The New York Times (3/27/11) features an opinion piece by British historian and writer Simon Sebag Montefiore on current Arab uprisings and their historical precedents. Although all revolutions have differences because they are “local”, he emphasizes that historical parallels can offer us “clues to the future.”

British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore sees current Arab uprisings as reminiscent of the watershed European revolutions of 1848.
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21stCenturyWaves.com has previously identified the decade just prior to (or early during) Maslow Windows, over the last 200+ years, to be dangerous times of international conflicts, wars, and upheavals. The classic example is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis early in the Apollo Maslow Window that could have led to a major nuclear exchange. Indeed, recent conflicts with North Korea and Iran suggest that the world system is approaching a “critical state.”
See: “Near-Term Wars Threaten the New Space Age“.

The question is: Do the Arab uprisings of today — and their historical parallels — support that pattern?

According to Montefiore, there is something to be said for spontaneity.

Leaderless revolutions without organization have a magically spontaneous momentum that is harder to crush … This time, headless spontaneity has been aided by Facebook, which certainly accelerates the mobilization of crowds — and the transmission of Western culture…

Montefiore believes that for today’s Arab uprisings, “technology’s effect is exaggerated…” For example, in the stunning European revolutions of 1848,

uprisings spread from Sicily to Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest in mere weeks without telephones, let alone Twitter. They spread through the exuberance of momentum and the rigid isolation of repressive rulers.

As Montefiore surveys uprisings over the last 200 years, the revolution of 1848 is

the revolution that most resembles today’s.

Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the watershed European revolutions of 1848, began early in their Maslow Window, suggesting both were influenced by the ebullience of the approaching critical state. Although the United States was not directly involved, it was certainly affected by this mid-19th century zeitgeist. Indeed, against all odds, a smaller-than-life man — President James A. Polk — achieved the impossible by “engineering the triumph of Manifest Destiny” (NY Times) in only 4 short years.
See: “How the West Was Won — The Expansionist Effects of Ebullience”.

Interestingly, Dr. Lawrence Beale — a 77-year old African American, retired pastor, college counselor, and college administrator — sees parallels between current Arab uprisings and the U.S. civil rights movement during the last Maslow Window.

The Middle East and North Africa seems to be taking a page from the history of the civil rights movement in America during the 1950s and 1960s when black Americans demonstrated in the streets to gain the freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

At least some of the freedom-fighters are directly inspired by U.S. history. According to Dr. Beale,

Middle Easterners, North Africans, and now Chinese have taken to the streets in largely peaceful demonstrations crying out for human rights—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On CBN Tuesday, a woman was asked by a reporter, “What do you want.” She responded, “We want freedom.” When she was pressed by the reporter about what she meant, she cited one part of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but could not remember the rest. So she concluded, “We have been taught that freedom is not a right.” But she continued to insist that she wanted freedom.

Dr. Beale concludes that, “Like the civil rights movement, the demonstrators are unsettling their nations.”

Maslow Windows are identified by economic, technological, and political patterns over the last 200+ years. Parallels between the European revolutions of 1848 and the current Arab uprisings — as identified by historian Montefiore — and parallels between the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and current Arab uprisings — as identified by Dr. Beale — support 21stCenturyWaves.com’s expectation that similar civilization-altering events are likely to occur just prior to or early in Maslow Windows of the future.

Therefore, the current Arab uprisings offer further empirical support for the arrival of another 1960s-style transformative decade — including an Apollo-style, international Space Age — by 2015.

The Drake Equation was humanity’s first serious attempt to think systematically about advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galaxy. Devised by Cornell astronomer Frank Drake during the early 1960s Apollo Maslow Window, it was his ebullient goal to estimate their number and use radio telescopes to achieve contact.

Will interstellar probes, such as the one discovered on the Moon in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” ever really be found?
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The number (N) of high-tech (e.g., communicative) civilizations in our Galaxy is traditionally estimated by considering 7 factors requiring stellar, planetary, biological, social, and technological information.

In 1961, Drake had good guesses about the astronomical factors, but little else. His surprisingly conservative estimate for N was 10 — hardly significant motivation for a radio search for ETs in a galaxy 100,000 light years across. But Carl Sagan made up for it; by 1974 his estimate for N was one million!

Today there are new data and ideas that illuminate the 3 biggest lingering mysteries involving N: 1) the abundance of Earth-like planets, 2) the origin of life and intelligence, and 3) the typical lifetime of high-tech civilizations.

This new information makes N seem more consistent with the Rare Earth Hypothesis of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee (University of Washington).

Not only intelligent life, but even the simplest of animal life, is exceedingly rare in our galaxy and in the Universe … (However) life in the form of microbes or their equivalents is very common…

Earth-like Planets
Two JPL scientists recently calculated that only about 2% of Sun-like stars have Earth-analog planets. The first four months of data on planet transits of 153,000 FGK stars, as observed by the NASA Kepler spacecraft, indicate that Earths are “relatively scarce.” (See: “Latest Data from NASA’s Kepler Mission Suggests Earths are ‘Relatively Scarce’.”)

High Intelligence
Andrew Watson’s 2008 Astrobiology paper expands the anthopic model of Carter (1983) which assumed that an unknown number n of “critical steps” affect the timing and development of complex life and intelligence; the critical steps are

… defined as being intrinsically unlikely to occur in the time available.

Watson’s best guess is n=4 — i.e., appearance of prokaryotes, eukaryotes, cell differentiation, and homo sapiens — and that each event is separated by about 1 Gyr. If the probability for each step to occur either at or before the observed time (on Earth) is ~0.1, the cumulative probability of high intelligence developing on an Earth-like planet would be < 0.0001. This is consistent with Lineweaver and Davis (2002) who estimated that 13% of Earthilke planets older than 1 Gyr will experience biogenesis, based on the rapid appearance of life on Earth. The probability of 10(-4) seems optimistic considering biologist Ernst Mayr’s 1995 comment.

There have been perhaps as many as 50 billion species since the origin of life. Only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.

Longevity of High-Tech Civilizations
Princeton astrophysicist Richard Gott’s well-known and hotly-debated Copernican formula — aka the “Doomsday Argument” — was originally published in Nature in 1993. According to the New York Times (7/17/2007; J. Tierney) Gott has successfully used his technique to forecast the longevity of “Broadway plays, newspapers, dogs, … the tenure of hundreds of political leaders around the world.”.

In 2006 Gott’s approach received a vote of confidence from philosophers Bradley Monton and Brian Kierland in The Philosophical Quarterly who concluded that Gott’s technique is Bayesian and is a “useful tool for difficult situations” including those where little empirical data exists.

Gott can predict the future using only one piece of information: how long something has existed up to now. And he needs to be assured that there are no observational selection effects; i.e., there is nothing special about your location in time or space (the Copernican Principle). For example, using only the information that Homo sapiens has existed for 200,000 years, Gott predicted at the 95% confidence level that our species’ future duration is “between 1/39 and 39 times 200,000 years,” (5100 yrs and 7.8 Myrs).

A nuclear doomsday has only been possible since 1945 (66 yrs) so, at the 95% confidence level, it is unlikely to arrive in less than 1.7 yrs but most likely by 2574 yrs from now. An even shorter high-tech human civilization duration is suggested by the AI Singularity, described by Kurzweil and others, projected to arrive by 2045; this would give humans a total high-technology lifetime of only around 100 yrs. Note that the nuclear and singularity timeframes are less than the species lower limit, suggesting that our species will continue but possibly not with our nuclear or technological capability (at least under human control).

Estimating a 21st Century Value for N
We’ll use L — the longevity of a high-tech civilization in the Galaxy — as a parameter:
Using the values above, N = 1.4 x 10(-5) x L
(This assumes that the fraction of intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy that develop high technology is 100%.)

Therefore, N as a function of L (high-tech lifetime) is:
1) For the species UL (8 Myr), N = 112 (closest ETs are ~10,000 light years away)
2) For the species LL (205 Kyr), N = 2.8
3) For the Nuclear DD (2640 yr), N = 0.037
4) For the Singularity (100 yr), N = 0.0014

Summary
Initial Kepler results plus the Watson/Carter model of intelligence appear to preclude other intelligent ETs in our Galaxy unless their L’s are in the millions of years. This was attained only by our species upper limit, using Gott’s technique; the closest ETs would be ~10,000 light years away. Other high-tech civilization timescales — species LL, nuclear doomsday, and singularity — are consistent with the Rare Earth Hypothesis.

Jet Propulsion Lab scientists recently released calculations indicating that about 2% of Sun-like stars are expected to have “Earth-analog” planets. Joseph Catanzarite and Michael Shao base their estimate on the first 4 months of data (released February, 2011) on planetary transits of 150,000 FGK stars from observations by NASA’s Kepler mission. This is much lower than previous estimates.

Super-Earths like this one discovered around Gliese 876 probably have active plate tectonics and more volcanism than Earth, but are relatively scarce.
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The authors’ analysis informs planning for future missions that will study nearby Earth-analog planets, and it also highlights an important trend noticed by 21stCenturyWaves.com that is typical of approaches to 1960s-style golden ages of prosperity, exploration, and technology — e.g., the 2015 Maslow Window — over the last century+:

As we ascend toward another crescendo in human achievement — the 2015 Maslow Window … UFOs are being seen in China and around the world, potentially habitable planets are being discovered around nearby stars, and even the Vatican and the Royal Society are openly planning to properly greet intelligent interstellar visitors. One of the most important NASA missions ever flown — the Kepler spacecraft — will accelerate this ebullient trend in 2011.

Although a habitable zone (HZ) refers to the region where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, the fraction of Sun-like stars with Earth-analog planets is a strong function of the adopted HZ boundaries. Catanzarite and Shao define the scaled semimajor axis (mean planetary distance scaled to the square root of its star’s luminosity relative to the Sun) as between 0.95 AU to 1.37 AU (AU is Astronomical Unit = 1 Earth-Sun distance) from Kasting et al. (1993). Because Kasting et al. did not consider clouds (which can cool interior planets) and CO2 (which can warm distant worlds), the authors also consider the more optimistic scaled HZ boundaries of the Exoplanet Task Force Report (2008): 0.8 AU to 1.6 AU.

In addition to HZ boundaries, the JPL scientists’ Earth Analog region is defined by a scaled planetary radius (i.e., relative to Earth’s radius) from 0.8 to 2. The lower value corresponds to a mass of about 50% of Earth’s; the lower limit for retention of an Oxygen atmosphere. The upper value is adopted by the Kepler scientists and, assuming Earth-like parameters, implies a planet with twice the surface heat flow of Earth and half Earth’s lithospheric thickness. Active plate tectonics and volcanism is expected in these super-Earths.

Catanzarite and Shao fit the Kepler transit data to power laws for both the planet radius and the scaled planet distance; they judge that the power laws are excellent fits to the data for distances from 0.2 AU to 0.5 AU (inside the HZ limits) and planetary radii from 2 to 4 (just larger than the EA range). Using the power laws, the Kepler data set is then extrapolated into the Earth analog region defined above.

After removing probable false detections and correcting for the observational effect that not all planets’ orbit planes are in Kepler’s line of site (to produce an observable transit), the authors obtain their surprisingly low value of 2%, +1.6%/- 1.1%, for the fraction of Sun-like stars with an Earth-analog planet.

Although their estimate will become more accurate when the full 3.5 to 6 year Kepler data set is obtained, the authors comment on its surprising implications for planning future missions that will image and take spectra of Earth-analog planets,

Our result that Earths are relatively scarce means that a substantial effort will be needed to identify suitable target stars prior to these future missions.

Standard Chartered bank (The Super-Cycle Report, London, 2010) asserts that,

We are in a new ‘super-cycle’ driven by the industrialisation and urbanisation of emerging markets, and global trade.

Two previous Super-Cycles have culminated in stunning economic booms during Maslow Windows in the early 20th century and the 1960s. The 3rd Growth Super-Cycle has already begun.
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They define a growth super-cycle as,

A period of historically high global growth, lasting a generation or more, driven by increasing trade, high rates of investment, urbanisation and technological innovation, characterised by the emergence of large, new economies, first seen in high catch-up growth rates across the emerging world.

This is closely related to what we at 21stCenturyWaves.com call a “Maslow Window”.
See: “State of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for 2011.”

In 2007, we were enjoying “the greatest economic boom ever” before it was interrupted by the financial Panic of 2008 and the Great Recession of 2008-10. As the recovery continues and the growth Super-Cycle takes off, we expect to accelerate toward the Great Boom of 2015 and another 1960s-style golden age of prosperity, exploration, and technology.
See: “State of the Wave: Today’s Gloom & Doom, and the 2015 Boom.”

According to Standard Chartered bank, we’ve enjoyed two previous growth super-cycles.

The first super-cycle took place during the second half of the 19th century, from 1870
until 1913, the eve of the First World War. At that time, the world economy witnessed a significant step-up in its rate of growth, rising 2.7% on average per annum in volume, or real, terms. That was a full 1% higher than the average growth rate seen during the previous half-century. America was the big gainer, moving from the fourth largest to the largest economy.

The first super-cycle culminated in the Peary/Panama/T. Roosevelt Maslow Window (1901-13), one of the most ebullient, transformative periods in U.S. history. It immediately followed a serious financial crisis known as the Panic of 1893 and the Great 1890s Recession, that have economic and political parallels with today.

The 2nd super-cycle featured the post-WW II expansion.

The second super-cycle was after the Second World War until the early 1970s. World growth averaged a huge 5% per annum, again in real or inflation-adjusted terms. Japan and the Asian tigers saw the biggest gains over this time. Japan, for instance, moved from 3% to 10% of the world economy.

The 2nd super-cycle culminated in the 1960s Apollo Maslow Window that featured the first great exploration that was “off-world”, the greatest macro engineering project of modern times, and probably the most transformative decade in U.S. history.

Although “emerging markets could propel a global boom comparable to the industrialization of the United States,” Standard Chartered believes the 3rd super-cycle represents a shift in global economic power from the U.S. and Europe to Asia. According to Ian Bremmer (Wall Street Journal, 3/2/11),

Americans and Europeans should be relieved to hear that other countries can do a bigger share of the world’s economic lifting.

However not everyone concurs. For example, Harvard professor Joseph Nye projects that,

China will give the U.S. a “run for its money” but it will not pass the U.S. in overall power in the first half of this century.

See also: “Harvard’s Joseph Nye sees U.S. “unlikely…(to) be surpassed…” Well Positioned for the 21st Century.”

And the eminent British historian and author of Modern Times (2001), Paul Johnson, believes America will stay on top (WSJ, 3/5/11; B. Carney).

I think America has such huge strengths — particularly its freedom of thought and expression — that it’s going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world.

In any case, the 3rd super-cycle will feature a return to prosperity that should usher in the stunning 2015 Maslow Window. If the last 200+ years are any guide, we will experience wonders like space-based solar power systems, international commercial development of the Moon, and the initial expansion of human civilization to Mars.

1) Facebook Page for 21stCenturyWaves.com
Invite your Facebook friends to explore the new 21stCenturyWaves Page!
It’s the Wave of the future… Click HERE.

2) Bruce Speaking at ISDC 2011 In Huntsville
Just confirmed that I’ll be speaking at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) 2011 in Huntsville, AL this May. Topic is, “Economic Booms and Apollo-style Exploration: How Soon the 40-Year Moon Hiatus Will End,” See the Abstract.
Looking forward to seeing you there!

3) Readers’ Favorite Posts — February, 2011
This is an updated end-of-February 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 February, and II) Favorites during the Last 7 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 3/1/2011

I. FEBRUARY — Readers’ Favorites

1) 10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space — 5/18/09
2) State of the Wave — 10 Space Trends for 2011 — 1/23/11
3) The Moon is Not Enough…! — 11/22/08
4) Phobos: The Key to the Cosmos? Just Ask Russia and China! — 3/27/10
5) The Allure of Moving to Mars Points to the New Space Age — 10/30/10

II. THE LAST 7 DAYS — Readers’ Favorites

1) 10 Lessons the Panama Canal Teaches Us About the Human Future in Space — 5/18/09
2) Phobos: The Key to the Cosmos? Just Ask Russia and China! — 3/27/10
3) The Moon is Not Enough…! — 11/22/08
4) Commercialization of the Moon: How Soon and Who? — 2/27/11
5) The Cold War-Style Arms Race in Asia and the New Space Age — 2/12/11