Here’s a little science fiction discussion question for y’all, Gentle Readers. Given your druthers, which ludicrously implausible scientific breakthough (slash production breakthrough slash whatever) would you prefer to see announced and implemented immediately?
(a) something that would make it possible, for a reasonable expenditure, to inspect pretty nearly everything shipped in and out of our borders, making it pretty damn near impossible for any chemical, biological, nuclear or even large-scale explosive weapon or armament to be brought into the country without putting a stop to international shipping generally, or
(2) a transmat device, making more-or-less instantaneous transfer of physical objects anywhere around the globe cheap, and of course making it impossible to stop smuggling of any kind, particularly of weapons of mass destruction.
Just wondering. I’d take (2), myself, but that’s me.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Isn’t #2 FedEx? For approximate values of instantaneous and cheap…
When it’s economical enough to put a 5000-pound vehicle on a boat and ship it across the planet rather than build it near home, and when I can send a book from Boston to Brazil in 3 days for less than $10, I question how radically a matter transporter would change things. It would have to be substantially cheaper and incredibly widespread. Because the advantage of shipping a book in 10 minutes instead of 3 days isn’t really all that great.
Maybe I’m not imagining the level of advance you’re talking about. If I could personally teleport myself and objects at no cost, I’d love to travel more frequently and more easily. That would make a huge difference in my life, unlike simply moving things around faster. I’d be on Maui a lot more often, for example.
I’d be on Maui a lot more often, for example.
So would a lot of other people… enough, surely, that none of them would enjoy being on Maui in such a state of overcrowdedness. Lack of hotel rooms and lack of vacation days would no longer keep people away when they could just nip off to Maui for four hours on Sunday afternoon and be home in time to watch watch Sixty Minutes.
Fortunately, this is all ludicrously implausible.
Until at least 2008.
Because the Democrats have a plan to implement teleportation? That should gain a few votes…
It turns out that the part of Maui that I love is very far from the popular part, so I’m not concerned. But yes, there’d be wild population swings moment to moment. Queuing theory would have to be taught in elementary school.
Is the transmat one more implausible than the other?
And even if the transmat couldn’t handle living stuff (for plot reasons), I have to think it would make a pretty sizable difference if you could, for instance, move produce across the world the day it was picked, or move potable water, or medicine, or for that matter ammunition, construction materials or toys. Heck, you really could make thousands of dollars stuffing envelopes at home. Maybe.
And, really, if only, say, one person in a million likes that part of Maui, well…
Thanks,
-V.
transmat. who’d need to smuggle anything? i’m going to go feed my endangered illegal parrot right now in its cage in thailand. also i’ll just pinch food into this horizontal transmat and watch the deep sea monster fish eat it.
I’ll just note that (a) could be implemented at a rather low direct cost if the U.S. decided to restrict imports. By reducing the flow of goods into the country to, say, 25% of current levels, it would be much less expensive to inspect all of it. A reduction in imports would also help the trade deficit. Of course, the global economy as we know it would collapse, but there _might_ be a smaller set of unintended consequences from that collapse than there would be if low-cost, low-energy transmat technology were suddenly and universally available.
True, they say that distribution of medicine and food is the big obstacle to curing most disease and hunger, and presumably transmat would fix that. I was thinking of the first world countries, where disease and hunger are created by policy, not distribution obstacles. Wrong thinking on my part — transmat would clearly be an enormous benefit to a lot of people. Make it so.
I think the math for Maui is interesting. There’s a 40-mile stretch that I want to go to. If one person in a million wants to be there, that’s 6000 people. If I’m typical in wanting to spend 30 minutes a day there during its 12 hours of daylight, and there’s fairly inefficient distribution of people, then that should be 400 people at any given time, over a 40-mile stretch. 1/10 mile per person, I can live with that. The line at the fruit stand will be much worse, but I could chop up my own pineapple if I didn’t have to give up my swiss army knife to fly there.
Here’s another way of looking at the people-to-land ratio: Lisa and I have 2000 square feet of living space, which is 1000 square feet each. At that density, the entire planet’s population could fit into Texas in single-story buildings and have space left over for sidewalks. (Sadly, a lot of them would be in Tom Delay’s district.)
The world’s really crowded in many places because the distribution is very weird, not because there’s no land.
I do think the container screening challenge is far more solvable. DHS spends less than 2 billion dollars a year on port security. Some percentage of that includes inspection of 4% of containers. So for less than 50 billion dollars a year, we can inspect all containers. And there are significant technology advances happening in screening, so efficiency will get far better particularly with widespread deployment.
It’s less than 9 million shipping containers a year, so that’s a bit over $5000 allowed to inspect each container. It should take a team of 3 people a day to inspect each container rather thoroughly. At $20 an hour, that’s $480. Give them a $1000 biohazard test kit, assume they break it at the end of each day, give them each a $50 radiation tag, and $100 for chemical swabbing. These estimates are very high, and you could still inspect each container twice.
The obstacle on screening is cost, because nobody is saying they’re worried about Bad Stuff in the current 4% of inspected containers. I do think it’s a more plausibly solved problem than transmat.
The thing about inspecting containers is that there are few economies of scale, but rather the reverse. For 4% of the containers, they can probably simply be checked en route. For 100%, you need to build your ports, warehouses, loading docks and shipping lanes entirely differently, so that you can separate the checked from the unchecked, have a place to put the checked stuff, have a place to store the unchecked stuff, have access to the unchecked stuff for the workers, etc, etc. You are right that there have been technological advances, and it’s possible (tho’ I think unlikely) that we could invest a passel o’ dough in what we have no and make the system work, but we are talking, really, not about the $50 billion a year once we get the system in place, but about hundreds of billion to get the system in place. Or so I understand; I only know what I hear on NPR.
And I think Chris is right, that we could nearly eliminate the possibility of external terrorist attacks through our ports by drastically reducing our imports to the point where we could afford to check them, thus destabilizing the global economy, causing massive political and military destabilization, and almost certainly domestic unrest to the point that we’d be concentrating on our own problems.
I still prefer the transmat.
In the Star Trek version, they can send you anywhere, right? They don’t need a receiver or anything? So could I transport myself into, say, the mezzanine of Pac Bell without going through a ticket line? I think Maui is a lot safer than the Fenway, particularly when Damon comes to town in pinstripes, and people transport themselves into the bleachers and then throw the transporter device’s AAs at the field, and then can’t get out again…
Thanks,
-V.
there will need to be way offshore checkpoints in a model of total security. most of the big ports are so close to big population areas all the kaboom would need to be was waiting in an upwind holding pattern before docking to be effective. the prevailing natural accomplice to mass death would do the rest. if one were inclined to pursue such lines of thinking.
adding to that the damage that such an explosion would do to the fisheries and water supply. the next rain storm would be poisoned. i’m not saying that “port security” is an oxymoron. well maybe i am. but with the neocons and others i disagree – liberty and security aren’t at war – it’s militarism and security that are at war. perceived strength is the enemy of safety.
I did hear someone in one of those NPR discussions say that what we needed to do was put all the security checks at the other end, and not let anything on any shipping line to the US that hadn’t been OKd by US before it left the foreign port (and presumably kept secure while in transit).
I think he was serious.
Thanks,
-V.
David gets to the heart of the issue: we’re being told that we need to give up liberty for security, but in fact we’re giving up security and liberty in order to establish a reputation as a powerful and untrustworthy nation. Yick.
the “put the checks over there” person was serious. putting aside the political solutions (for instance, not holding a gun to the heads of the heads of iran), doing a first round of checks at points away is safer. maybe an effective version would be fought as a strange form of tariff – wouldn’t it be fun to see a “why should we pay for your security when you keep making war” case before the WTO – but layers would improve the situation.
the thing is, i’m just finished looking this up, “international waters” start about 27 miles from shore. with the right conditions one could irradiate the entire eastern or western seaboards of the united states with one bomb on one small boat. to talk about “securing” is disingenuous. the answer, like the answer with climate change, lies in moving away from this extortive financial model – stopping paying and arming people who run local protection rackets – because bad results will multiply unless all forms of slavery are really put behind us.
Putting the checks overseas is much safer, sure. And about as plausible as a transmat. And of course all this does allow me to give my favorite Graham Allison quote, about how if terrorists got their hands on a nuclear bomb and just needed a way to get it across the borders, they could always hide it in a bale of marijuana.
There’s no question in my mind that security is as much a pipe dream as transmat, and the Security Theater that Our Only President has engaged in and encouraged has only had ill effects. Personally, I’d rather waste money on the transmat.
Thanks,
-V.
Plausible or not, we already have teams of US customs agents deployed to more than 30 major ports in over 20 countries. The Container Security Initiative includes screening containers at the source end as a primary component.
It’s not a perfect program. The inspection rates are low, and the inspections are “non-intrusive” (meaning we do radiation screening from outside the containers, for example). But it has already set up the precedent that we put our personnel on the ground around the world, that we prescreen and inspect some containers before they leave for the US, and that we have very early access to all shipping documentation.