Hubble before the void – changing unknown unknowns in known knowns
Doug Hohulin
To Save 1 Billion Lives with AI, Exponential Blueprint Consulting LLC, President/Founder, When the AI System Has to Be Right: Healthcare, AV, Policy, Energy. Co-Author of 2030: A Blueprint for Humanity's Exponential Leap
Peter Thiel in his book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future,” asks the question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” He goes on to say, “Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.” Then he adds, “THE BUSINESS VERSION of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building?”
From a scientific view point, I would ask the question: what great discoveries are nobody pursuing?
Edwin Powell Hubble said "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.“
As I wrote in my essay: Let there be light -5G - Internet of Things –Tree of Life, "Think of what we can do with hundreds of different senses being used by trillions of connected things?"
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/let-light-5g-internet-things-tree-life-doug-hohulin?trk=prof-post
I am now reading the book: Humble before the Void: A Western Astronomer, His Journey East, and a Remarkable Encounter between Western Science and Tibetan Buddhism. I am a bit dyslexic (side note: my junior high school teacher friend would say I just do not pay enough attention) and at first, I thought the title was: “Hubble before the Void” but after thinking about it, I like the title: Hubble before the Void. Hubble “the man” was a great explorer of the void of the unknown that made humanity rethink our place in the universe and in space and time. Hubble “the telescope” - in the same way – is a great explorer of the unknown, the void. Hubble, both the man and the telescope, looked into the darkness and saw light.
Donald Rumsfeld once stated: “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”
In business as in science, I think of unknown unknowns as the void of knowledge yet to be discovered. Thinking and studying about how other great men and women of science and business stood before the void to change the world for the better can help us turn our current unknown unknowns into known knowns.
As JFK stated: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
I have been thinking about smart phone technology and medicine, health and wellness for the last 5 years. Here is my answers to Peter Thiel’s question:
Medicine, health and wellness will be radically transform in the next 10 years with advances in smartphones, sensors, biomarker scanning and medical A.I. – just like telecommunication and computing in the last 20 years – or just like medicine 100-150 years ago with the discovery of the germ theory, antibiotics and getting rid of bloodletting.
Related to this answer, I wrote the following essays:
Actionable Information, Wearables, IoT and Seeing a Doctor?
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/actionable-information-wearables-iot-seeing-doctor-doug-hohulin
The Bad News that Everyone Will Get: Unless They Are 1st Hit by a Bus
Paul Sonnier in a blog highlighted the movie Big Hero 6 and the main robot character, Baymax, who is a purpose-built “personal healthcare companion”. Here’s the scene that could be in the near future of healthcare, with “sensors scanning our biometrics, artificial intelligence making diagnoses, and no visit to the doctor’s office for basic services.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xttZ4JOnSk&list=WL&index=112
Baymax is a companion that connects with humanity in real and meaningful ways. At the end, I think we all would want a Baymax if we needed care.
In the blog by Adam Cherepski, he writes, “Baymax is activated when he witnesses someone say “Ow!” … Baymax assesses the patient by scanning them. He searches for the sources of pain and even goes as far as evaluating neurotransmitters to determine mood. The best part is that our hero cannot be deactivated until the patient states: “I am satisfied with my care.” Really, isn’t that what we should be looking for when it comes to healthcare?” https://learntelehealth.org/blog/post/personal-healthcare-companion-disneys-big-hero-6/
I really liked the blog from Bill Crounse, MD Senior Director, Worldwide Health Microsoft of what could be possible.
“Announcing the Life Force 3000 Smartwatch
The fashion accessory that continuously monitors health status by sampling body temperature, heart rate, heart rhythm, respiration, blood oxygenation, and blood pressure. It furthermore will detect 24 critical blood chemistries including pH, pCO2, hemoglobin A1c, and blood glucose. Painless intradermal microprobe sensors detect red and white cell counts including cell morphology. Advanced “lab on a chip” technology continuously detects and streams physiologic variations to powerful, cloud based computing systems where scientifically proven algorithms predict impending infections by viral, bacterial, or parasitic pathogens well before symptoms appear. Sensors may also accurately predict impending vital organ failure long before such failures become a threat to life. Much like the computer and engine sensors in your modern automobile, the Life Force 3000 quietly goes about its work throughout the day and night, calculating billions of data points and only drawing to your attention those factors that pose an immediate or long term threat to your health and well being.“ https://blogs.msdn.com/b/healthblog/archive/2014/03/10/wearable-computers-biosensors-and-sanity.aspx
Working to improve the health of society is a difficult challenge but to paraphrase JFK, “the goal of quality healthcare and wellness for all will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” I know medical professionals have worked long and hard on this challenge and my hope is to use new technologies that will be available in the next few years to aid them. These technologies will also help individuals to take actionable information to maximize their own health and the health of those they love. I want to work for a world where everyone can say: “I am satisfied with my care.”
Humanity is just at the beginning of an adventure of the exploration of the Universe. By learning, reading and working hard on the “difficult challenges” of things I am passionate about, I am hoping to become a better explorer of this universe and maybe even change a few unknown unknowns into known knowns.
Who knows what lies before the void? But I want to find out. It is no fun living in the dark.
P.S.
In thinking about the void of darkness, the videos below may express the emotions of what explorers who climbed a mountain in the dark discovered when the saw the first light of a new day. Light does such a good job of revealing the unknowns.
Sunrise and Sunset over Haleakala; Maui, Hawaii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDBMaAWtQHI
Pilgrims singing on top of Mount Sinai at dawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYkVduX__I4
Dawn at Mount Moses – Sinai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OruEIinisI
“For astronomers, the Hubble space telescope's images of the Eagle nebula simply bear out that Bob Dylan was right: for the basic questions of star birth and the formation of planets "the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind".” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/across-the-void-hubble-sees-the-birth-of-stars-1537408.html
Blowing in the Wind - Bob Dylan
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l4nVByCL44
P.P.S.
In the book by Richard Panek “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality” I enjoyed the backstory and history of the search for Dark Matter, Dark Energy. I learned a lot and the book encouraged me want to learn more about the topic; what a really good book always does. The end of the book finishes with the following quote that I thought would be good when considering the topic of the Universe and exploration.
“Let there be dark. Let there be doubt, even amid the certainty. Especially amid the certainties—the pieces of evidence that in one generation transformed cosmology from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to science. In early 2010, the WMAP seven-year results arrived bearing the latest refinements of the numbers that define our universe. It was 13.75 billion years old. Its Hubble constant was 70.4, and its equation of state (w) -0.98 , or, within the margin of error, -1.0. And it was flat, consisting of 72.8 percent dark energy, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 4.56 percent baryonic matter (the stuff of us)—an exquisitely precise accounting of the depth of our ignorance. How the story would end remained a mystery, for now and possibly forever. The astronomers who set out to write the final chapter in the history of the universe had to content themselves instead with a more modest conclusion: To be continued.” …
“I have this three-year-old daughter at home,” Perlmutter [a scientist] said now, sitting in Smoot’s office, “and we’re just at that stage where she’s asking us, ‘Why?’ It’s pretty obvious that she knows it’s a bit of a game. She knows that whatever we say, she can then say, ‘Yes, but— why?’” He laughed. “I have the impression that most people don’t realize that what got physicists into physics usually is not the desire to understand what we already know but the desire to catch the universe in the act of doing really bizarre things. We love the fact that our ordinary intuitions about the world can be fooled, and that the world can just act strangely, and you can just go out and make it good over and over again. ‘Do that again! Do that again!’” Smoot agreed. “They’re always testing the limits. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re babies in the universe, and we’re testing what the limits are.”
If our luck did hold, and another Newton did come along, and the universe turned out once again to be simple in ways we couldn’t have previously imagined , then Saul Perlmutter’s daughter or Vera Rubin’s grandchildren’s grandchildren would not be seeing the same sky that they did, because they would not be thinking of it in the same way. They would see the same stars, and they would marvel at the hundreds of billions of galaxies other than our own. But they would sense the dark, too. And to them that darkness would represent a path toward knowledge— toward the kinds of discoveries that we all once called, with understandable innocence, the light.”
Doug, you are a man of many interests and quite the philosopher along with your interest in science. Thanks for sharing. It fans the flames of discovery.