Think Big Or Stay Home
I don't speak for my employer, but I'm going to speak about them
I may have mentioned in passing, here and there, that I work for Amazon. In fact, I've worked there longer than most software developers; I'll pass 16 years by this June.
Amazon likes to measure its employees' career development according to its Leadership Principles. Note that this link, like everything I reference in this post, is to publicly available information. I'm not spillin' any secrets here. I signed an NDA like everyone else.
In my own progress assessments, I've been told I'm excellent at "Diving Deep". This, you could probably guess from my writing. I'm a details guy. I analyze the crap out of stuff. It's just how my brain works.
Where are my "opportunities for growth", as they like to positively frame "the stuff you're not-so-good at yet"? The clearest of these is "Think Big". I jump so naturally to the details, the single lines of code, that I rarely zoom out to examine where we're going on a broad scale, and why.
At least, that's how I function while I'm at work. On other venues, like this blog, I do that all the time.
Challenge accepted
Imagine me cracking my knuckles.
You may have noticed that Amazon is no longer just a bookseller.
Amazon still has a retail business, oh yes it does. I don't imagine that's going away any time soon. Amazon may have started by selling books online, but it branched out into selling practically anything that could be boxed, hosting sales for other sellers, and now has brick-and-mortar stores as well. I happen to work in the "other Amazon", the non-retail side called "Amazon Web Services" or AWS. This side sells cloud computing, a platform that is used by businesses to run their own websites and such. AWS's customers include many big names, such as Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (and some names we don't talk about). Amazon has also snapped up dozens of other companies, such as Whole Foods Market and Twitch.
The point of this blog post is not to be an Amazon cheerleader. Rather, I'm just illustrating that Amazon isn't afraid to branch out into new areas, take a few risks. "Bias for Action" is another Leadership Principle. Fortune favors the bold.
For example, Amazon is building an increasing number of data centers:
I don't know anything about running a data center. I gather, though, that they have computers inside them, and that computers can't operate without a steady source of electricity. You might then wonder where Amazon is going to get all that electricity. And, what do you know -- they have thought about this. You see, Amazon recently added a couple of new Leadership Principles: "Strive to be Earth's Best Employer", and "Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility". In an effort to ward off accusations that this all-consuming corporate juggernaut might be veering into Evil Empire territory, Amazon has been announcing partnerships with renewable energy companies. You can't be entirely evil if you're pursuing net-zero carbon emissions. (You could still be evil in other ways, of course. But if you're good in some ways then, by definition, you're not entirely evil.)
Fun sidebar about my dad:
My father made his career as a physicist. Now, "physicist" probably makes you think of some famous folks like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. These are members of a particular subspecies of physicist, known as a theoretical physicist. Put very simply, they search for explanations of the universe's behavior. A possible explanation is called a hypothesis. My father chose to join another subspecies, the experimental physicist. They design experiments to test hypotheses and see whether they can be confirmed or disproven. If theoretical physicists were software developers, experimental physicists would be the QA team, trying to find all the bugs.
Specifically, my father focused on developing a solar cell technology, called photovoltaics. These are the black-glass solar panels you may find on rooftops, that turn sunlight directly into electricity. Even more specifically, he worked on cadmium telluride solar panels, and spent some of his career at Solar Cells Inc., a company which is mentioned on the Wikipedia page. Some papers he wrote can be found online.
Solar power, wind power, these are what come to mind when people think about environmentally friendly energy sources. In my opinion, nuclear power is another reasonable option; we've learned some things about how to do it safely, such as the Pebble Bed design. Unlike wind or solar, nuclear power isn't subject to the whims of the weather. Of course, nuclear power takes a huge initial investment, but Amazon also likes to think long-term. Remember, Jeff Bezos is a guy who's poured millions of dollars into the Clock of the Long Now project. Now that's Thinking Big.
More Power, Scotty
So far, Amazon is not in the electricity business. It's partnering with firms that produce electricity, with the aim of consuming that power itself. Of course, that's how AWS started, too: Amazon engineers were frustrated with their ability to get new services online, and realized it was wasteful to have every team retread the same ground, assembling the underlying infrastructure such as databases. In cleaning up that mess, they stumbled into the idea of "infrastructure as a service". Having solved the problem for the company's own engineers, they could resell the solution to everyone else. If you need a database, AWS will provide you with one to meet your specifications.
After you've solved a problem for yourself, you can solve it for others. It's not such a stretch, then, to imagine Amazon getting into the clean energy business. Why stop at partnering with a renewable energy company? Why not become one?
What worries Bezos is that in the coming generations the planet’s growing energy demands will outstrip its limited supply. ... What is Amazon, aside from a listing on Nasdaq? This is a flummoxing question. ... When I posed the question to Amazonians, I got the sense that they considered the company to be a paradigm—a distinctive approach to making decisions, a set of values, the Jeff Bezos view of the world extended through some 600,000 employees. This description, of course, means that the company’s expansion has no natural boundary; no sector of the economy inherently lies beyond its core competencies.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years, Amazon will have a division that's installing solar panels, building nuclear plants, and exploring other sources of energy. Geothermal is interesting to me. The planet's core contains a vast amount of untapped heat. Also like nuclear power, geothermal isn't affected by the weather. The main problem with it is the lack of access to the heat: geothermal has only been done in certain select places, where the tectonic plate boundaries provide easy access. The limiting technology, then, is one's ability to dig a deep hole. Solve that, and you could install geothermal power in more places.
I hear you yawn. "He's talking about digging holes. Time to click over to TikTok."
OK, then. Not thinking big enough for you? Let's go nuts.
Taming The Scary Maw Of Physicists' Nightmares
I'm talking about black holes.
Second fun sidebar about my dad:
He doesn't believe black holes are real. Perhaps this shouldn't be so surprising. As an experimental physicist, he's accustomed to casting a critical eye upon the hypotheses of the theoretical crowd.
The consensus among scientists, though, is that black holes are indeed real. Their existence has been verified in a few different ways. Most notably for me: Several years back, I took a field trip with a bunch of other Amazonians to LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in Hanford. They were attempting to detect and measure gravity waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space itself, something anticipated by Einstein's relativity, but entirely theoretical at the time of my visit. Then, in September of 2015, they received an unequivocal signal. A second detector confirmed it. This was an exciting scientific triumph, a dramatic first within my lifetime.
The event that generated these ripples? Two black holes spiraling into each other.
There are now several interesting ideas about how one might extract energy, perhaps truly massive amounts of energy, from a black hole. One such idea is the Penrose process, entertainingly illustrated in this Kurzgesagt video. Kurzgesagt, I think, now corners the market on animated birds in educational videos.
If you think building a clock that can run flawlessly for 10,000 years is a big engineering undertaking (and you'd be wrong if you didn't), try to imagine the challenges involved in building a shell of mirrors completely surrounding a black hole. One might, for example, choose the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center, somewhere between 24,000 and 28,400 light-years away from us. All other challenges aside, just getting there is daunting.
Assume the galactic center turns out to be 26,000 LY away (2.46e+17 meters). Imagine you somehow crack the problem of achieving continuous acceleration at 1G (9.806 meters/second2) without burning rocket fuel you pack for the trip, since carrying that much fuel would make the craft prohibitively heavy. Further assume you must accelerate for the first half of the trip and decelerate for the second (so you don't simply fling yourself past your destination). Note that at these scales, you can't ignore relativistic effects (thank you Einstein). This has some surprising implications; I recommend Randall Munroe's book How To, which has a chapter on this. Very briefly, the time that seems to pass for you while traveling is a lot less than the time passing for observers staying behind on Earth.
Stealing a couple equations from this helpful StackExchange answer, and this helpful calculator, a trip of this length would take you nearly 20 years from your perspective as a traveler, and slightly over 26,000 years for everyone else. (One of the surprising results is how close to the speed of light one can get, if one can just accelerate steadily.) If you sent a message back to Earth announcing your arrival, it would be an additional 26,000 years before they received it.
There is believed to be a closer black hole, V723 Monocerotis, some 1,500 light-years away. That'd be less than 8 years of elapsed time for the travelers, and again, slighly over 1,500 years for the rest of us. (We might find still closer ones as we keep searching, but hopefully we will not find one too close.)
There are a few obvious upshots to this:
- A human could make the journey. It wouldn't be fun. Apart from saying "goodbye forever" to their families and friends, imagine being stuck in a tin can for 8 or 20 years.
- Any such trip is essentially one-way. There's no telling whether civilization will exist on Earth by the time you reach your destination.
- You'd either need to bring everything you need with you, or find it on some planet near the destination.
- We could send robots in our stead. They'd have to be smart enough to handle the entire mission unaided, since we couldn't talk them through it. The round-trip for messages would be thousands of years.
- Even if everything went according to plan, if the goal was to send energy to humans on Earth, the energy wouldn't arrive for millenia after the mission began.
- All the above assumes you've already cracked the problem of free, continuous acceleration, and we very much have not.
Of course, it'd be great if we could crack faster-than-light travel somehow. There's an idea for that too, called the Alcubierre Warp Drive, and nobody's entirely sure if it's really possible to do. If it were successful, it would entirely alter the rules of this game.
Either way, it would remain a huge undertaking - one that would make Elon Musk's little trip to Mars seem like a cakewalk.
Too crazy? Or... just crazy enough?
An Amazon Solution To The Facebook Problem
Companies need to keep growing. I don't know why that is, exactly, but economists and other business-y people appear convinced it's true.
Facebook has a problem: It has too many customers. That is, it has so many customers already, it has become difficult to find any more. There are, after all, a finite number of people on Earth. Not all of them are suitable customers: some don't have Internet access, for example (and some don't even have electricity). This may explain why they are trying to provide Internet access to more people. Then again, some people aren't Facebook customers simply because they don't like Facebook. This is especially a problem when the company is struggling to attract younger customers. The new kids like new toys. To them, Facebook is a website for the olds.
Amazon, by contrast, is in the business of selling, well, anything to everybody. Since everybody needs stuff (including food -- cue Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh), everybody is a potential customer.
One can imagine that, far in the future, Amazon could run out of new customers, perhaps when it saturates the market. Excepting a handful of isolated tribes, the entire Earth could be wired up and shopping through Amazon (and watching Netflix, and everything else Amazon technology enables). Then the company would be stuck. How would it continue to grow?
If one can widen the customer base by giving people Internet, perhaps one can go a step further and start a colony.
A journey to a black hole would take a long time, and there'd be years, decades, of work involved in setting up the power generator. It would involve collecting resources, refining material, manufacturing devices, assembly and testing, as well as growing or synthesizing food, and generating new entertainment for the colonists to enjoy on their down time. It would be an entirely new civilization. And like any civilization, it would need a system for allocating those resources and rewarding hard workers -- an economy. To put it another way, every member of this colony could be an Amazon customer.
At the end of this long process, our species could have a property Amazon greatly desires in its own data centers: redundancy. Even if the Earth were wiped out by an asteroid, Amazon would survive. Er, I mean, humanity would. Same thing, at that point.
“We have to go to space to save Earth,” Jeff Bezos has said. He envisions turning the entire planet into a park, to preserve the ecosystem, while everyone else lives and works in space, or on the moon or something. Good idea. I'd say that's thinking... biggish. You could consider it a stepping stone, training wheels, practice, for humans to learn how to be self-sufficient without exploiting the Earth's resources and biosphere. Then, you pack up all that hard-earned experience and technology into a spaceship, and set out to create a black-hole-powered interstellar empire.
Some Think Big Proposals
Here they are, then, in order from least ambitious to most:
- Buy an energy company. Start selling electricity directly to consumers, and using it to power Amazon data centers.
- Expand into research. Maybe buy a University, or start a new one -- I'll let someone else figure out the fine details, there. To begin with, work on better sources of climate-friendly energy.
- Expand into self-sufficient living. Build biodomes.
- Start building colonies throughout the solar system. Mine the asteroids, live on the moon, all that cool stuff. Partner with Blue Origin, presumably.
- Widen the research into cutting-edge theoretical physics. Research propulsion tech. Attempt to verify the Penrose process, or one of the other solutions for black hole power. Work out the practical problems. Productize that crap.
- Launch an interstellar colony mission. To begin with, pick a nearby star, one that'll permit sending a signal back to Earth in a reasonable number of years, so we can learn how it went.
- Since that isn't likely to go perfectly on the first attempt, repeat this several times.
- Aim for the nearest black hole and punch the big red button. Onward and outward.
Comments
Post a Comment