Meeting notice: The 04-06-99 meeting will be held at
7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge),
a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.
                         

Suggested topic: NT and Kosovo.

How would the issues in Kosovo be affected if we were ten 
years closer to the control of matter on a molecular level?  

If the Serbs had disembowelled Kosovo fifty years ago the 
sole consequence, both here and in the other NATO countries, 
would have been several severe newspaper editorials.  Any 
more aggressive response at the time would have been 
prohibitively expensive and therefore unthinkable.  The 
current campaign is possible because technology has lowered 
the cost of expressing physical disapproval, measured both 
in dollars and lost lives, to acceptable levels.  

As technology continues to lower this cost, perhaps by using 
MEMS to build microrockets and autonomous aircraft, such 
activities will grow steadily cheaper.  As this cost falls, 
the powers might consider it politically viable to launch 
bombing raids not only to affect such behaviors as general 
slaughter or population displacement but the destruction of 
wetlands, violation of child labor standards, and insufficient 
intellectual property protection.

However, the same trends will also lower the cost of 
effective reprisals, which in turn will work to deter such 
attacks, or rather to concentrate them on the shrinking 
number of countries unable to afford the technology.  
Eventually the process will arrive at a natural terminus, 
perhaps when Burkina Faso and Haiti, after many years of 
being bombed continuously by one or another of the world's 
powers, finally acquire an effective deterrent.  

Another effect of technological change will be the
increasing difficulty of escaping surveillance, whether by 
authorities or insurgents.  This will make it harder 
both to organize KLA-like resistance movements incountry 
and harder to suppress such movements violently without 
running the risk of appearing on CNN's "Bloodthirstiest
videos of the week". However the falling cost of strike 
delivery (see above) is making incountry organizations 
less critical anyway, while networking costs are already 
low enough to support any needed degree of expat activity.

It is plausible that the huge drop in the cost of
bandwidth (8-10 orders of magnitude between 1980 and 2020) 
the world is experiencing will end by bleaching sectarian 
(and especially nationalist) feelings to approximately the 
level of intensity we feel for our favorite NFL football 
team.  If not, however (or if we start to care more about 
the NFL) it is possible to imagine multiple insurgency cells 
around the world launching mini- and micro- bombing raids 
hundreds and thousands of miles from their targets.  In 
theory these could be hard to inhibit, since the launching 
platforms (trucks, planes, boats) could themselves be 
autonomous.    

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Nanonews

Cornell University has one of the most productive
nanotech research groups in the world.  In the past
few weeks the following results were announced:


Speeding DNA sequencing with nanofabricated artificial gels. 
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March99/APS.biochip.bs.html

Nano-Mechanical Resonant Systems in Single-Crystal Silicon.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March99/APS.nanoharp.bs.html

Storing data with Nanomagnets.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March99/nanomagnets.bs.html

Up until now, so far as I know, the genetic engineering of 
organisms has been restricted to introducing one genetic 
change.  Recently Cornell biotechnologists built a bacterium
out of two discrete acts of genetic engineering. 
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March99/ACS_wilson.hrs.html



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