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BY JOHN CRONIN
Nov/Dec 2008
The past is always orderly, its path set and unchangeable. The present is chaotic, a landscape of infinite choice where calamity and opportunity lurk at different turns. The future is uncharted and unpredictable—those who claim to own a road map should expect surprises.
John von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician, born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1903. He emigrated to the United States in 1930, and launched a career that set the future course of the young field of computer science. The innovations of Dr. von Neumann and others led to the development in 1951 of the first commercial computer, UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), which set the standard for two decades of computational technology. Von Neumann is recognized still as the father of the modern computer.
The UNIVAC was 25-by-50 feet, sported a hard drive that weighed 2 tons, and performed an astonishing 1,000 calculations per second! The UNIVAC acronym was synonymous with the future, which, to me, as a young boy, glowed as bright and warm as the 5,600 vacuum tubes that drove this new and exciting manufactured intelligence. I wanted one.
There were countering views, however. As one character said in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, which is set in the industrial, pre-Tech Valley world of the upper Hudson Valley, “Organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of the use of vacuum tubes.” Von Neumann, who died at the age of only 54, is said to have predicted that computers would become so big and powerful that only governments and large corporations would be able to afford one.
Nonetheless, in the 57 years since the introduction of UNIVAC, the pace of innovation has been staggering, and society is still intact. The MacBook Pro sitting on my lap performs more than 2 billion calculations per second, using a microprocessor the size of a fingernail that contains 291 million transistors. On the “large” side, an example of a computer that only a corporation can afford is IBM’s new Roadrunner supercomputer, which can perform 1,000 trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. When JD, my 13-year-old, has reached my age, he will howl with laughter at this paragraph.
Here on the Hudson, we are riding this wave of innovation to view, understand, and protect the river and its estuary, and ecosystems like it, using methods once unimaginable. Two years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. John Kelly, IBM’s senior vice president and director of research, and one of the company’s visionaries. He spoke of the Hudson River as an information system waiting to be tapped. I was fascinated. One of IBM’s specialties, he explained, is to understand complex systems by collecting and analyzing the data—or information—those systems generate, and converting that data into understandable models and images. Why not the Hudson? As complex systems go, the Hudson is hard to beat.
The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, where I am director and CEO, joined with IBM to design and deploy a River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON) from the Adirondack Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. Using cutting-edge sensor technology and analytical systems, we are collaborating on a real-time network that will deliver, in understandable ways, the biological, chemical and physical information that represents the life, habitat, and natural support system for the river.
REON will also allow us to understand the river in detailed and fundamental ways. Consider a Hudson Valley storm event. A 2-inch rainfall forces the salt of the estuary south, creates conditions that make organisms shift their habitat, mobilizes contaminants trapped in the river’s mud, causes sewage treatment plants to overflow, and results in the overland movement of pollutants into the river from the Hudson’s extensive watershed. Shouldn’t we be able to document these conditions and their impacts hour by hour, if not minute by minute? Is there even a precedent for such a network?
Last August, JD and I were attending a Hudson Valley Renegades baseball game when a sudden storm halted play. Rick Zolzer, the public announcer, told the crowd there would be a half-hour rain delay. Approximately 35 minutes later, the rain passed and the game resumed. The crowd accepted Rick’s wonderful feat of prediction as if it were an everyday thing. It was. Rick was plugged into an elaborate global network of field stations, equipment arrays, transmission facilities, communication and observation satellites, supercomputers and mathematical modeling systems that could tell him the weather in real time anywhere on the planet. We all have access to that same network when we tune in to the weather report.
Imagine REON as a “weather report” about the Hudson. In a matter of years, a young student will be able to type longitude, latitude and depth of water into a home or school computer and actually see what is happening deep in the Hudson, while downloading information about flow, temperature, pollution and other measures. Researchers will know the minute-by-minute location of fish. Environmental agencies will be able to plot the river’s response to both weather and spills.
Predictions about the future are a tricky business, as demonstrated by the limits on even John von Neumann’s imagination. The good news, however, is that if The Beacon Institute’s vision of the future here on the Hudson is incorrect, it is most likely because we have underestimated where innovation can take us. Stay tuned and enjoy the ride, and visit www.bire.org.
