This is a hot-button topic. Beware.

Attempts to discuss the prospects of human exploration and inhabitation of the cosmos on the internet tend to attract a certain type of participant. If you've been following the comment threads here you probably recognize them ...

For starters, they're overwhelmingly white male Americans (plus a handful of Brits and Canadians). Politically they're right-of-centre (by American standards), and libertarian-leaning. They are enthusiastic proponents of space colonization, but will boost any other technological or scientific work oriented in an upward direction (as long as it's carried out by people who look like them: they're somewhat less gung-ho about the former Soviet, and now the Chinese, space programs).

There is an ideology that they are attached to; it's the ideology of westward frontier expansion, the Myth of the West, the westward expansion of the United States between 1804 (the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition) and 1880 (the closing of the American western frontier). Leaving aside the matter of the dispossession and murder of the indigenous peoples, I tend to feel some sympathy for the grandchildren of this legend: it's a potent metaphor for freedom from social constraint combined with the opportunity to strike it rich by the sweat of one's brow, and they've grown up in the shadow of this legend in a progressively more regulated and complex society.

My problem, however, is that there is no equivalence between outer space and the American west.

Humans are a climax organism that is fundamentally dependent on a couple of key ecosystems. There's the one we carry around in our guts — about a kilogram of bacteria and fungi, for a typical adult — without which we can't even digest most of our food. And there's the ecosystem we live in. (Or ecosystems. Because of our unique horizontally-transferable tool culture we can adapt to existence in terrestrial ecosystems other than the one our ancestors coevolved with. But there are limits; we don't thrive in Antarctica, or at the bottom of the ocean trenches.) We're also somewhat dependent on our extraordinary extended phenotype, from flint hand-axes to Space Shuttles. Maintaining that phenotype is a large-scale operation supported by a penumbra of extended cultural activities that maintain the ability to maintain the phenotype — primary school teachers, for example, don't bend metal but are absolutely vital to the activity of engineering insofar as you've got to start educating your next generation of engineers somewhere. Hence some earlier postings on this blog.

Basically, it's not clear how large a system you need to support human civilization. We don't know how to build biospheres from scratch yet, and indeed there's worryingly little research being done on the topic (which may become a screamingly important priority in another half century, if the most pessimistic climate change projections are accurate). We can make a rough back-of-the-envelope guess at the size of human population it takes — given abundant raw materials and a favourable biosphere — to maintain a technological civilization; it's many orders of magnitude larger than the proponents of Heinlein's nostrum that "specialization is for insects" may be comfortable with.

There may be possible technological solutions to both problems that don't require the combined lifelong effort of millions of humans. We don't have (a) strong artificial intelligence, (b) self-replicating machines that can work from raw materials extracted from their natural environment, (c) "magic wand" space propulsion technologies (which may themselves be Fermi paradox solutions insofar as their existence implies either flaws in our current understanding of physics or drastically efficient and thereby destructive energy sources), or (d) the ability to re-engineer ourselves. If any one (or more) of these are achievable, then all bets against space colonization are off.

But. But. But.

The west was inhabitable; it supported a healthy set of interlocking ecosystems in most of which a lone human being could find food and sustenance. (There were exceptions.) It already supported a human population. The colonists were equipped with adequate technology and were crossing distances that were, at a pinch, amenable to shanks' mare and a walking stick.

These conditions do not apply in space. You don't get to breathe the air on Mars. You don't get to harvest wheat on Venus. You don't get to walk home from an asteroid colony with 5km/sec of velocity relative to low Earth orbit. You don't get to visit any of these places, even on a "plant the flag and pick up some rocks" visitor's day pass basis, without a massive organized effort to provide an environment that can keep the canned monkeys from Earth warm and breathing.

I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization. In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space).

In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.

In my last blog entry, I asked "What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?"

It occurs to me that besides the obvious ramifications we've been chewing over (read the comment thread if you dare — it should only take a couple of hours), if you turn this question on its head it looks like a component of a set of answers to the Fermi Paradox.

Loosely stated, the Fermi Paradox is this: there are roughly 7 x 10²² stars in the observable universe. We know that planets aren't rare and that stars of our own sun's class aren't rare, so earthlike worlds are presumably not rare. Going by the principle of mediocrity, our own existence shouldn't be particularly unusual. So where is everybody else? There are plenty of stars old enough that, if intelligent space-going life has a non-zero probability of emerging, our galaxy should long since have been overrun. And if not, why do we detect no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence?

In general, there are two classes of solution to the Fermi paradox; ones that assume that we are unique special snowflakes in an empty cosmos, and those that postulate that intelligent species are common, but some kind of mechanism stops them from colonizing interstellar space.

If we look at the second problem set, and broaden the focus ... well, intelligent species emerge as components of a biosphere bound to a particular planetary habitat. We humans are land-dwellers on Earth in the later high-oxygen period; conditions on earth even one billion years ago would have been rapidly fatal for an unprotected human, and even today, survival on 90% of our planet's surface area is contingent on the availability of cultural artefacts like boats (80% is water) or clothing (for protection in hostile climates). So the real question isn't, "can intelligent life colonize other star systems?" so much as "can intelligent life propagate itself, and its supporting biosphere and technosphere to run in alien environments? Which is a very different question. Call it the Ark Problem; if your name is Noah and you're going on a one-way trip to another world, how big an Ark do you need (and how many specimens per speciality, be they biological or technological)?

(Last time I asked the minimal-biosphere question here, while ploughing a space colony furrow, one of the first answers was "oh, you just need humans and blue-green algae". That, plus soy beans and tilapia and five dollars won't buy you a latte in Starbucks — especially once your colonists begin dying of obscure micronutrient deficiency diseases.)

But enough with the ark problem and defining the minimum population of a stable self-maintaining technosphere; there are other fun concepts that might bear on the Fermi Paradox. Chief among these is the Simulation argument. (In fact, I gather Steve Baxter has written a paper about it, but it doesn't seem to be on the web.)

Loosely stated, the simulation argument runs thuswise (pace wikipedia): it is taken as axiomatic that consciousness is an emergent property of physics (i.e. there's no ghost in the machine), and that we can simulate physical systems. Thus, it is possible in principle to construct a software simulation of a world inhabited by intelligent beings who will perceive that world as real. It then follows that either no civilization will ever reach a technological level capable of constructing such simulations, or that every civilization capable of doing so will choose not to do so for some reason, or ... we're probably living in a simulation (because any civilization capable of running a civ-sim is liable to do so many, many times; so the number of sim-civilizations will vastly outnumber the number of authentic ones, and by the principle of mediocrity we are not exceptional).

(NB: you can find a more formal treatment of the simulation argument in Nick Bostrom's original paper, although the idea goes back some way before then, to Hans Moravec and earlier less rigorous speculators.)

It's that danged principle of mediocrity that's causing all these problems. It shows up in the Fermi Paradox, it turns up in the Simulation Argument, it turns up like a bent penny in all sorts of places — it's a big problem for the standard model of spacetime, once you start digging into the Boltzman Brains paradox (for a quick intro, look here or here). Indeed, it seems to me to be a corollary of the weak anthropic principle.

... And I've run out of brain cells with which to continue this line of thought, but a dangling question remains: how relevant is the simulation argument to the Fermi paradox, either (naively) as a solution, or as a mode of temporal reasoning for examining the possibility of our being alone in the cosmos?

There's a deceptively simple question that's been bugging me this week, and it is this:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you.

Conservative politicians in the US — and elsewhere — get a lot of mileage from appeals to false nostalgia, to a yearning for a time when things were simpler, everyone was sturdily self-sufficient or knew their place (or both), and government was small (sometimes small enough to drown in a bathtub). Nostalgia trips manifest themselves in all sorts of curious places. In SF (the literary field I know most about) we have the perennial libertarian/space colonization nexus.We have Ayn Rand, and her wish-fulfilment nerd fantasy of a world sustained by a tiny, overworked minority of geniuses who, if only they could demand a level of rewards corresponding to their work, would be rich beyond dreams of avarice (and able to make the trains run on time). Outside it, we have the peculiarly rustic aspirations of the green fringe, who'd like to see a world of five million or so pre-industrial humans living in harmony with nature. In the Republican party of the United States we see rhetoric couched in hatred for "big government", and among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending framed with calls for a big society in which many current government services will be delivered by voluntary citizens groups instead.

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.

Let's take a look at the superficial structures around us. How many people does it take to design a new automobile? Back in Henry Ford's day, it needed an office full of draughtsmen, a handle of senior engineers to sort out each major mechanical subsystem (gear train, engine, electrics, brakes, suspension, bodywork), and experts on coachbuilding to dictate the shape of the bodywork. There would be time and motion men to dictate the speed and sequence of assembly line activities, and more drafting work to design the tools the production line workers would use ... it took the effort of a few hundred men.

But modern cars are different. A typical 2010 automobile may contain roughly 20-30 electric motors and actuators (for everything from the central locking system to the air conditioning and the motorized seats and windows). There's a similar number of microprocessors involved in everything from the engine and gearbox management systems to the entertainment, navigation, communication, and accident mitigation systems (for example, the sensors and microprocessors that control the sequence of pyrotechnic detonators that inflate air bags, tension seat belts, and collapse the steering column in event of a collision). The in-car electronics alone require on the order of 10-20 million lines of code to run all these services — which implies the combined efforts of thousands of software developers, never mind the small army who design not only the body panels but the handling tools the production line robots use to install them. Cars are no longer user-serviceable because they're nearly as complex as 1960s airliners.

And as for your smartphone? The damned thing has a component count somewhere between ten major subsystems and frame components and a hundred billion (if you go down to the smallest scale and count the capacitors in its FLASH memory). The number of fab lines on the planet that can make memory chips of that density is limited, and they rely on rare elements mined only in exotic locations and in tiny abundance.

Medicine: let's not go there. Back in the late 19th century, we had doctors, nurses, surgeons, pharmacists, and dentists. Today, each of those professions has exploded into platoons and battalions of sub-specialities, and their roles are supported in turn by complex industries full of strange niches.

Around 1900, it took the effort of about 20-30% of a nation's work-force to provide food for everybody; and another 30-50% working in factories to produce clothing, machinery, and processed materials like bricks and billets of pig iron. Today, we only need 0.5-1% of the work force to feed everyone, and another 1-4% working in industry to produce the basics — but the microspecialities have exploded, to the extent that a lot of our needs seem to require a trans-national economy to provide. There are only two vendors of wide-body airliners on any scale today, Boeing and Airbus, and both of them are effectively multinational consortia (more than half the components of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are produced overseas, and shipped to Seattle for final assembly). There seems to only be room for one vendor of super-Jumbo airliners — if Boeing and Airbus tried to exploit that niche simultaneously, they'd both starve — so they appear to be avoiding conflict in that (and some other) area(s). And so on.

So. I ask: how many people does it take, as a minimum, to maintain our current level of technological civilization?

I'd put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).

I'd put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let's not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on. Hypothetically, we may only need 500 people in one particular niche, but that means training 20 of them a year to keep the pool going, plus future trainers, and an allowance for wastage and drop-outs by people who made a bad career choice. Higher education accounts for 1.8-3% of gross spending in the developed world, with primary and secondary education taking a whopping chunk on top of that (if you spent 10 years in a school with a staff:pupil ratio of 1:10, then you soaked up a person-year of time; there may be more labour going into pre-university education than goes into agriculture and industry combined).

As to those political implications ...

Firstly: no, you can't simplify a complex society that runs on just-in-time delivery and a host of specialities. You need a huge training back-end to provide for the thousands of skilled graduate-entry niche occupations. You need an efficient just-in-time delivery system to keep everyone supplied with food, water, power, shelter and whatever else they need — it's that, or accept huge inefficiencies in your supply chain that wipe out the gains produced elsewhere.

Secondly, seemingly similar artefacts (cars, phones, airliners) have invisibly accreted complexity. The complexity makes them better (safer, more economical, more luxurious) than their predecessors, but vastly more difficult to engineer; stuff that used to be fixable by shade-tree mechanics and jobbing electricians has receded over the horizon. Back in the early 19th century, the complement of a sailing ship could expect to maintain the ship in every significant way using tools and expertise that they could carry aboard the ship. Today in the early 21st century, that's not an option with airliners or probably even automobiles.

Thirdly, the complexity embodies in these new products means that their production is dependent on a complex web of lower-level specialities.

Fourthly, there are more side-effects to keep track of. Exotic materials mean exotic contamination events from waste dumping, for example.

Fifthly: space colonization? Get back to me when you've tracked down how many people it takes to design and build a space suit. (The number is in the hundreds, if not the thousands.) More realistically, we won't have autonomous off-world colonies unless and until they can cover all the numerous specialities of the complex civilization that spawned the non-autonomous, dependent-on-resupply space program. Or, to put it another way: colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.

If you are a bit of a command-line junkie and ever wanted to use APIs but wished you could get that data straight from your favorite shell, GoogleCL is for you. GoogleCL is a new open source project that allows you to utilize major Google APIs without writing code. It defines a set of commands that you can use as command-line utilities and access a number of Google services. For example, you can upload pictures to Google Picasa Web, create a new event in your Google Calendar, upload a blog post to Google Blogger, export your contacts to a file and much more.

GoogleCL example scripts give you some good ideas on what you can run:

• Blogger

$ google blogger post --title "foo" "command line posting"

• Calendar

$ google calendar add "Lunch with Jim at noon tomorrow"

• Contacts

$ google contacts list name,email > contacts.csv

• Docs

$ google docs edit --title "Shopping list"

• Picasa

$ google picasa create --title "Cat Photos" ~/photos/cats/*.jpg

• Youtube

$ google youtube post --category Education killer_robots.avi

Wonder what is the difference between GoogleCL and API calls you make through cURL? They both live in your shell, however, with cURL you need to understand low-level details of API protocols and data structures you pass to services and receive back. GoogleCL is much simpler: it hides all programming details and lets you only specify command-line arguments in the same way as you do with most command-line utilities. Moreover, GoogleCL behaves as a third-party application that accesses your data in Google’s cloud. It authenticates using OAuth which gives you the full control over its access rights that you can always revoke in your Google account settings.

At the initial stage of GoogleCL development you can access Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and Youtube. More services will come in the future GoogleCL releases. GoogleCL is written in Python and requires gdata-python-client library.

We get e-mails:

Sounded like fun to us. Just one problem, though: we knew we had to load Stewart’s “cassette tape” source into the Apple //e’s audio input. But we didn’t exactly have a cassette deck lying around.

What did we have? An iPad.

It’s an obvious solution in retrospect, but there is something very unreal and amazing about tapping a button on a multi-touch screen and watching an Apple //e fill up with data — to quote Andy Baio, “that’s like WALL-E connecting to EVE.”

Check out my new Google profile.

I got quite a shock last week, when I got my bi-annual royalty statement.

Hyperion publishes six titles in my Jack Daniels series. They gave me my ebook figures.

Authors are usually quite secretive about their sales and their royalties.

Me? I'm spilling the beans. Here are my ebook Kindle numbers from Jan 1 to June 31, 2009.

Whiskey Sour priced at $3.96: 550 sales, $341 earned.

Bloody Mary priced at $7.99: 180 sales, $381 earned.

Rusty Nail priced at $7.99: 153 sales, $341 earned.

Dirty Martini priced at $6.39: 202 sales, $604 earned.

Fuzzy Navel priced at $7.59: 152 sales, $341 earned.

That's 1237 ebooks sold in six months. Total money in JA's pocket: $2008.

Why do these numbers vary so much?

I get 25% of the amount received by the publisher. Depending on the deal my publisher makes with Amazon, that can be anywhere from 62 cents to $3 per ebook sold.

We can draw a simple conclusion looking at these sales: a $4 ebook sells 3 times as many copies as an $8 ebook.

Now lets compare these to my self-published Kindle sales. I'll use my four novels for comparison. This is also for a six month period.

The List priced at $1.99: 5142 sales, $3600 earned.

Origin priced at $1.99: 2619 sales, $1833 earned.

Disturb priced at $1.99: 1139 sales, $797 earned.

Shot of Tequila at $1.99: 900 sales, $630 earned.

That's 9800 ebooks sold in six months. Total money in JA's pocket: $6860.

I get 35% of the price I set on Kindle, or 70 cents per ebook download.

We can draw some simple conclusions looking at these numbers.

Ebooks priced at $4 sell an average of 1100 ebooks per year.

Ebooks priced at $8 sell an average of 342 ebooks per year.

Ebooks priced at $2 sell an average of 4900 ebooks per year.

It doesn't take a math whiz to see that the biggest profit is with low priced ebooks.

Now let's play the imagination game.

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I'm losing $15,762 per year.

Now Hyperion also has my print rights, and my Jack Daniels books are still selling in print. But they aren't selling enough to make up the $15,762. Especially since all of them aren't regularly being stocked on bookstore shelves.

According to my math, I'd be making more money if my books were out of print, and I had my rights back.

Of course, there are a lot of different factors at play here. Certain titles are more popular than others. Print sales may fuel ebook sales. Ebooks sales may wane (though mine haven't yet.) Branding and name recognition and past customers and fans all come into play, making this damn confusing and far from conclusive.

That said, do I really want to keep signing deals with print publishers?

$3430 per ebook per year isn't really a big number. I've certainly never been paid so small an advance for a novel.

And yet, I'm 100% sure ebook sales are going to go up. I've signed deals with Smashwords to sell ebooks through Barnes and Noble, Apple to sell ebooks as iTunes apps for the Iphone and iPod Touch, and Sony to sell ebooks on their reader. Kindle was just released in 100 more countries. I predict more ebook sales in the near future.

Let's say by the end of 2010 I can make $5000 per year per ebook title by self publishing. I can easily write four books per year.

Again, $20,000 per year isn't enough to live on. But things begin to accumulate.

$20k per year for 4 new books, plus $20k per year for the books I'm already selling, is $40k per year.

But I'm selling more than novels on Kindle. I also have 6 collaborations and short story collections. This year I'm also going to put The Newbie's Guide to Publishing ebook on Kindle.

So now we're looking at 14 ebooks, each making $5k per year. That's $70,000 a year.

And as more people buy ereaders and ebooks, that number can go up. Plus, I publish on my schedule, I keep the profits, and best of all, the rights are 100% mine. So if I want to do a limited print edition, I can. If I want to sell the mass market paperback rights, I can.

Ebook rights began as gravy. I can picture a day when the print rights are the gravy, and authors make their living with ebooks.

Yes, it's still far off. And yes, print publishing is in no danger of going away anytime soon.

But I don't think I'll ever take a print contract for less than $30,000 per book, because I'm confident I could make more money on it over the course of six years than I could with a publisher over six years.

Isn't that bizarre?

For the bestselling author, this is all still very trivial. These numbers are chump change compared to the advances they get.

But for the midlist author, I'm beginning to think it's possible to make a living without print contracts.

I've struggled mightily to break into print. And I've made a nice chunk of change on my print novels.

Now I'm hoping those novels go out of print, so I can get my rights back.

I never would have guessed my mindset would change so dramatically in so short a time.

DISCLAIMER: YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY

If you're a new author, reading this and thinking about the fame and fortune you'll make on ebooks, I urge you to try the traditional route first. Find an agent. Land a deal with a big NY house. Ebooks aren't there yet.

I'd hate to think some writer gave up on their print aspirations because of something I've said on my blog. I suggest you keep up the agent search, and hold out for that major deal. While I have no doubt others will be able to sell as many ebooks as I have, and probably many more, I still haven't made anywhere near the money I've made by being in print. Plus, everyone's situation is unique, and no writer should compare themselves to any other writer.

Most of all, don't change the future of your career based on one man's ideas. Learn as much as you can about all of your options, do research, get other opinions.