Moore's law

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Plot of CPU transistor counts against dates of introduction. Note the logarithmic vertical scale; the line corresponds to exponential growth with transistor count doubling every two years.

An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982 with a Zilog Z80 4MHz CPU, and a 2007 Apple iPhone with a 412MHz ARM11 CPU. The Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times as much volume, cost approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone.

Moore's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.^[1][2][3] His prediction has proven to be accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.^[4] The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,^[5] memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.^[6] All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well. This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.^[7] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity and economic growth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.^{[8][9][10][11]}

The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).^[12]

Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore's law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.^{[note 1][14]} However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth will slow at the end of 2013,^[15] when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.

History

Gordon Moore in 2004

The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead in reference to a statement by Gordon E. Moore.^[2][16] Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture.^[17] A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959.^[18]

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965^[19] and then concluded:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.^[1]

Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law.^[20] Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years.^[21][22] Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months." However, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.^{[note 2]}

In April 2005, Intel offered US$10,000 to purchase a copy of the original Electronics Magazine issue in which Moore's article appeared.^[24] An engineer living in the United Kingdom was the first to find a copy and offer it to Intel.^[25]

Other formulations and similar laws

Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density and speed of components. Moore himself wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor,"^[26] at minimum cost.

Transistors per integrated circuit. The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every two years. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. The graph at the top shows this trend holds true today.

Density at minimum cost per transistor. This is the formulation given in Moore's 1965 paper.^[1] It is not just about the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest.^[27] As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography, this number would increase at "a rate of roughly a factor of two per year".^[1]

Dennard scaling. This suggests that power requirements are proportional to area (both voltage and current being proportional to length) for transistors. Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years. According to Dennard scaling transistor dimensions are scaled by 30% (0.7x) every technology generation, thus reducing their area by 50%. This reduces the delay by 30% (0.7x) and therefore increases operating frequency by about 40% (1.4x). Finally, to keep electric field constant, voltage is reduced by 30%, reducing energy by 65% and power (at 1.4x frequency) by 50%.^{[note 3]} Therefore, in every technology generation transistor density doubles, circuit becomes 40% faster, while power consumption (with twice the number of transistors) stays the same.^[28]

The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling appears to have broken down, so even though Moore's law continued for several years after that, it has not yielded dividends in improved performance.^[29][30][31] The primary reason cited for the breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore further increases energy costs.^[29][30][31] The breakdown of Dennard scaling prompted a switch among some chip manufacturers to a greater focus on multicore processors, but the gains offered by switching to more cores are lower than the gains that would be achieved had Dennard scaling continued.^[32][33] In another departure from Dennard scaling, Intel microprocessors adopted a non-planar tri-gate FinFET at 22 nm in 2012 which is faster and consumes less power than a conventional planar transistor.^[34]

Quality adjusted price of IT equipment. The price of Information Technology (IT), computers and peripheral equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, declined 16% per year on average over the five decades from 1959 to 2009.^[35] However, the pace accelerated to 23% per year in 1995-1999 triggered by^[11] faster IT innovation, and later slowed to 2% per year in 2010-2013.^[35][36] The rate of quality-adjusted microprocessor price improvement likewise varies, and is not linear on a log scale. Microprocessor price improvement accelerated during the late 1990s, reaching 60% per year (halving every nine months) versus the typical 30% improvement rate (halving every two years) during the years earlier and later.^[37][38]

The number of transistors per chip cannot explain quality-adjusted microprocessor prices fully.^[37][39][40] Moore's 1995 paper does not limit Moore's law to strict linearity or to transistor count, “The definition of 'Moore's Law' has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that when plotted on semi-log paper approximates a straight line. I hesitate to review its origins and by doing so restrict its definition.”^[26]

Moore (2003) credits chemical mechanical planarization (chip smoothing) with increasing the connectivity of microprocessors from two or three metal layers in the early 1990s to seven in 2003.^[41] This has leveled off at 9-11 layers since 2007.^[42][43] Connectivity improves performance, and relieves network congestion. Just as additional floors may not enlarge a building's footprint, nor is connectivity tallied in transistor count. Microprocessors rely more on communications (interconnect) than do DRAM chips, which have three or four metal layers.^[44][45][46] Microprocessor prices in the late 1990s improved faster than DRAM prices.^[37]

Hard disk drive areal density. A similar law (sometimes called Kryder's law) has held for hard disk drive areal density.^[47] The rate of progress in disk storage over the past decades has sped up more than once, corresponding to the utilization of error correcting codes, the magnetoresistive effect and the giant magnetoresistive effect. The outlook for the rate of progress slowed in recent years, because of noise related to smaller grain size of the disk media, thermal stability and writability using available magnetic fields.^[48]

Network capacity. According to Gerry/Gerald Butters,^[49][50] the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there is another version, called Butters' Law of Photonics,^[51] a formulation which deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butter's law^[52] says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called WDM) increased the capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually.^[53]

Pixels per dollar. Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted pixels per dollar as a basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens and resolution.^[54][55][56]

The great Moore's law compensator (TGMLC), generally referred to as bloat, and also known as Wirth's law, is the principle that successive generations of computer software acquire enough bloat to offset the performance gains predicted by Moore's law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy,^[57] formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on a year 2000 computer.

Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available.^[58] He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission mediums. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of information growth in an era that is now sometimes called an Information Age.

The Carlson Curve is a term coined by The Economist ^[59] to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson.^[60] Carlson accurately predicted that the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law.^[61] Carlson Curves illustrate the rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures.

As a target for industry and a self-fulfilling prophecy

Although Moore's law was initially made in the form of an observation and forecast, the more widely it became accepted, the more it served as a goal for an entire industry. This drove both marketing and engineering departments of semiconductor manufacturers to focus enormous energy aiming for the specified increase in processing power that it was presumed one or more of their competitors would soon actually attain. In this regard, it can be viewed as a self-fulfilling prophecy.^[4][62]

Moore's second law

As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law.^[63] This had led to the formulation of Moore's second law, also called Rock's law, which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.^[64][65]

Major enabling factors and future trends

Numerous innovations by a large number of scientists and engineers have helped significantly to sustain Moore's law since the beginning of the integrated circuit (IC) era. Whereas assembling a detailed list of such significant contributions would be as desirable as it would be difficult, below just a few innovations are listed as examples of breakthroughs that have played a critical role in the advancement of integrated circuit technology by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades:

• The foremost contribution, which is the raison d’etre for Moore's law, is the invention of the integrated circuit itself, credited contemporaneously to Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments^[66] and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.^[67]
• The invention of the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process by Frank Wanlass in 1963.^[68] A number of advances in CMOS technology by many workers in the semiconductor field since the work of Wanlass have enabled the extremely dense and high-performance ICs that the industry makes today.
• The invention of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technology by Robert Dennard at I.B.M. in 1967.^[69] that made it possible to fabricate single-transistor memory cells, and the invention of flash memory by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in the 1980s,^[70][71][72] leading to low-cost, high-capacity memory in diverse electronic products.
• The invention of chemically amplified photoresist by C. Grant Willson, Hiroshi Ito and J.M.J. Fréchet at IBM c.1980,^[73][74][75] that was 10-100 times more sensitive to ultraviolet light.^[76] IBM introduced chemically amplified photoresist for DRAM production in the mid-1980s.^[77][78]
• The invention of deep UV excimer laser photolithography by Kanti Jain^[79] at IBM c.1980,^[80][81][82] that has enabled the smallest features in ICs to shrink from 800 nanometers in 1990 to as low as 22 nanometers in 2012.^[83] This built on the invention of the excimer laser in 1970^[84] by Nikolai Basov, V. A. Danilychev and Yu. M. Popov, at the Lebedev Physical Institute. From a broader scientific perspective, the invention of excimer laser lithography has been highlighted as one of the major milestones in the 50-year history of the laser.^[85][86]
• The interconnect innovations of the late 1990s. IBM developed CMP or chemical mechanical planarization c.1980, based on the centuries-old polishing process for making telescope lenses.^[87] CMP smooths the chip surface. Intel used chemical-mechanical polishing to enable additional layers of metal wires in 1990; higher transistor density (tighter spacing) via trench isolation, local polysilicon (wires connecting nearby transistors) and improved wafer yield (all in 1995).^[88][41] Higher yield, the fraction of working chips on a wafer, reduces manufacturing cost. IBM with assistance from Motorola used CMP for lower electrical resistance copper interconnect instead of aluminum in 1997.^[89]

Computer industry technology roadmaps predict (as of 2001) that Moore's law will continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade. The semiconductor industry technology roadmap uses a three-year doubling time for microprocessors, leading to a tenfold increase in the next decade.^[90] Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics can continue during the next decade,^{[note 1]} and in 2008 as predicting the trend through 2029.^[91]

Some of the new directions in research that may allow Moore's law to continue are:

• Researchers from IBM and Georgia Tech created a new speed record when they ran a supercooled silicon-germanium transistor above 500 GHz at a temperature of 4.5 K (−269 °C; −452 °F).^[92][93]

• In April 2008, researchers at HP Labs announced the creation of a working memristor, a fourth basic passive circuit element whose existence had previously only been theorized. The memristor's unique properties permit the creation of smaller and better-performing electronic devices.^[94]

• In February 2010, Researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland announced a breakthrough in transistors with the design and fabrication of the world's first junctionless transistor. The research led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge was published in Nature Nanotechnology and describes a control gate around a silicon nanowire that can tighten around the wire to the point of closing down the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping. The researchers claim that the new junctionless transistors can be produced at 10-nanometer scale using existing fabrication techniques.^[95]

• In April 2011, a research team at the University of Pittsburgh announced the development of a single-electron transistor 1.5 nanometers in diameter made out of oxide based materials. According to the researchers, three "wires" converge on a central "island" which can house one or two electrons. Electrons tunnel from one wire to another through the island. Conditions on the third wire result in distinct conductive properties including the ability of the transistor to act as a solid state memory.^[96]

• In February 2012, a research team at the University of New South Wales announced the development of the first working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal (not just picked from a large sample of random transistors).^[97] Moore's law predicted this milestone to be reached in the lab by 2020.

• In April 2014, bioengineers at Stanford University developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain. 16 custom designed "Neurocore" chips simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. This Neurogrid is claimed to be 9,000 times faster and more energy efficient than a typical PC. The cost of the prototype was $40,000; however with current technology a similar Neurogrid could be made for $400.^[98]

• The advancement of nanotechnology could spur the creation of microscopic computers and restore Moore's Law to its original rate of growth.^{[99][100][101]}

The trend of scaling for NAND flash memory allows doubling of components manufactured in the same wafer area in less than 18 months.

Ultimate limits of the law

Atomistic simulation result for formation of inversion channel (electron density) and attainment of threshold voltage (IV) in a nanowire MOSFET. Note that the threshold voltage for this device lies around 0.45 V. Nanowire MOSFETs lie towards the end of the ITRS roadmap for scaling devices below 10 nm gate lengths.^[90]

On 13 April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the law cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens". He also noted that transistors would eventually reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:

In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.^[102]

In January 1995, the Digital Alpha 21164 microprocessor had 9.3 million transistors. This 64-bit processor was a technological spearhead at the time, even if the circuit's market share remained average. Six years later, a state of the art microprocessor contained more than 40 million transistors. It is theorised that with further miniaturisation, by 2015 these processors should contain more than 15 billion transistors, and by 2020 will be in molecular scale production, where each molecule can be individually positioned.^[103]

In 2003, Intel predicted the end would come between 2013 and 2018 with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunnelling, although others suggested chips could just get bigger, or become layered.^[104] In 2008 it was noted that for the last 30 years it has been predicted that Moore's law would last at least another decade.^[91]

Some see the limits of the law as being in the distant future. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman announced an ultimate limit of around 600 years in their paper,^[105] based on rigorous estimation of total information-processing capacity of any system in the Universe, which is limited by the Bekenstein bound. On the other hand, based on first principles, there are predictions that Moore's law will collapse in the next few decades [20–40 years]".^[106][107]

One could also limit the theoretical performance of a rather practical "ultimate laptop" with a mass of one kilogram and a volume of one litre. This is done by considering the speed of light, the quantum scale, the gravitational constant and the Boltzmann constant, giving a performance of 5.4258 ⋅ 10⁵⁰ logical operations per second on approximately 10³¹ bits.^[108]

Then again, the law has often met obstacles that first appeared insurmountable but were indeed surmounted before long. In that sense, Moore says he now sees his law as more beautiful than he had realized: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better."^[109]

Futurists and Moore's law

Kurzweil's extension of Moore's law from integrated circuits to earlier transistors, vacuum tubes, relays and electromechanical computers.

If the current trend continues to 2020, the number of transistors would reach 32 billion.^{[clarification needed]}

Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Vernor Vinge believe that the exponential improvement described by Moore's law will ultimately lead to a technological singularity: a period where progress in technology occurs almost instantly.^[110]

Although Kurzweil agrees that by 2019 the current strategy of ever-finer photolithography will have run its course, he speculates that this does not mean the end of Moore's law:

Moore's law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to forecast accelerating price-performance ratios. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to [Newman] relay-based "[Heath] Robinson" machine that cracked the Lorenz cipher, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.^[111]

Kurzweil speculates that it is likely that some new type of technology (e.g. optical, quantum computers, DNA computing) will replace current integrated-circuit technology, and that Moore's Law will hold true long after 2020.^[111]

Seth Lloyd shows how the potential computing capacity of a kilogram of matter equals pi times energy divided by Planck's constant. Since the energy is such a large number and Planck's constant is so small, this equation generates an extremely large number: about 5.0 * 10⁵⁰ operations per second.^[110]

He believes that the exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the technological singularity. The Law of Accelerating Returns described by Ray Kurzweil has in many ways altered the public's perception of Moore's law. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore's law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when it was originally intended to apply only to semiconductor circuits. Many futurists still use the term Moore's law in this broader sense to describe ideas like those put forth by Kurzweil. Kurzweil has hypothesised that Moore's law will apply – at least by inference – to any problem that can be attacked by digital computers as is in its essence also a digital problem. Therefore, because of the digital coding of DNA, progress in genetics may also advance at a Moore's law rate. Moore himself, who never intended his law to be interpreted so broadly, has quipped:

Moore's law has been the name given to everything that changes exponentially. I say, if Gore invented the Internet, I invented the exponential.^{[112][note 4]}

Consequences and limitations

Technological change is a combination of more and of better technology. A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that the peak of the rate of change of the world's capacity to compute information was in the year 1998, when the world's technological capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers grew at 88% per year.^[114] Since then, technological change has clearly slowed. In recent times, every new year allowed mankind to carry out roughly 60% of the computations that could have possibly been executed by all existing general-purpose computers before that year.^[114] This is still exponential, but shows the varying nature of technological change.^[115]

The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity,^[116] and Moore's law factors into productivity. Moore (1995) expected that “the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities.”^[26] However, the reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, with economists reporting that "Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation."^[11] An acceleration in the rate of semiconductor progress contributed to a surge in US productivity growth^{[117][118][119]} which reached 3.4% per year in 1997-2004, outpacing the 1.6% per year during both 1972-1996 and 2005-2013.^[120] As economist Richard G. Anderson notes, “Numerous studies have traced the cause of the productivity acceleration to technological innovations in the production of semiconductors that sharply reduced the prices of such components and of the products that contain them (as well as expanding the capabilities of such products).”^[121]

Intel transistor gate length trend. Transistor scaling has slowed down significantly at advanced (smaller) nodes.

While physical limits to transistor scaling such as source-to-drain leakage, limited gate metals, and limited options for channel material have been reached, new avenues for continued scaling are open. The most promising of these approaches rely on using the spin state of electron spintronics, tunnel junctions, and advanced confinement of channel materials via nano-wire geometry. A comprehensive list of available device choices shows^[122] that a wide range of device options is open for continuing Moore's law into the next few decades. Spin-based logic and memory options are actively being developed in industrial labs^[123] as well as academic labs.^[124]

Another source of improved performance is in microarchitecture techniques exploiting the growth of available transistor count. Out-of-order execution and on-chip caching and prefetching reduce the memory latency bottleneck at the expense of using more transistors and increasing the processor complexity. These increases are empirically described by Pollack's Rule which states that performance increases due to microarchitecture techniques are square root of the number of transistors or the area of a processor.

For years, processor makers delivered increases in clock rates and instruction-level parallelism, so that single-threaded code executed faster on newer processors with no modification.^[125] Now, to manage CPU power dissipation, processor makers favor multi-core chip designs, and software has to be written in a multi-threaded manner to take full advantage of the hardware. Many multi-threaded development paradigms introduce overhead, and will not see a linear increase in speed vs number of processors. This is particularly true while accessing shared or dependent resources, due to lock contention. This effect becomes more noticeable as the number of processors increases. There are cases where a roughly 45% increase in processor transistors have translated to roughly 10–20% increase in processing power.^[126]

On the other hand, processor manufactures are taking advantage of the 'extra space' that the transistor shrinkage provides to add specialized processing units to deal with features such as graphics, video and cryptography. For one example, Intel's Parallel JavaScript extension not only adds support for multiple cores, but also for the other non-general processing features of their chips, as part of the migration in client side scripting towards HTML5.^[127]

A negative implication of Moore's law is obsolescence, that is, as technologies continue to rapidly "improve", these improvements can be significant enough to rapidly render predecessor technologies obsolete. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence can pose obstacles to smooth or continued operations.^[128] Because of the toxic materials used in the production of modern computers, obsolescence if not properly managed can lead to harmful environmental impacts.^[129]

Moore's law has significantly impacted the performance of other technologies: Michael S. Malone wrote of a Moore's War following the apparent success of shock and awe in the early days of the Iraq War. Progress in the development of guided weapons depends on electronic technology.^[130] Improvements in circuit density and low-power operation associated with Moore's law have also contributed to the development of Star Trek-like technologies including mobile phones^[131] and replicator-like 3D printing.^[132]

Alternate mechanism of species formation picks up support, thanks to a South American ant

Date:

August 21, 2014

Source:

University of Rochester, link http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140821124835.htm

Summary:

A newly discovered species of ant supports a controversial theory of species formation. The ant, only found in a single patch of eucalyptus trees on the São Paulo State University campus in Brazil, branched off from its original species while living in the same colony, something thought rare in current models of evolutionary development.

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A queen ant of the parasitic species Mycocepurus castrator (left) and a queen ant of the host species Mycocepurus goeldii queen (right).

 Credit: Christian Rabeling/University of Rochester

A newly-discovered species of ant supports a controversial theory of species formation. The ant, only found in a single patch of eucalyptus trees on the São Paulo State University campus in Brazil, branched off from its original species while living in the same colony, something thought rare in current models of evolutionary development.

"Most new species come about in geographic isolation," said Christian Rabeling, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rochester. "We now have evidence that speciation can take place within a single colony."

The findings by Rabeling and the research team were published today in the journal Current Biology.

In discovering the parasitic Mycocepurus castrator, Rabeling and his colleagues uncovered an example of a still-controversial theory known as sympatric speciation, which occurs when a new species develops while sharing the same geographic area with its parent species, yet reproducing on its own."While sympatric speciation is more difficult to prove," said Rabeling, "we believe we are in the process of actually documenting a particular kind of evolution-in-progress."

New species are formed when its members are no longer able to reproduce with members of the parent species. The commonly-accepted mechanism is called allopatric speciation, in which geographic barriers -- such as mountains -- separate members of a group, causing them to evolve independently.

"Since Darwin's Origin of Species, evolutionary biologists have long debated whether two species can evolve from a common ancestor without being geographically isolated from each other," said Ted Schultz, curator of ants at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study. "With this study, we offer a compelling case for sympatric evolution that will open new conversations in the debate about speciation in these ants, social insects and evolutionary biology more generally."

M. castrator is not simply another ant in the colony; it's a parasite that lives with -- and off of -- its host, Mycocepurus goeldii. The host is a fungus-growing ant that cultivates fungus for its nutritional value, both for itself and, indirectly, for its parasite, which does not participate in the work of growing the fungus garden. That led the researchers to study the genetic relationships of all fungus-growing ants in South America, including all five known and six newly discovered species of the genus Mycocepurus, to determine whether the parasite did evolve from its presumed host. They found that the parasitic ants were, indeed, genetically very close to M. goeldii, but not to the other ant species.

They also determined that the parasitic ants were no longer reproductively compatible with the host ants -- making them a unique species -- and had stopped reproducing with their host a mere 37,000 years ago -- a very short period on the evolutionary scale.

A big clue for the research team was found by comparing the ants' genes, both in the cell's nucleus as well as in the mitochondria -- the energy-producing structures in the cells. Genes are made of units called nucleotides, and Rabeling found that the sequencing of those nucleotides in the mitochondria is beginning to look different from what is found in the host ants, but that the genes in the nucleus still have traces of the relationship between host and parasite, leading him to conclude that M. castrator has begun to evolve away from its host.

Rabeling explained that just comparing some nuclear and mitochondrial genes may not be enough to demonstrate that the parasitic ants are a completely new species. "We are now sequencing the entire mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of these parasitic ants and their host in an effort to confirm speciation and the underlying genetic mechanism."

The parasitic ants need to exercise discretion because taking advantage of the host species is considered taboo in ant society. Offending ants have been known to be killed by worker mobs. As a result, the parasitic queen of the new species has evolved into a smaller size, making them difficult to distinguish from a host worker.

Host queens and males reproduce in an aerial ceremony, in the wet tropics only during a particular season when it begins to rain. Rabeling found that the parasitic queens and males, needing to be more discreet about their reproductive activities, diverge from the host's mating pattern. By needing to hide their parasitic identity, M. castrator males and females lost their special adaptations that allowed them to reproduce in flight, and mate inside the host nest, making it impossible for them to sexually interact with their host species.

The research team included Ted Schultz of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Naomi Pierce of Harvard University, and Maurício Bacci, Jr of the Center for the Study of Social Insects (São State University, Rio Claro, Brazil).

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Rochester. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Christian Rabeling, Ted R. Schultz, Naomi E. Pierce, Maurício Bacci. A Social Parasite Evolved Reproductive Isolation from Its Fungus-Growing Ant Host in Sympatry. Current Biology, 2014; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.07.048

The Psychology of Your Future Self and How Your Present Illusions Hinder Your Future Happiness

The Psychology of Your Future Self and How Your Present Illusions Hinder Your Future Happiness

by Maria Popova

Original link:  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/06/18/daniel-gilbert-happiness-future-self/
 

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Philosopher Joshua Knobe recently posed a perplexing question in contemplating the nature of the self: If the person you will be in 30 years — the person for whom you plan your life now by working toward career goals and putting money aside in retirements plans — is invariably different from the person you are today, what makes that future person “you”? What makes them worthy of your present self’s sacrifices and considerations? That’s precisely what Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explores in this short and pause-giving TED talk on the psychology of your future self and how to avoid the mistakes you’re likely to make in trying to satisfy that future self with your present choices. Picking up from his now-classic 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness (public library), Gilbert argues that we’re bedeviled by a “fundamental misconception about the power of time” and a dangerous misconception known as “the end of history illusion” — at any point along our personal journey, we tend to believe that who we are at that moment is the final destination of our becoming. Which, of course, is not only wrong but a source of much of our unhappiness.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.

Gilbert explores this paradox in greater, pleasantly uncomfortable-making, strangely reassuring detail in Stumbling on Happiness — one of these essential books on the art-science of happiness. He writes:

What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you’ve been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss’s office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol?

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something — a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger — we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

[But] our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.

This gives another layer of meaning to Albert Camus’s assertion that “those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” Our in-the-moment principles and attachments, after all, may be of no concern to our future selves in their pursuit of happiness.

In the remainder of Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert, who argues that “the mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic,” explores the sometimes subtle, sometimes radical changes we can make in our everyday cognitive strategies in order to avoid ending up unhappy and disappointed by unlearning because we set goals for the people we are when we set them rather than the people we become when we reach them.

Scientists Propose Using Lasers to Fight Global Warming From Space

Written by

Brian Merchant

Senior Editor

August 22, 2014 // 06:00 AM EST

 

Original link:  http://motherboard.vice.com/read/scientists-propose-using-lasers-to-fight-global-warming-from-space?trk_source=homepage-lede

 

At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space.

One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change.

The highly theoretical proposals are still in their early stages, and easily count as the more radically ambitious of the already radically ambitious climate engineering schemes discussed by scientists. These plans don't concern gadgets that absorb carbon pollution or spreading particles in the sky, after all—we're talking about space lasers powerful enough to alter the climate.

And European Space Agency fellow Isabelle Dicaire studies them full time. She traveled to Berlin this week to discuss how a satellite equipped with high-powered LIDAR lasers may prove useful for researching—and maybe eventually actually orchestrating—climate engineering.

LIDAR is remote sensing technology that blasts a laser at a target, then analyzes its reflection to accurately measure distances. It's already widely used here on Earth (on things such as Google's driverless car), and by NASA's CALIPSO satellite. Dicaire is interested in what we could do with a much more powerful LIDAR positioned in space; theoretically, it should be able to better detect the movement of particles in clouds, and maybe even make new ones.

this would be the first step if you'd like to do laser cloud seeding

Among the most widely discussed geoengineering ideas of recent years is so-called cloud-brightening. A cloud is just a mass of water vapor that's condensed into droplets around particles floating in the air—and the more droplets in a cloud, the more sunlight gets bounced off of them.
So, geoengineers figure that if you can increase the surface area of clouds, or seed more of them altogether, you could begin to reflect back enough sunlight to cool the globe. Research into the subject has been limited, and Dicaire says a powerful LIDAR would help scientists better understand the science. Beyond that, it could be used to carry out the cloud-seeding itself.

"Another application is to use the effects that are happening inside the plasma filaments to do some exotic stuff. For instance, laser-based cloud seeding," she said. Researchers at the University of Geneva, Dicaire says, have demonstrated that lasers can produce droplets.

"They are generating nano-sized water droplets from the laser," she said. They're doing it in a lab, though. "I'm monitoring the field to see what we could do from space."

So, theoretically: "You can use the Earth Observation System to target or find where you have your clouds, what kind of clouds you would like to seed, and then from that, aim the beam towards these clouds." Bear in mind that the idea ESA is examining here is entirely theoretical, and no laser even exists in orbit capable of performing such a feat. But it's not unthinkable, technologically speaking—the political and economic hurdles are probably larger.

"So far you can only find these laser sources on the ground. Eventually, if someone would like to put them in a satellite, they would have to space qualify them. So this is something that some industries are looking into. And this would be the first step if you'd like to do laser cloud seeding."

This would likely be a pretty expensive way to make clouds brighter—older proposals suggest using boats to spray seawater skyward—and you'd need an awful lot of cloud-growing laser satellites. But Dicaire, for now, is more interested in the underlying research LIDAR could help scientists perform.

Image: NASA

"It's a very basic concept. The only one looking at it at the moment is ESA, and it's very preliminary. We just want to see if it's possible to send your beam from the satellite to the ground. If it's possible then, yeah, we'll look more closely into this," she said.

Alternatively, we could use another type of laser-toting satellite to blast away the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. That's what Aidan Cowley, a professor at Dublin City University, proposes, anyhow. He believes that a solar-powered satellite equipped with a plasma laser could hone in on heat-trapping gases in order to get them to break apart into less harmful ones.

"We've already observed here on earth that plasma ionization approaches, for example, air plasmas, can essentially dissociate long-lived pollutants: SF6, carbon dioxide. This is something we've observed, and it's been well reported in literature," Cowley told me. "Plasma essentially will excite whatever gas it's traveling through, and just by giving energy to these gases, these molecular species, they'll break up—in the case of SF6, they'll become S, and become more benign greenhouse gases."

It's an alluring idea, of course; SF6 is a potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas. And our immense CO2 output is driving climate change toward a cliff; it'd be convenient if we could just zap them away with a laser. So why haven't we done it already, if plasma ionization has proven to scatter the building blocks of our climate crisis?

"The problem about using [lasers] as a means of actually addressing climate, greenhouse gases per se, is that the energy used to strike those plasmas has to be generated here on Earth. So essentially you're burning fuel to destroy the emissions that you're producing anyway, and it ends up being a net positive to the emissions profile anyway. So you have to come up with a low cost, energy-free scenario that frees you from that paradigm. And that's where the idea of using space solar power to do so comes into it."

A satellite outfitted with high-efficiency solar panels should do the trick.

there's nothing crazy about it, solar power in space

"Essentially by using abundant power that's available in orbit, to drive ionization phenomenon in the atmosphere, you can neatly size up the problem of doing the same thing here on the ground, and you have a nearly unlimited supply of energy to do so. You just need to develop the technology and tap it for that," he said.

Now, there are other pitfalls here; those greenhouse gases are already pretty diffuse in the atmosphere, so it'd be hard to target them effectively with a laser. Cowley says you'd probably need multiple units to do it effectively. Then there's the vast expense of building, testing, and deploying the machines, of course.

Cowley also says his satellite would be useful for creating ozone, to patch up the holes we've left by overusing aerosols. "You could use it to create ozone, too," he said. "Pretty strong pedigree for producing ozone. It's a very easy trick." Then again, he adds, the technology could be used to the reverse effect, too.

"Conversely, from a military perspective, you could also use it to destroy the ozone as well, if you do it the right way," he said. "It could potentially open the holes in the atmosphere of your not too friendly neighbors."

So does Dr. Cowley think his greenhouse gas-blasting satellite is feasible?

"I still think it will take a long time. It's got an underground movement to a certain degree, so I think it will continue to be developed, going forward. Space solar power has got a fairly good future for certain applications, and, I think, eventually, like most technology, it will be the niche that drives the mainstream adaptation," he said. "Find one good niche and make it work, and people will go, 'oh that's not so crazy after all.' And there's nothing crazy about it, solar power in space. It's not science fiction."