Continuing our series on the evolutions that can be expected over the coming decade, we look at new directions in particle physics, media technologies that are enabling not only greater freedom, but a new communicative paradigm which will, in part, help steer us to the great discoveries of this moment in history, and a vital new understanding of global economic patterns, which will revolutionize the way governments around the world plan for domestic spending and trade policy.

Particle Physics

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN —Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—, outside of Geneva near the French-Swiss border, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the most complex machine ever created, and designed to smash subatomic particles together at rates of speed high enough to mimic the kind of physics that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, from which our universe is believed to have emerged.

The big game is the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to lend mass to all other particles, and which possibly exists only briefly for this purpose. The Higgs boson, also popularly known as the “God particle”, for its capacity to generate mass for other particles, has never been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be powerful enough to actually generate, and record information about the behavior of, the elusive Higgs boson.

This breakthrough would confirm vital aspects of the cosmological model of supersymmetry and bring together, for the first time in the history of human science, a comprehensive model of the known universe. Another elusive gap in the standard model —which integrates Einstein’s theory of relativity with the advanced discoveries of quantum physics— that could be tested and demonstrated by the LHC, is quantum gravity.

In December, the LHC achieved a world record for high-energy particle acceleration, reaching 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). That threshold moves the LHC closer than any other experiment in human history to being able to reproduce and observe conditions similar to those that would have existed nano-seconds after the Big Bang, when key elements of the physical dynamics of our universe were brought into being and set in motion.

It is also believed the Higgs boson gives rise to dark matter, the theoretical substance, which contains the majority of the mass in the universe and which is clustered around galaxies. Discovering the physics of that process and possibly observing the early physics of the birth of star systems, galaxies and star-forming regions, could help to reorganize our understanding of matter, energy and the universe itself, in ways as yet unprecedented in the history of science.

Media Freedom & Decentralization

The coming decade is already poised to see major breakthroughs in low-energy, high-capacity integrated communications technologies. The complex computational technology that goes into encrypting, sending, decrypting and storing, digitized messages, including text, voice, imagery and video, is increasingly light-weight, efficient and inexpensive. Handheld phones are increasingly powerful and integrated into the world wide web. Some now use remote IP connections to provide voice services.

Social networking is the new standard for high-intensity information exchange online, with global conversations building up around issues of major controversy. The post-election demonstrations in Iran this past summer were one example, where information was shared and testimony published and proliferated around the world, despite extreme measures used to curtail open communications within the nation itself. The Copenhagen Conference on climate policy gave rise to the most extensive global policy debate ever seen, from the government level through the grassroots.

Even as economic policy and environmental science drive a more global view of human activity, the rapid expansion of dispersed information-sharing technologies and the world wide web are helping to create a climate in which a decentralized grassroots conversation emerges around any issue of major import, stripping political leaders of centralized power and requiring them to respond to more diverse views from a more informed public.

The key paradigm-shift involved in the decentralized information-freedom revolution is the decentralized aspect of it. Individuals can join a wide array of networks, for varying purposes, in order to build up and maintain significant relationships in their personal and professional lives. Deprivation of resources within borders can be alleviated through those relationships, and vital information about political leadership, public controversies or events, can be delivered from sources outside the country who also have sources within the country.

Global Consumer Protection

The financial crisis of 2008 occurred at a uniquely pivotal moment in economic history. As the failings of the “globalization” process reached critical mass —a severe widening of the gap between rich and poor, the undermining of labor rights across the world, and perilous lack of transparency and provenance for tracking money flows—, massive systemic manipulations in the financial world were revealed, as trillions of dollars in reported “wealth” evaporated almost overnight.

An integrated global fabric of economic activity and banking relations meant the freeze in lending in the US and other wealthy nations would serve as a contagion of economic stagnation in poorer nations. A global response was needed, and in April, Pres. Obama succeeded in persuading the G20 nations to agree to a global financial rescue process. The IMF would create a $500 billion fund, with $100 billion put up by the United States, over several years, to ensure malfeasance or a risky economic climate would not lead to a contagion of banking collapses around the world.

That agreement was one of the most important economic achievements of 2009, because it allowed two important things to happen: 1) there would be a means of rescuing banking systems on the verge of collapse, around the world, to prevent a deepening of the global financial crisis; and 2) nations that have never had solid records of financial transparency would be incentivized to sign up to a new regime of banking transparency and financial ethics, further shoring up the global financial system against potential abuses.

Issues related to the security of fresh water resources, the human food supply and climate stability, have led to a significant increase in overall international economic negotiation. The virtues of pragmatic shared-interest negotiations have become apparent, and economic incentivization is now part of many crisis-level negotiations. The crisis regarding Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, involves a triangular proposal that would allow Iran’s enrichment process to involve both Russia and France, providing economic benefits to all three nations, but denying Tehran the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

Job creation is increasingly dependent on global flows of financial and natural resources. China’s enormous consumption of mineral resources has built up its economic clout, and lowered the cost of its massive nationwide industrialization and construction process, but it has also deprived other nations, as well as multinational conglomerate corporations, of the ability to do business in a dependable way trading certain mineral resources, like copper and iron ore.

China is consuming cropland in Africa, in an effort to provide for the basic sustenance of its people, and world grain reserves are being depleted in line with the depletion of fossil aquifers around the planet. These patterns of global economic impact are more than just wave trends; they are part of a new way of negotiating for the sustained prosperity of local populations. The state of California, for instance, the world’s 5th largest economy, negotiates parallel agreements, not waiting for the US to make trade deals to help shore up the California economy.

But consumer protection is the missing component that has made globalization a less flexible process, too heavily oriented toward guaranteed windfalls for big investors. The 2008 global financial crisis, rooted in financial abuses, a property-price inflation bubble and the credit markets, made clear this shortcoming of global economic policy. Transparency is one of the responses, but global consumer protection is another.

It is now likely that over the next decade, negotiations to provide for consumer protection across borders, and to ensure consumers have the ability to distinguish between businesses that negotiate fairly with workers and those that use sweatshops and abusive labor conditions to pad their profits. Improvements to global economic ethics will come from enhanced consumer protection guarantees and a more global awareness of economic activity.

Conclusion

These are just nine fronts on which major paradigm-shifts are either already underway or are likely to occur in the coming decade. The details of each of these nine areas of focus provide extensive room for overlap, and touch on literally thousands of other details of personal quality of life, political and economic stability and human potential.

One of the most critical, and perhaps underreported, aspects of the social networking revolution, is the technological capability of spontaneous alliances of thoughtful individuals to locate information, fashion reports and instigate a culture of vigilance, on virtually any issue, at any time.

There are major political and economic implications tied to this trend, and local and international institutions and governments of nation states, will have to think ahead about how to integrate genuine ethical protections into the fast-changing environment of global policy. New media connectivity and decentralized civic infrastructure have allowed for a kind of de-formalization of policy-shaping events and communications between local communities and world leaders.

There is a “bubbling-up” effect that takes place, where large numbers of people can quickly band together to act as conscience to the broader world and exert pressure on leaders; international development and crisis negotiations will take this into account, as part of a new‘transactional’ cosmology, in which leadership is always under scrutiny and the facts of human life do actually matter.

2nd Decade of the 21st Century: What’s in Store?

1. Denuclearization, Green Tech & Cooperation
2. Gender Equality, Food Security & Counter-extremism
3. Particle Physics, Media Freedom & Global Economics

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.

The above image, captured by and transmitted from the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit around the Earth, shows the largest star-forming region in the vicinity of our Milky Way galaxy. According to NASA: “The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.”

The deepest image ever taken of the universe, using the ultra-powerful Hubble Space Telescope, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, shows there to be 100 billion galaxies in the universe, some projecting light from a distance of 47 billion light years. A study of the Doppler redshift of galaxies speeding away from the Hubble’s vantage point has allowed astronomers to create a 3-dimensional projection of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, the deepest photograph ever taken of the observable universe.

The US space agency NASA’s Apollo 11 mission was the first to land a human being on the surface of the Moon, on 20 July 1969. The lunar module, known as Eagle, landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon. They spent one day there, and both stepped outside the lander to explore the otherworldly environment.

Apollo 11 was the culmination of a race to the Moon that was launched when Pres. Kennedy, in 1961, responding to the Soviet Union’s achievements with the first orbiting satellite and the first man in space, pledged the US would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On this day, 40 years ago, that pledge was fulfilled when the Apollo 11 team landed two of its three crew members on the surface of our planet’s moon.

At 9:37 am, on 16 July 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft launched from Merritt Island, Florida, on journey to the Moon that would require reaching Earth orbit, then a jump into lunar orbit, then the detachment of the lunar lander Eagle, which would take Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the lunar surface, while Michael Collins orbited above, in the command module Columbia.

The Eagle would travel to the lunar surface on 20 July, four days after launch, landing in the southern Sea of Tranquility. The terrain had been judged to be relatively smooth and obstacle-free by unmanned spacecraft that had preceded the Apollo 11 mission. But the first manned journey to the surface of the Moon was not so simple.

As the Telegraph newspaper reports:

As they descended towards the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin were alarmed to note they were passing landmarks on the lunar surface four seconds early. They reported the Mission Control Centre in Houston, Texas that they were “long” and would land miles west of their target point in a boulder-strewn area just north-east of a 400 meter crater.

In fact, the craft would have to be partially taken over by Armstrong, who would try to correct the landing. The Eagle landed with just 25 seconds of fuel remaining, a welcome conclusion to what had become a nerve-racking series of concerning events. The Telegraph reports that when Armstrong uttered the historic words “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”, his heart was racing at 156 beats per minute.

Ground Control, in Houston Texas, registered Armstrong’s radio communication and told him the news of the successful landing had been a great relief. Charles Duke, Capsule Communicator in Houston, said “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here. We’re breathing again.”

At 2:56 am, Neil Armstrong emerged from the lunar module and became the first human being ever to set foot on the Moon. He marked the moment with the now famous words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin joined him, and the two experimented with the reduced gravity and zero atmosphere of the lunar experience. They planted an American flag, then spoke by radio telephone to Pres. Richard M. Nixon.

Wikipedia lists a number of lunar surface operations, in addition to those listed above:

They deployed the EASEP, which included a passive seismograph and a laser ranging retroreflector. Then Armstrong loped about 120 m (400 ft) from the LM to snap photos at the rim of East Crater while Aldrin collected two core tubes. He used the geological hammer to pound in the tubes – the only time the hammer was used on Apollo 11. The astronauts then collected rock samples using scoops and tongs on extension handles. Many of the surface activities took longer than expected, so they had to stop documented sample collection halfway through the allotted 34 min.

During this period Mission Control used a coded phrase to warn Armstrong that his metabolic rates were high and that he should slow down. He was moving rapidly from task to task as time ran out. However, as metabolic rates remained generally lower than expected for both astronauts throughout the walk, Mission Control granted the astronauts a 15-minute extension.

They had a reserve of fuel for lunar lift-off, and once on lunar module life-support, began preparations for their lift-off and ascent to the orbiting command module Columbia, where fellow astronaut Michael Collins awaited them. Buzz Aldrin apparently inadvertently damaged the circuit-breaker that provided power to the ignition, which initially it was feared would prevent firing the launch rockets, but a felt-tip pen was able to act as substitute, and the two would in fact lift-off as planned and make their rendezvous with Columbia.

The Eagle ascent stage was jettisoned into lunar orbit, but was not tracked. Its position would be a matter of concern for later Moon missions. The astronauts would splash down in the Pacific Ocean and were immediately put in mobile quarantine, and transported to a lunar receiving laboratory to be studied and assessed.

They had left a commemorative plaque on the Eagle’s ladder, at the site of their landing, noting it was the first place human beings set foot on the Moon. There was also a silicon storage disc that listed the leaders of Congress and contained messages of well wishes from US presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. They also mentioned Russian cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin.

Pres. Richard Nixon, when he greeted them in quarantine, told the Apollo 11 crew “As a result of what you’ve done, the world has never been closer together before”. Their achievement had been watched on television around the world, and though it was seen as a kind of Cold War victory for the US, it was treated around the world as a collective achievement of human science and ingenuity.

The crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavor marked the 4oth anniversary of the Moon landing with a spacewalk today. Astronauts Dave Wolf and Tom Marshburn will spend six and a half hours outside the controlled environments of the Shuttle Endeavor and International Space Station (ISS), working to complete construction of the Japanese laboratory module Kibo. The STS-127 mission will expand the ISS to its completed size, an important achievement for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

TheHotSpring.com :: The NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis took off this afternoon at 2:01 EDT, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission —STS-125— will be the last scheduled mission to service the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, in an effort to extend its working life at least 5 more years into the future. It will entail at least 5 planned spacewalks to repair and upgrade the telescope’s equipment and power-sourcing.

When the Hubble program was first to be abandoned, it sparked a worldwide public outcry, and a movement to save the Hubble, which is responsible for a great number of major scientific discoveries made since it first began looking deep into the unknown remote universe. Its images of galaxies, star clusters, and the massive brilliant nebulae where new stars form, has allowed scientists to reconfigure the way we concieve of the shape and nature of our universe.

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According to NASA’s Shuttle Mission page:

Liftoff was right on time at 2:01 p.m. EDT following a countdown that proceeded relatively smoothly throughout the day. Late in the countdown, launch managers had to evaluate an unexpected ice formation on the liquid hydrogen umbilical, and a buildup of cumulus clouds threatened the favorable weather forecast. But those issues were quickly resolved, and in a post-launch press conference, NASA managers praised the launch team for its expertise and efficiency.

Space Shuttle Endeavor is already set for STS-126, situated on another launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, in case the crew of STS-125 somehow finds itself stranded or in distress. Atlantis was stocked with twice the normal 12-day supply of food, as the Hubble mission —at 350 miles altitude— will take the Atlantis 100 miles higher into orbit than the usual destination of the International Space Station.

Being 100 miles further out than the International Space Station, the astronauts would be stranded if there is any major systems failure on the shuttle, so Endeavor’s being readied, staffed and stationed, was instrumental to being able to allow the Atlantis launch to be conducted with confidence that potential emergency situations could be addressed should they arise.

TheHotSpring.com :: The US-based Science Channel will be showing the last mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope live. The mission is the last of its kind in a prolonged service regime planned for the telescope, after a global campaign to prevent the project’s premature cancellation. The Hubble Space Telescope is the single most successful technical instrument in terms of producing new discoveries from probing the distant universe.

NASA lists the “top five discoveries” made by use of the Hubble Space Telescope. All involve the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, and all give us vital background information on the evolution of stars, star systems and the life of the universe itself. Our understanding of general cosmology, and of physics at the interstellar and quantum levels, has been vastly expanded due to the hundreds of major discoveries achieved with this instrument.

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One of the most visually startling of NASA’s top five was the Hubble Deep Field image: published in 1996, the “deepest” photograph ever taken of the remote universe showed hundreds of galaxies never before known of by science. That single image drastically reoriented the outlook of the human scientist toward deep space, changing important assumptions about scale and density across the ancient universe.

NASA’s own write-up of the top five reads as follows:

Deepest photograph of the universe. Hubble’s famous “Deep Field” picture (above), taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, left the world with its mouth agape when it was first revealed in 1996. In just a small patch of sky, more than 1,000 galaxies located billions of light-years away could be seen floating in space like sea creatures at the bottom of an endless ocean. Our world and our galaxy suddenly seemed very small.

Observations of comet collision with Jupiter. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 gave the world a rare, stunning view of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunging into the gas giant Jupiter in 1994. The images revealed the event in great detail, including ripples expanding outward from the impact.

The birth and death of stars. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 brought the cosmos down to Earth with its exquisite pictures of stars in all stages of development. Its famed picture of the “Pillars of Creation” and other images of colorful dying stars offered the first, glorious views of a star’s life. The camera also took the first pictures of the dusty disks around stars where planets are born, demonstrating that planet-forming environments are common in the universe.

The age and rate of expansion of our universe. Our universe formed from a colossal explosion known as the Big Bang, and has been stretching apart ever since. Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, by observing stars that vary periodically in brightness, was able to calculate the pace of this expansion to an unprecedented degree of error of 10 percent. The camera also played a leading role in discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force called “dark energy.” Together, these findings led to the calculation that our universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old.

Most galaxies harbor huge black holes. Before Hubble, astronomers suspected, but had no proof, that supermassive black holes lurk deep in the bellies of galaxies. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, together with spectroscopy data from Hubble, showed that most galaxies in the universe do indeed harbor monstrous black holes up to billions of times the mass of our sun.

The mission is needed to keep the telescope working, as a key technical failure in October has interrupted its full functioning capacity. The launch has been delayed for months, and there is now a launch-date set for one week from today. As MSNBC reports:

After months of delay, NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis is just one week away from launching seven eager astronauts to give the iconic Hubble Space Telescope one last makeover.

Atlantis is poised to rocket toward Hubble at 2:01 p.m. ET on May 11 with a mix of veteran Hubble mechanics and first-time spacefliers on board. The mission, NASA’s final repair flight to Hubble, has been delayed since October, when a critical component on the space telescope failed.

The mission will consist of 5 spacewalks over an 11-day period. Reparis will be aimed at extending Hubble’s life at least through 2014 and will include “add new instruments, replace old batteries and gyroscopes and make vital repairs, including some to equipment that was never designed to be fixed in space”.

Commander Scott Altman will be returning to Hubble on this, his fourth spaceflight. He will pilot the space shuttle Atlantis in a repeat of his last flight, in 2002, which was Hubble’s most recent service mission. After 19 years on the job, the Hubble is still considered viable for at least 5 more years, and may last another 7 to 10.

The longevity of complex instruments in space is notoriously hard to predict: while minor mathematical mistakes caused two Mars rovers to disappear (presumably crashes on landing), other rovers have continued working long after they were supposed to have shut down, and deep space probes have continued sending images and signals long after they were supposed to have lost power or radio-contact.

The shuttle mission itself remains a potential risk, with millions of potential malfunctions that could pose obstacles to the safe return of the shuttle. In order to avoid the potential for astronauts being stranded on the shuttle with too few supplies to last more than a few weeks, a second shuttle, the Endeavor, is prepared for lift-off in case of a distress call from the Atlantis, or should there be any evidence the shuttle was damaged while exiting Earth’s atmosphere.

TheHotSpring.com :: The twin Mars rover projects NASA launched over 5 years ago, which landed the Spirit rover on 3 January 2004 and the Opportunity rover on 24 January 2004, which planned only 3 months of research, are still roving, gathering data and transmitting new discoveries back to Earth, after 5 years at work on the desolate red planet. Specifically, the rovers have revealed a great deal of information about water around the Martian equator billions of years in the past.

The rovers are exposed to extreme conditions at all times, and program directors are enthusiastic about the resilience shown by the rovers. Some wear is evident, and failing parts that can’t be repaired have limited the rovers’ operative functionality: Spirit must move in reverse at all times, due to a “jammed wheel” and Opportunity’s robotic arm is limited by a failed electrical wire.

Spirit set up for the Martian winter at its “winter haven” (image below), perched atop a hill to keep from getting buffeted by debris rolling into the crater below.

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The rovers alternate between periods of rest, to protect against unnecessary environmental perils, and roving, from one site to another, and across wide ranges, like the craters and plateaus they have explored for signs of mineral evidence of water.

According to the BBC:

Spirit is exploring a 150km-wide bowl-shaped depression known as Gusev Crater. It has found an abundance of rocks and soils bearing evidence of extensive exposure to water.

Opportunity is on the other side of the planet, in a flat region known as Meridiani Planum.

Opportunity has demonstrated that there was water present, which flowed over the Martian surface, depositing sedimentary rock that can now be studied by the rover. If the rovers continue to operate for one full additional year, they could potentially produce another four times as much data as they were initially expected to produce for their planned 3-month mission.

Below is a view of the Victoria Crater, shot in panoramic view by a camera attached to one of the rovers. High resolution panoramic images were one of the popular early products of the twin rover missions, and have continued to provide valuable information about the Martian environment and history.

In December, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) discovered evidence of carbonate minerals, necessary for making some of the rocks already known to exist, and indicative of a less acidic water environment at some point in the Martian past, evidence that could indicate there was microbial life or that it could still be hidden somewhere in the Martian environment.

The MRO has also been providing high-resolution images and chemical-spectral scans that help describe the composition of the Martian soil and indicate what sort of physical interactions may have taken place between rock formations and liquids or gases running over the Martian surface, which is helpful to reconstructing the now absent atmosphere that would have permitted a warmer and more life-sustaining climate.

TheHotSpring.com :: A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.

The Roadrunner, like other hybrid super-computers, is made up of thousands of distributed computing “nodes”, each with its own microprocessor and separate memory store. There is a time-lapse between memory retrieval and central processing registry of computation, which means researchers have to come up with creative ways to narrow the ever-widening gap between computation and memory-retrieval time, a barrier difficult to overcome due to the physical limitations of the raw materials.

Roadrunner’s specific hybrid design is a breakthrough because it allows some improvement on this front. According to the Los Alamos website:

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons.

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It is believed the petaflop speed will allow Roadrunner to be useful in calculating the rapid evolution of supernovae, the massive explosions that sometimes result from dying stars, a process which, if understood, can help to explain to astronomers, physicists and cosmologists, not only how the details of cosmic radiation have played out but also: what can be expected in the evolution and decay of certain star systems, and what that means for the physics of stars and galaxies, forces like gravity, the nature of black holes and, ultimately, provide some of the information necessary for testing sweeping theories about the beginnings of our universe.

The Milagro Cosmic Ray Observatory at Los Alamos, using special code designed to trace fluctuation and tranmission of radiation, to map the celestial background and study the effects of interstellar radiation on the Earth and near-Earth objects, would be the forum through which such applications for Roadrunner would be explored. In Milagro’s work with specially designed code to study radiation physics, according to Los Alamos itself:

The major application areas addressed were radiation transport (how radiation deposits energy in and moves through matter), neutron transport (how neutrons move through matter), molecular dynamics (how matter responds at the molecular level to shock waves and other extreme conditions), fluid turbulence, and the behavior of plasmas (ionized gases) in relation to fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is also expected the petaflop speed will be useful in testing medical advances, potentially projecting cell reaction to chemical treatments, radiation innovations, gene therapy and other complex metabolic interventions that could adversely affect or significantly improve patient prognoses. John Turner, a Los Alamos researcher, says his team expects “proposals in cosmology, antibiotic drug design, HIV vaccine development, astrophysics, ocean or climate modeling, turbulence, and we hope many others”.

The Lab’s website also reports plans to use Roadrunner, starting in 2010, to test means of improving nuclear weapons technology, to enhance performance, and facilitate higher levels of maintenance and security, with a state goal of “maintaining confidence in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without actual nuclear testing”.

Molecular computing innovations, like 16-bit, 128-bit or 1,024-bit simultaneous molecular processing hubs, could allow processor speeds to accelerate exponentially, once such technologies are developed and able to be specialized, mass-produced and widely distributed. Research into nano-scale molecular chemical brains or chemical computational network nodes means “nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.”

Computing speed is relevant not only to improving the performance of super-computers and later commercial microprocessors, enabling more advanced research, but also to the practical application of computational solutions for new zero-emissions models of energy capture, storage and distribution, distributed cloud computing processing platforms, the next generation of hyper-convergent online services, neural nets and artificial intelligence.