In 1994, 17-year-old Boy Scout David Hahn raided junk yards in Michigan for trace radioactive materials: americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lanterns, radium from clocks, tritium from gun sights. In a shed in the back of his house, he used a Bunsen burner and the lithium he’d collected from a thousand dollars’ worth of rechargeable batteries to purify the thorium ash, which he added to a bored-out block of lead in the hopes of making a breeder reactor, a reactor that produces more fissile material than it uses, meaning it can be used to seed other reactors.
The FBI found him before he finished the project, but he did make a functional neutron source, which is the first step.
Five years later, a pair of University of Chicago graduate students produced a working ‘reactor in a shed,’ which was one of the items on the university’s annual scavenger hunt. They were later able to isolate trace amounts of plutonium.
We love it when the guy tinkering in his garage is Steve Jobs or Carroll Shelby (the automotive engineer played by Matt Damon in the recent film Ford v. Ferrari). But most of the time, it’s gonna be a precocious kid doing it for the challenge and the danger.
People like David are already implanting home-built electronics in themselves and modifying their DNA with CRISPR tools, and their number and capabilities will only increase as technology gets cheaper and easier to access.
Welcome to the Future.
I once read a magazine article from the 1930s that predicted news and entertainment—by which they meant printed newspapers, books, and magazines—would one day be piped to every home in the US via pneumatic tubes, which were then being used to deliver the mail inside large skyscrapers.
This was not as wrong as it sounds. I suspect whoever wrote the article understood the long-term trend of information delivery, that it would eventually be personal, and in a real sense, their prediction was right. Here in the future, news and entertainment is piped directly to everyone—just not by pneumatic tube.
To be fair, it wasn’t that they failed to appreciate electronic transmission. Already by the 1930s we had the telegraph and radio. Nor was it the absence of the computer. Even as late as the 1980s, when we knew computers would eventually be portable, would-be futurists were predicting that every home would have a fax machine to print the newspaper in place of costly home delivery.
We’re good at extending trend lines to the future. We’re bad at predicting the intersection of things—in the case of what you’re doing this very second, the intersection of electricity, radio, and the semiconductor.
That intersection of technologies is what produces the complexity of real outcomes and makes prediction so hard. Even as late as the 1990s, with the internet right in front of us, very few people had a clear sense of what the smartphone would do in less than a decade. Who can say how AI, 3D printing, genetic modification, robotics, nanotechnology, and other emerging tools will interact with each other in just the next few election cycles?
The following short segment of a recent interview with thinker and polymath Daniel Schmactenberger is a fantastic summary of the fundamental tension I'm getting at with Science Crimes Division—what Schmactenberger calls “the Metacrisis” of falling into one of “the two attractors.”
On the one hand, as advanced technology gets cheaper and cheaper, it will put catastrophic power in the hands of more and more people. Think of a basement nuke or someone bioengineering a global pathogen in their garage. That's bad.
On the other hand, once you empower any agency (governmental or otherwise) to stop such people, you pretty much guarantee a centralized repressive dystopia.
Those are the attractors society is currently stumbling between: chaos or oppression. (Probably the first followed by the second, since humans as a species widely prefer security over autonomy.)
I have set the link to start at the appropriate time. You only need to watch a couple minutes.
Schmachtenberger is describing exactly what Science Crimes Division is all about, the need for a “science and technology police” on the one hand and the existential threat to democracy that such an organization would pose.
The challenge always is educating the reader in an entertaining way, because none of this is stuff you cover in school. It's always nice to see I'm not the only one thinking of these kinds of things.
That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.