World”? … it will be increasingly hard to be globocop and nanny state at the same time.

Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman (2005) expands the point to explicitly include space, “A rising average income allows a country to project its national interest abroad, or send a man to the Moon.”

Political scientist and blogger Thomas Barnett likes to refer to the U.S. as the Leviathan. In 2009 we spent as much on defense ($ 660 B) as the rest of the world combined. But major entitlement programs currently cost 35% of GNP, about twice that of defense.

It takes exceptional mental prowess to remember when U.S. entitlement spending initially exceeded defense (in 1976). And Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have expanded “dramatically” since then. ObamaCare will accelerate the trend.

Prosperity is a Moral Imperative
In his monumental book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005), Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman presents the case for prosperity as a moral imperative.

Even in America, I believe, the quality of our democracy -– more fundamentally, the moral character of American society – is similarly at risk.

He shows that economic growth, rather than just the level of living standards is the key to political and social liberalization around the world as well as in the U.S.. Merely being rich is no protection against society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance.

Periods of economic expansion in America and elsewhere, during which most citizens had reason to be optimistic, have also witnessed greater openness, tolerance, and democracy. To repeat: such advances occur for many reasons. But the effect of economic growth versus stagnation is an important and often central part of the story.

Friedman’s comments mirror the general trends of the long economic wave which peaked most recently in the late 1960s, declined into the 1990s, and should ignite another Kennedy-style long boom by 2015:

The central economic question for the United States at the outset of the twenty-first century is whether the nation in the generation ahead will again achieve increasing prosperity, as in the decades following World War II, or lapse back into the stagnation of living standards for the majority of our citizens that persisted from the early 1970s until the early 1990s … But even the prosperity … in the late 1990s bypassed large parts, in some important dimensions a clear majority, of the country’s citizens …

So for most people, it is persistent real growth in wages and low unemployment that trigger the twice-per-century Maslowian ebullience which momentarily creates broad public approval of great explorations and MEPs like Apollo in the 1960s — and the new international space age expected near 2015.

And in addition to its profound technological impact on society, prosperity is also a moral imperative that historically results in more openness, tolerance, and democracy thoughout the world.

Despite our current circumstances, there is every reason to believe that the 2015 Maslow Window will be the best of both worlds.

This is a recent sample of the interesting ways 21stCenturyWaves.com is being portrayed on the web. Apologies if I couldn’t mention you this time.

Thanks to everyone who’s visited 21stCenturyWaves.com.

Sam Fraser Forumlog.com
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DecaState of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for the Decade 2010-2020

No Room To Move
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State of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for 2010

Science Blips
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Phobos — The Key to the Cosmos? Just Ask Russia and China!

Portal to the Universe
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Paul Davies on the 50th Anniversary of SETI

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Space: The Fractal Frontier — How Complexity Drives Exploration

Like a breath of fresh air, the science of self organized criticality has illuminated many disciplines, including astrophysics, biology, climate, economics, geopolitics, and others (see Turcotte & Rundle (2002) PNAS, “Self-organized criticality in the physical, biological, and social sciences.”)

What do Apollo and the new international Space Age have in common?
…Self organized criticality?
Click .

The brainchild of Danish physicist Per Bak (1948-2002) — “one of the most original people in science” — SOC is an emergent property of complex systems whereby they organize themselves into a critical state such that rapid changes, including catastrophes, can occur. You can see the famous “Bak sandpile” conceptual model of SOC in Aschwanden (2010) as well as in Bak (1996), How Nature Works.

The captivating assertion of social scientist and SOC enthusiast Gregory Brunk (2002) that,

Virtually all aggregate-level, monumental events are somehow ’caused’ by the process of self-organized criticality,

suggests that SOC may have played a major role in the Apollo program and other major MEPs over the last 200 years. This post is a brief sketch how that might work.

Apollo Was the Most Recent of the Great Explorations
Cordell (1996) described the extraordinary pulses of great human explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark), macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal), and major wars (e.g., WW I) that cluster together exclusively every 55 to 60 years, over the last 200 years. I speculated that the decade from 2015 to 2025 would have economic, technology, and geopolitical parallels with the spectacular Apollo 1960s, including a JFK/Camelot-style zeitgeist.

Cordell (2006) introduced the concept of a “Maslow Window,” triggered by rhythmic, twice-per-century economic booms. Affluence-induced ebullience propels many to higher states in the Maslow hierarchy, where their momentarily expanded worldviews make great explorations and MEPs seem not only intriguing, but almost irresistible. As ebullience decays — due to widespread perceptions of budget stresses, a war, etc. — the Maslow Window closes.

The Bottomline is: The realization that Apollo is the most recent in a rhythmic, 200-year long string of great human explorations starting with Lewis and Clark, potentially opens the door to Bak-style SOC.

Wars and the Evidence for Complexity
According to Bak, a complex system exhibits SOC only if it has some form of power-law scaling, called “fractal” by Mandelbrot (1963). Based on their size-frequency plots for wars, Roberts and Turcotte (1998) conclude that,

The results we have shown indicate that world order behaves as a self-organized critical system independent of the efforts made to control and stabilize interactions between people and countries; and wars, like forest fires, are SOC processes.

Although Roberts and Turcotte (1998) only had data up to 150,000 deaths per war, the fact that “medium-size” wars are almost pure SOC indicates that the major wars of Maslow Windows are also fractal, as suggested recently for World War I by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson.

Punctuated Equilibria and Exploration
In 1994, the National Academy of Sciences held a major colloquium in Irvine, CA on “Physics: The Opening to Complexity.”

In Bak’s conference paper, he considers SOC in the contexts of geology, biological evolution, and macroeconomics. For example, in economics each system consists of many “agents” that interact together,

such as producers, governments, thieves, and economists. These agents each make decisions optimizing their own idiosyncratic goals. The actions of one agent affect other agents. In biology, individual organisms … (or individual species) interact with one another. The actions of one organism affect the survivability, or fitness, of others. If one species changes by mutation to improve its own fitness, other species in the ecology are also affected.

Bak generalizes Stephen Jay Gould’s biological theory of “punctuated equilibrium” to all complex systems:

The system exhibits punctuated equilibrium behavior, where periods of stasis are interrupted by intermittant bursts of activity … They are intrinsic to the dynamics of biology, history, and economics … Large, catastrophic events occur as a consequence of the same dynamics that produces small, ordinary events … We believe that this punctuated equilibrium behavior, first noted by Gould and Eldredge (1977, 1993), is common to all complex dynamical systems.

The Bottomline is: The Apollo program — seen in the context of 200 years of great explorations — exhibits punctuated equilibrium behavior, an important step toward identifying it and the other MEPs as a SOC process.

Dynamics of SOC — The Gap Equation
Bak’s Gap Equation governs the system’s evolution from weak SOC to the fractal, self organized critical state.

The model is so general that it can also be thought of as a model for macroeconomics. The individual sites represent economic agents, and the random numbers f1 represent their “utility functions.” Agents modify their behavior to increase their wealth. The agents with lowest utility functions disappear and are replaced by others. This, in turn, affects other agents and changes their utility functions.

Bak’s quote above could apply just as well to agents of particular space projects modifying their behavior and vying for funding at NASA (or elsewhere) and/or Macro-Engineering Projects likewise seeking support of all types. Agents and projects with the “lowest utility functions” soon disappear (a Darwinian principle), no matter how big they are – just ask Constellation advocates!

The Bottomline is: This compatibility with Bak’s law indicates that space projects and MEPs are most likely governed by SOC. The Space Project/MEP System is most fractal just before and during a Maslow Window. As in Bak’s computer simulations, transitions into and out of the strong SOC state are abrupt just before (e.g., in 1901; in 1958) or just after the Maslow Windows (e.g., in 1914 and in 1970). While in the critical state, large changes (i.e., great explorations, MEPs, major wars) can occur in response to even a minor stimulus.

Predictability and SOC
The fractal nature of SOC inhibits long-term predictability of specific events during the critical state (i.e., during a Maslow Window). However, the last 200+ years show that, especially during the non-fractal decades between Maslow Windows, the long wave has been a reliable guide to the rhythmic, twice-per-century timing of Maslow Windows from Lewis and Clark through 1960s Apollo to the present. And other intriguing regularities are also observable.

For example, according to former UCLA geophysics professor Didier Sornette — who more recently founded the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich — in reference to the U.S. stock market, “It is possible to identify clear signatures of near-critical behavior many years before the crashes and use them to ‘‘predict’’ the date where the system will go critical …”

Bak also hints at predictability (by analogy with his sandpile model, he refers to major changes during the critical SOC state as “avalanches”):

During an avalanche, a great deal of rapid activity occurs in which species come and go at a fast pace. Nature “experiments” until it finds another “stable” ecology with high fitnesses. The Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago can be thought of as the grandmother of all such avalanches.

So what should we expect prior to a Maslow Window? What’s the analog for Nature looking for a more “stable” ecology while “species come and go” in a Darwinian sense? What signal should we see of “near-critical behavior many years before” the critical Maslow Window?

Two potential candidates have been identified that appear regularly over the last 200+ years:
1) Major financial panic/great recession combinations (e.g., Panic of 1893) that usually begin 6-8 years before a Maslow Window (including the Panic of 2008 and current great recession),
and
2) Moderate wars and/or dangerous confrontations (e.g., Cuban Missile Crisis) that are rapidly resolved and occur early in or just before Maslow Windows (including the current Iran crisis).

These precursors are consistent with both long wave patterns and self organized criticality, when our complex international economic system self-organizes into a critical state — characterized by Great Explorations, Macro-Engineering Projects, and major wars — that we call a Maslow Window.

This is an updated end-of-April list of our readers’ favorite posts, based on the number of times each post was visited during the times indicated below. The lists below include both Daily Wavelet posts and State of the Wave posts.

Timeframes of the readers’ lists below are: I) Favorites during April, and II) Favorites during the last 7 days, and III) Favorites during the last 90 days.

To see readers’ favorite posts for each previous month, click HERE.

The lists below give only the top 5 favorites in each category in order of reader preference.
All posts below are clickable and their publishing dates are given.

Updated 5/1/2010

I. APRIL — Readers’ Favorites

1) Obama’s New Space Policy and the Spirit of Apollo — 4/19/10
2) Near-Term Wars Threaten the New Space Age — 4/02/10
3) DecaState of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for the Decade 2010-2020 — 3/06/10
4) 10 Lessons Peary & Amundsen Teach Us About the Human Future in Space — 11/29/08
5) China & Russia Take the Smart Road to Mars! — 12/04/08

II. THE LAST 7 DAYS — Readers’ Favorites

1) How We Could Spot Nearby Space Aliens — 11/18/08
2) Obama’s New Space Policy and the Spirit of Apollo — 4/19/10
3) Without Adventure Civilization is in Full Decay — 12/08/08
4) Obama’s New Space Policy — An Encore! — 4/25/10
5) China & Russia Take the Smart Road to Mars! — 12/04/08

III. THE LAST 90 DAYS — Readers’ Favorites — Readers’ Favorites

1) DecaState of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for the Decade 2010-2020 — 3/06/10
2) State of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for 2010 — 1/26/10
3) Obama’s New Space Policy and the Spirit of Apollo — 4/19/10
4) 10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space — 5/18/09
5) Near-Term Wars Threaten the New Space Age — 4/02/10