The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  All of which means that honesty and integrity and scrupulousness—the building blocks of character—are crucial to science. For that reason, people who are methodical and conscientious in the lab—checking every assumption and securing the full consent of everyone involved—will do better than intellectual hot-rodders who can’t be bothered or who think such things beneath them. In this sense, Einstein was right: without character, science is doomed, and unethical scientists all too often produce bad science.

  That’s especially true because, since World War II, science means power—power that extends beyond just big, obvious things like nuclear bombs. It also includes everyday interactions, like a psychologist manipulating someone in the lab or a doctor begging a patient to join an iffy drug trial. Small misdeeds still ruin lives.

  No matter what human beings are like in the future—whether we’re half-bionic, or living on Pluto, or remixed with lizard DNA—our descendants will still be people, and will likely misbehave as people always have. As psychologists say, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. But Einstein, as usual, saw farther than the rest of us. Intelligence is good, certainly. It’s also not enough anymore, given the power science has obtained. The character he spoke of is the best guarantee against scientific abuse, and it remains to be seen whether these two vital aspects of science—intellect and character—can coexist in the future.

  APPENDIX: THE FUTURE OF CRIME

  This appendix is a bit of a hodgepodge: a mix of stories and hypothetical scenarios. But the common theme is the future of crime, as enabled by new technologies. Whether it’s space exploration, advanced computing, or genetic engineering, big changes are coming to human society—and every new advance will introduce new ways to do one another wrong.

  In July 1970, one of the knottiest homicides in history took place in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Nineteen American scientists and technicians were stationed there on a floating ice island, a slab roughly the size of Manhattan. They were a grizzled, hard-drinking crew, and on July 16, one Donald “Porky” Leavitt stole a jug of homemade raisin wine (sic[k]) from the trailer of electronics expert Mario Escamilla.

  By all accounts Porky was a dangerous drunk: he sometimes attacked people with a meat cleaver to get his hands on their booze. So to protect himself, Escamilla grabbed a shotgun before heading over to confront him. Unbeknown to Escamilla, the shotgun was faulty, and prone to firing if bumped.

  Escamilla found Leavitt in a nearby trailer, guzzling a truly foul combination of raisin wine, Everclear, and grape juice. With him was a meteorological technician named Bennie Lightsy, also drunk. After a heated argument, Lightsy followed Escamilla back to his trailer. There, while telling Lightsy to go away, Escamilla gestured with the rifle toward the door—and accidentally bumped it. The blast caught Lightsy square in the chest, and he bled out a few minutes later.

  At that point the real chaos started—the legal mess. The ice island lay well outside any nation’s territorial waters, and was temporary anyway (it would melt away in the mid-1980s), so it wasn’t sovereign territory. Nor did the law of the sea apply, since the ice island wasn’t navigable. Crazy as it sounds, several legal scholars suggested that no laws applied there, and they questioned whether any nation had the right to try Escamilla. He had seemingly killed someone in one of the few places on Earth where, legally, there were no consequences.

  The T-3 “ice island” camp, where one of the knottiest homicides in history took place in 1970. (Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.)

  In the end, U.S. marshals did seize Escamilla and haul him back to stand trial for murder in Virginia. Why there? For the less-than-airtight reason that, um, Virginia was the first place their plane landed, at Dulles Airport. (Escamilla showed up for court in the only shoes he had—his black arctic rubber boots.) He was eventually acquitted, given the faulty rifle, but the arbitrary and ad hoc nature of the case left all the juicy legal issues unresolved. Namely, how should we handle crime in no-man’s-land? The legal community essentially punted, treating the Escamilla case as a one-time anomaly. It won’t be.1

  Lightsy’s death occurred one year to the day after the launch of the rocket that put the first human beings on the moon. Human spaceflight has stalled somewhat since, but over the next century we’ll almost certainly set up the first bases on the Moon or Mars. And where human beings boldly go, crime will follow.

  A clause in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 does require nations to monitor their own citizens in space, which works fine when astronauts are few. But when thousands or millions of people reach orbit, that becomes untenable. Or imagine this scenario. A German woman poisons a Congolese man with Brazilian-made drugs on a spaceship owned by a Chinese-Belgian conglomerate and headquartered in Luxembourg as a tax dodge. What the hell would you do then? Or get rid of vessels entirely. Several companies are already gearing up to mine asteroids. What if a space-miner brained someone with a rock on one of those? Earthly laws will seem especially impotent when people on distant planets start having children, some of whom will never set foot on Earth in their lives.

  Even wilder, space exploration introduces entirely new ways to kill people as well. Take pecan sandies.

  Eating in orbit is nothing like eating on the ground. You have to slurp food out of plastic bags, and can therefore eat only one thing at a time. Your face also swells with fluids in microgravity, which creates nasal congestion and pinches off your nostrils enough to stifle aromas; as a result, food tastes flatter up there, as if you had a cold. (That’s one reason shrimp cocktails are popular among astronauts—because they can actually taste the kick of the horseradish in the cocktail sauce.) Cooking in space is odd, too. Liquids and vapors don’t separate cleanly in zero G, so bubbles don’t rise to the surface of boiling water and escape. Instead, the whole pot starts frothing at once. The lack of gravity also prevents convection currents from forming, so ovens don’t work very well.2 Strangest—and coolest of all—flames look oddly spherical in space, so roasting any marshmallows up there would be a real trip.

  But the biggest hassle with food in space is crumbs, which don’t just trickle harmlessly to the floor. Crumbs float, forming a haze of grains and specks that can fatally clog air filters—or lungs. Astronauts long ago swore off crumbly pecan sandies for this very reason. But a diabolical baker could send up a care package of deadly dried-out goodies, or even spike the treats with pockets of flour or other powders. One explosive bite later, and breathing would be impossible.

  Space presents other novel murder-mystery plots, too. Weightlessness is hell on bodily systems—joints, eyes, bones, you name it. If you kept a crew in orbit for years, perhaps through bureaucratic machinations, you’d effectively cripple them. The scariest potential breakdowns involve the immune system, which deteriorates in orbit and becomes less effective. As a result, normally feckless microbes can rise up and conquer our natural defenses. Several astronauts, for instance, have seen flare-ups of the herpes virus that causes cold sores and chickenpox. If you secretly infected a crew on the ground with some exotic virus or fungus, then sent them aloft long enough for their immune systems to crumble, they could easily succumb. It’s similar to how early AIDS victims often died of opportunistic infections that people with normal immune systems didn’t need to worry about.

  However titillating, murder in space would simply be an old crime transported to a new environment. But with planetary colonies, whole new types of crime could arise as well. Given the sheer amount of labor it would take to survive elsewhere, local governments might ban idleness and demand that people work or else. On the flip side, people themselves might demand new rights from the government. When we speak about legal rights on Earth, we usually mean free speech, fair elections, and the like. Given the harsh conditions on other planets, space pioneers would need to secure things further down on Maslow’s hierarchy. Like a guaranteed right to oxygen. They might also demand a right to communicate freely with Earth, for psychological health. You could ev
en speak of a right to entertainment or mind-altering substances. Imagine some punk on Mars erasing the entire colony’s collection of music, e-books, and holographic videos, leaving them no way to relax. Or destroying a cache of mild intoxicants that people popped on weekends to distract themselves from the constant, looming threat of death. On Earth, such acts would be misdemeanors. On Mars, those acts could sabotage the whole colony’s mental health and ruin the mission. New environment, new crimes.

  Criminal justice would also look different in space. Imagine arresting someone, or trying to. With the raisin-wine homicide, it took U.S. marshals two full days to reach the ice island, via planes and helicopters. Mars is multiple months away at its closest; even sending messages there takes twenty minutes. Forensic science would change, too. We’ve already seen the shortcomings of standard forensic science, and simply transferring Earthly forensics to other planets wouldn’t work. Given the new gravity and air and soil, dust samples and splatter patterns would look different, and fires would burn in unique ways. Corpses would decay differently as well. If a body were left outdoors, the exposed top half might grow bleached and leathery, like white beef jerky. Meanwhile, in the absence of microbes that promote decay, the sheltered bottom half could look eerily preserved. Even with natural deaths on Mars, twenty-second-century anatomists might be tempted to rob a few graves and peek inside the bodies, to see how the lower gravity on the red planet altered people’s anatomies.

  Once you slap handcuffs on someone, the trial brings up whole new issues. With the ice-island case, Escamilla’s lawyers asked some hard questions about whether trying him in Virginia violated his constitutional right to a fair trial and jury of peers. After all, the island had no police force, and property rights there were enforced with guns. Contrast that to suburban Virginia, where most people’s grimmest daily fears involve traffic. Could a jury there really understand the pressures Escamilla faced and properly judge his actions? The gap in understanding would grow even larger for people born on other planets. How could a dozen Earthlings fairly convict someone who was born in such a different society? In what way are they really peers?

  So perhaps space colonists should take criminal justice into their own hands. But that approach has shortcomings as well. Is it really fair to park a felon in space-jail for years, and let them consume oxygen and food that the rest of the colony needs? Perhaps colonies should go medieval instead and execute all criminals, or exile them to some godforsaken expanse. But even that approach would falter if the do-bad was, say, the engineer who ran the power plant or the colony’s lone doctor. Without their expertise, everyone could die. Colonies might have to revert to forced labor, since they can’t afford to have useless people sucking down resources. It’s an ugly option, but we on Earth don’t face the same stark tradeoffs that space colonies will. There are no easy choices.

  Right now, the issue of space crime might seem remote. After all, most astronauts are annoyingly perfect—goody-goody pilots with Ph.D.s who floss after every meal and have negative body fat. But the first crime in space might happen sooner than you think. In 2019, media reports circulated that an American astronaut going through a divorce reportedly committed identity theft by using International Space Station computers to access her estranged wife’s bank account against the wife’s wishes. (The charges were later dropped.) And in 2007, a NASA astronaut who was jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s new lover reportedly strapped herself into a diaper, grabbed a knife, BB gun, and pepper spray, and drove a thousand miles from Houston to Orlando to kidnap the new flame. Even goody-goodies succumb to emotions sometimes and do dumb things.

  Plus, as space travel gets more commercial and the demand for colonists increases, the standards for who gets to strap into rockets and settle other planets will drop below NASA-grade, especially for missions that require years in isolated places. Looking back to history, European powers generally sent misfits and lowlifes to colonize the Americas, and England populated Australia with felons. Colonization would have been exploitative anyway, but sending over scumbags all but ensured atrocities.

  Ever since the Escamilla case a half-century ago, a few forward-thinking legal scholars have bemoaned the lack of laws that cover space. But perhaps there’s not much we can do. We can’t anticipate all new crime, and given the vast distances involved, even enforcing current laws could be impossible. More troubling still, the centralized technology of space colonies might make them naturally prone to tyranny. Imagine a space warden lowering the oxygen levels in prison cells as punishment. Or imagine a wannabe dictator doing the same to a whole base, to bend people to his will. When it comes to the perils of space, we usually tremble over the searing cold or risk of suffocation. But one of the most acute dangers up there will be the people.

  Another frontier in crime involves computers, in all their manifestations.

  Burglars already use Google Street View to case storefronts and homes. In the future, virtual reality could allow them to scout buildings even more thoroughly from the inside. They could also use 3D printers to reproduce facsimiles of jewelry, fossils, or other artifacts and swap them in for the real thing, delaying the discovery of the theft for weeks or years.

  Larger-scale thefts could exploit cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies offer users the promise of privacy, but every transaction must be laboriously encrypted and verified using computers— a process calling “mining.” Rather than have a central computer handle everything, this mining is often outsourced to swarms of smaller computers, which earn a bit of money for the effort. Well, bad guys have figured out how to hijack the smaller computers and steal those commissions. (This scam doesn’t currently work with Bitcoin, just other, lesser-known currencies.) The bad guys do this by embedding a few lines of malicious code in an otherwise legitimate program, which people blithely download. The program then runs in the background, secretly mining cryptocurrency all the livelong day. After the mining wraps up, and the stooge computer wins its commission, the money gets routed into the bad guys’ bank accounts. This not only steals money that the computer owners earned (however unwittingly), it violates their privacy, runs up electric bills, and degrades their hardware. Malicious mining programs cost as little as $35 online, but one study found that the criminals involved raked in $58 million over four and a half years, over a million per month.

  Even bigger thefts could be on the horizon. Just like with regular businesses, new technologies allow criminals to take advantage of economies of scale. As historians have pointed out, a bandit in medieval times could, if lucky, waylay a half-dozen people at once by lurking near a busy highway. By the mid-1800s bandits could rob 250 people at once on trains. Nowadays, you can hack a database and steal from millions. In the future, if quantum computing ever fulfills its promise, the power of the resulting machines would dwarf even supercomputers and render current internet security useless. You could easily rob hundreds of millions of accounts in one swoop.

  Smart criminals will also exploit so-called smart technologies. They could start fires by turning on ovens or stoves remotely. They could hijack automated construction machines and introduce fatal structural flaws into buildings, or leave security loopholes that they alone know about. They could redirect self-driving cars into crowds of pedestrians, or lock all the doors and hurl a family of five off a cliff. Less melodramatically, bank robbers could flood a neighborhood with self-driving cars after a heist and create a traffic jam to block police pursuit. Even your body could be violated. Tens of thousands of people already have pacemakers, brain stimulators, and insulin pumps that connect wirelessly to the internet through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to help doctors monitor their illnesses and zap them back to health if needed. Hack one of those, and you could zap someone at will. More slyly, you could feed the doctors fake data, masking all signs of crisis until it’s too late.

  Then there’s the most powerful new technology of all, artificial intelligence. Computer scientists refer to AI systems as “brittle”: they perform cert
ain functions well, but they’re not very flexible and can break down easily. Breakdowns are especially common when computers have to interpret visual data. Adding decals to stop signs can cause self-driving cars to misread the signs and blow through them. Similarly, using drones to project fake lane lines onto the road can cause these cars to swerve suddenly, potentially into oncoming traffic. (The researchers here were trying to make a point, not be evil.) More subtly, you can flummox AI with “adversarial noise,” seemingly random pixels inserted into the 1s and 0s of digital images. Much like with music played over a staticky channel, humans can still decipher noisy images with little effort; it still looks like a sloth or whatever, just fuzzier. But computers currently lack the “high level” awareness to cut through visual clutter, and the added pixels bamboozle them. Many hospitals already use AI to screen pictures of skin tumors, since computers are more accurate than human dermatologists. If you sprinkled the right visual noise into someone’s scan, the computer might miss a malignant tumor, effectively condemning that person to death.

  Benign mole (left). When “adversarial noise” (center) was digitally added to a computer file of the image, the result looked the same to human eyes (right). But an artificial intelligence program was flummoxed, and suddenly classified the rightmost picture as malignant instead. (The adversarial attacks were generated by Dr. Samuel Finlayson of Harvard Medical School.)

  Or, if you want to go completely soap opera, what about killer sex robots? Robot butlers are on the horizon, and elderly people in Japan already use companion robots to stave off loneliness and provide simple care. Sex robots seem like the next logical step; in fact, some companies already sell crude versions of them. Given that the robots would be interacting with people at their most vulnerable, literally with their pants down, there’s no reason someone couldn’t hack the bot and turn it against them.