Tech Talk

April kicks off with our annual roundup of the hottest, coolest, techiest rides on the planet. In "Top 10 Tech Cars" author John Voelcker gathers the most formidable collection of automotive inventiveness of the last year into our pages for your amazement. As you might guess, this year's theme is the great debate over what engineers can do these days with the automobile in a perfect world and what they ought to do in our imperfect world of fuel and emissions concerns.

Let's be wild for a moment and start with the perfect world fantasy of limitless supplies of non-polluting fuel and care-free motoring without a single worry over cost. In that abstract environment, you might choose to drive the 11th entrant in our Top Ten, the Veyron 16.4, from Volkswagen's (that's right) Bugatti division, "the fastest, most powerful, most expensive production car in the history of the automotive industry." This monster boasts an 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder engine and four turbochargers (16.4) that produce 987 horsepower of pure oomph. The Veyron goes from stop to 186 mph in 16.7 seconds—and can crank it up to 254 mph. Its carbon-fiber/aluminum body, front and rear air diffusers, and massive rear spoiler are a sci-fi dream. For US $1.2 million, it's yours (if you can get your hands on one of the 50 available for sale this year). Whew!

Back in the real world, ahem, where most of us really live, there are plenty of choices amidst the price continuum. Going from large to small, let's travel through our Top Ten's technical merits.

2007 Chevrolet Tahoe/GMC Yukon: Not exactly tech heavyweights (but decidedly heavy), the SUV twins do offer an upgraded OnStar service that opens a dialog between you, your vehicle, and your vehicle's manufacturer. OnStar monitors dozens of functions such as acceleration, braking, steering angles, body roll, oil pressure, fuel level, and even can tell when a vehicle is being driven "too aggressively." If OnStar determines the car's on-road activities are too extreme, an operator calls to make sure everything's all right.

2007 Mercedes-Benz E 320 Bluetec: This model boasts the cleanest diesel engine in the world. To crack the vast U.S. market, it needs it. With strict emissions requirements in most states and a lack of the cleaner diesel fuel used in Europe, few diesels make the trip across the Atlantic. To achieve a cleaner-running engine, Mercedes-Benz employs three catalytic converters in the Bluetec, a 3.0-L turbocharged V6 diesel that generates 208-hp and gives you an economical 35 miles to the gallon of fuel.

2006 Chrysler 300C Heritage: This four-door sedan offers a V8 engine that automatically shuts down four valves when the load is light. It comes with the new SmartBeam headlight system, which uses forward-facing CMOS image sensors (a "camera on a chip") built into the interior rearview mirror to switch on the high beams when needed. The technology keeps the brights switched on until it detects either the headlamps of oncoming vehicles or the taillights of vehicles ahead.

2007 Lexus LS460: The leading U.S. luxury brand comes with an alphabet soup of advanced automotive electronics. The latest trick up its sleeve is a new system that automatically parks the car for you, with just a little braking on your part, using front and rear cameras and software that controls both the electric power steering and the "drive-by-wire" electronic throttle. Its Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management system even helps you drive it in difficult circumstances.

2006 Volvo s60: An inexpensive option on several Volvo models, the Blind-spot Information System (BLIS) uses camera modules on each door mirror to send signals to LED displays warning of other vehicles in your way as you change lanes. The cameras process 25 images per second in a signal-processing chip, which uses software stored in the camera's flash memory. A control processor supervises I/O, data transfer, and communication among the components.

2006 Volkswagen Passat: The midsize Passat sold in the U.S. offers an optional 3.6-L VR6, with two banks of three cylinders at an angle of just 10.6 degrees, making it light and compact and capable of 280 hp. It features an electronic stabilization program that monitors speed, cornering, braking, input from the drive-by-wire throttle, and other data to compensate for slipping traction or sliding tires faster and more precisely than a human can.

Concept Ford Reflex: This subcompact sports diesel hybrid debuted at January's influential Detroit Auto Show. It's powered by a 1.4-L turbocharged diesel engine mated to a parallel 30-kW electric motor that drives the front wheels and an additional, 15-kW electric motor to drive the rear wheels and provide all-wheel drive. The combo produces peppy pick up, letting you move from 0-60 mph in less than 7 seconds. Solar panels on the roof and in the lights help lighten the load on the Reflex's high-voltage batteries.

Mitsubishi Concept-CT MIEV: This proof-of-concept compact four-door hatchback uses four electric motors on the wheels themselves. The Mitsubishi In-wheel Motor Electric Vehicle system is mated to a three-cylinder, 1.0-liter gasoline engine located behind the rear seat but ahead of the rear axle line. Its experimental electric motors follow a hollow-doughnut construction, in which the rotor goes outside the stator instead of inside it, conserving space and reducing weight.

Subaru B5-TPH: The Turbo Parallel Hybrid demonstrates the concept of matching a turbocharged 2.0-liter horizontally opposed "boxer" engine (256 hp) with an electric motor-generator (13 hp), just 58 millimeters thick, between the engine and the transmission. The all-wheel-drive compact coupe also introduces manganese lithium-ion batteries that offer 50 percent greater power density than the nickel-metal-hydride batteries used for hybrids today, as well as faster recharging.

2006 Subaru R2 Type S: Down at the tiny end of the automotive spectrum come Japan's kei cars, which are so small they qualify for free parking on the island nation's crowded streets. Still, they do offer some interesting features. The R2 Type S comes with: all-wheel drive with a continuously variable transmission; a 658-cc, four-cylinder engine, with dual overhead cams, a supercharger, and an intercooler. It can move from zero to 62 mph in about 10 seconds and will take you 42 miles on a gallon of gas.

So, ladies and gentlemen, start your imaginations and your engines—big and small.

When James D. Meindl went off to college in 1951, he planned to get a degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, that would enable him to design heavy electrical equipment for Westinghouse Electric Corp., where his father worked. As fate would have it, he was prevented from doing so, because the two men who taught the power engineering program left the department. So began the twisting road that led Meindl, the recipient of the 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor, to become an educator. And what a road it has been, Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry explains in "Wizard of Watts".

Meindl, an IEEE Life Fellow, got his bachelor's degree from Carnegie in 1955 and, on the advice of a mentor, decided to pursue postgraduate work in microelectronics, the opposite direction from which he had set out. His first project involved explaining the loss of radio-frequency signals transmitted through coaxial cables operated by the military. He soon became an expert in Maxwell's equations and solved the cable problem within 24 months. This newfound expertise thrust him into the emerging field of semiconductor engineering.

With a Ph.D. from the future Carnegie Mellon University, Meindl landed a job at Westinghouse, just not the one he had planned originally. Instead, he was hired to operate the silicon-controlled rectifiers that manage the control rods of a nuclear reactor. However, after a year of burning out transistors, the U.S. Army requested he repay its contributions to his education as a member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps with a stint in active service.

He reported to the Army Signal Research and Development Laboratories, in Fort Monmouth, N.J., where he was assigned to work in the revolutionary world of integrated circuits (ICs). There, he met Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and, on travel, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., in Palo Alto, Calif. These gentlemen briefed Meindl on how he might go about solving his charge of developing an IC that could work at a power level low enough to be used inside a helmet as part of a radio receiver. He stayed at Fort Monmouth for eight years, two as an Army officer and six more as a civilian. (This period resulted in a haircut that has stayed with him throughout his entire adult life.)

In 1967, John Linvill, then chair of the electrical engineering department at Stanford, made Meindl an offer he couldn't refuse—working on an electronic system that would enable blind people to read. It used a camera to take a picture of the letters on a page and then translated that picture to a tiny pad of vibrating pins. Linvill needed someone who could design custom-made, low-power chips in order to make the device portable. Meindl went out to California and helped to create the chips in the Optacon, the first optical-to-tactile converter. "That was the most thrilling moment in engineering work that I have ever had," Meindl told Perry.

As a teacher at Stanford, Meindl began to develop a reputation as an indefatigable champion of his students' projects, which concentrated mostly on developing new low-power sensors and circuits—and seeded Silicon Valley with some of its most promising young stars.

After two decades as a professor at Stanford, Meindl accepted the post of provost of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. Life as a provost, however, was not as rosy as he had anticipated. The Baby Boom had ended by the mid-80s, and enrollment in American universities dropped precipitously. Cutting budgets and raising tuitions simply was not the cup of tea for a man who enjoyed inventing and educating. So in 1993, he joined the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. As the Joseph M. Pettit Professor of Microelectronics, he pursues one of his passionate interests: optimizing the arrangement of interconnect wires that string blocks of logic circuitry on microprocessors.

Meindl is the director of the Interconnect Focus Center, in Atlanta—an R&D effort he organized eight years ago with the help of 13 U.S. universities—which investigates the impediments of interconnects to microprocessor performance. His team has developed a mathematical method to predict the distribution of interconnect lengths within a chip. It enables designers to select the optimal widths for wires to produce maximum performance at the lowest cost possible.

Between running from classroom to boardroom to research lab, Meindl serves as Georgia Tech's site director for the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network—on the latest of his professional passions, next-generation microelectronics. At 73, he is running as hard as ever. Still, he told Perry, it is fundamentally in the service of his students, who have come to populate the leadership of the microelectronics industry.

We congratulate Prof. Meindl on a career in service to his country, his profession, and his many well-mentored students on earning an award, the 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor, so richly deserved.

It reads simply: "For pioneering contributions to microelectronics, including low power, biomedical, physical limits and on-chip interconnect networks."

Power from wind is a growing energy resource in these days of expensive petroleum. The question that lingers over the nature of wind is its intermittency. We are at the mercy of the weather when it comes to harnessing the force of rushing air. This does not play nice oftentimes with the power grid. In "Taking Wind Mainstream", author Karl Stahlkopf explains that new technology is available to help solve the problem.

No one questions winds enormous potential. In the United States, just 0.6 percent of the land would have to be developed with wind farms to provide 15 percent of the nation's electricity, according to Stahlkopf. Plus, wind is both price-competitive and price-stable. Still, turbines only turn when the wind is blowing. How do we store energy from wind's peaks of production to balance it against its lulls? Two words: power electronics. Using large semiconductor devices, we can enable wind farms to provide rapid response to fluctuations in grid frequency and voltage.

Stahlkopf is the senior vice president and chief technology officer at Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO), which has been in the wind power business for years. He writes that power electronics can be integrated with new storage technologies to keep shifts in wind power production manageable. (And developing larger supergrids across continents will also help to distribute wind power across whole regions, balancing areas where the wind happens to be blowing with those that may be becalmed, while simultaneously spreading the burden of providing backup power.)

HECO has a proof-of-concept program it has developed to put together power electronics and storage technologies. They call their system the Electronic Shock Absorber (ESA), which has been operating since January on the Big Island. According to Stahlkopf, the ESA absorbs power briefly when it detects a sharp increase in the instantaneous output of the wind farm by a strong gust and injects power when the bluster dies down. The ESA system also can regulate reactive power (the product of current on a transmission line that is alternating out of phase with its voltage).

Stahlkopf argues that this is a problem that can be solved with intelligent R&D and upgrading of transmission technology. Most importantly, it has a payoff that will be enormously valuable to the challenges of producing clean, renewable energy at an affordable rate, as well as ensuring the reliability and security of the power vitally needed to run our economies.

It's a powerful argument. Give it a read. This may be one case where the answer really is blowing in the wind.

p>When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed through the U.S. Congress in 1998, few knew the impact it would have on technological innovation. Some eight years later, a war of words has erupted over the controversial provisions of the landmark legislation. In one corner stands a large group of technologist who believe it is crippling innovation, and in the other corner the entertainment industry weighs in with the argument that the copyright laws have ushered in a new era of content distribution via innovative devices of all kinds. Who's right? That's up to you to decide.

In this month's article "Death by DMCA", authors Fred Von Lohmann and Wendy Seltzer write that copyright is being turned from a limited-term incentive designed to encourage creative artists to a broadly scoped transfer of wealth from the public to the private realm. They claim the DMCA has washed away entire categories of new devices and has become de facto technology regulation.

In an accompanying sidebar, "DMCA Brings Good Things to Life", author Fritz Attaway responds that the DMCA gave innovators and creators an effective means of protecting themselves against thieves who try to beat the system by unlawfully making copies and redistributing movies and other entertainment.

Lohmann is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco devoted to protecting civil liberties and free expression in the digital world. Seltzer is a visiting professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, where she teaches Internet Law and Information Privacy and writes about free speech online.

Attaway is Executive Vice President and Special Policy Advisor to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Each side makes its best case in our pages this month.

The brief of Lohmann and Seltzer is that a law enacted to stifle digital piracy has done little to accomplish its goals but has done a great deal to interfere with the freedom to develop new electronics. Further, they say pending legislation—such as the "Analog Hole" Bill—will go even further in taking design decisions for product features out of the hands of engineers and into those of federal regulators.

Attaway asserts that rather than discouraging innovation, the DMCA has fostered an innovative environment that has given consumers greater access to movies, TV shows, and other copyrighted material than ever before, advancing new technologies as well as new business models. He urges the Congress to pass the Analog Hole Bill to help ensure that consumer choices are not undermined by the risk of theft, by laying out simple rules of the road for programming and equipment.

Read their articles, do the research, and make up your own mind. Then you might want to write to your representatives on Capitol Hill.

With a 60-gigahertz radio chip in your high-definition DVD player, you wouldn't need a cable to connect it to your high-def TV. As more and more devices are connecting to one another wirelessly, this would seem to be a no-brainer to make. One problem: price. Such chips—made with expensive gallium arsenide technology—are available. They just don't present economies of scale. Only recently have researchers been able to build chips in this rarified portion of the spectrum using inexpensive (and easy to package) silicon, according to Spectrum Senior Associate Editor Samuel K. Moore in this month's story "Cheap Chips for Next Wireless Frontier".

Moore fills us in on what's going on at two advanced labs working on the problem—and what the IEEE is doing about it.

At the University of California at Los Angeles, a group headed by IEEE Fellow Behzad Razavi is set to unveil transceiver components built in a widely available and inexpensive silicon process technology. At IBM's Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., a team led by Brian Gaucher recently completed efforts on making millimeter-wave radio chips using silicon-germanium technology.

Gaucher's group built separate transmitter and receiver chips with antennas set right in the plastic package, eliminating the need for interconnects and economizing on packaging. The chips communicate at 630-megabits per second over a distance of 10 meters. Razavi's team is making key parts of their transmitters and receivers using 130-nanometer and 90-nm silicon CMOS manufacturing technology—the same process used to make microprocessors.

Razavi told Moore that his team is trailing Gaucher's at present, but they hope to overtake IBM coming down the stretch. He points out that radio chips, and 5-GHz Wi-Fi radios in particular, started out in nonstandard transistor technologies, but engineers found a way to get ordinary silicon CMOS to do the same job for less money.

Whichever team wins the race to the easiest-to-manufacture, lowest-cost 60-GHz radio chip will reap substantial rewards. Many will mark the breakthrough in high-speed silicon as an important advance, including the IEEE. The year-old IEEE 802.15.3 Task Group 3c is already at work on specifications for such chips in a 2-Gb/s short-range, personal area network, according to Moore. And companies such as Fujitsu, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Philips, and Samsung have pledged to participate in writing the standard this fall. (The next meeting of the task group is scheduled for 16-21 July 2006 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, Calif..)

We'll all win with what these engineers come up with.

We're used to thinking of the most sophisticated robots of the future as being like C3PO from the "Star Wars" movies—all glittering metal on the outside. But what if they had a kind of "skin" that mimicked our own, enabling them to feel subtle surfaces and judge their composition? They may soon have this distinctly organic characteristic. In today's issue of Science, Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi F. Saraf of the Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln report on their invention of a tactile sensor that could prove to be a significant breakthrough in robotics and other fields, such as medicine.

According to an item in Nature, Saraf came up with the novel idea in response to the loss of a close friend to breast cancer. He wanted to invent a sensor to help doctors diagnose the disease at an earlier stage by detecting smaller malignant growths. The Nebraska team is working with the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Blacksburg, Va., on medical applications for the new sensor. However, it is the notion of covering portions of a robot's exterior, particularly its "hands," with the technology that is making headlines in the technical community.

The new sensor is a thin-film device about 100 nanometers thick built in alternating layers of gold and cadmium sulphide nanoparticles separated by insulating polymer sheets just 2 or 3 nanometers thick. When a current is passed through the film, it can detect pressure by corresponding changes in the current and the resulting electroluminescent light intensity of the cadmium sulphide particles in the film. Using a charge-coupled device, this information can be displayed as an image. The sensor can detect surface details to within a pressure of approximately 10 kilopascals and distinguish features as small as 40 micrometers wide—the lateral and height resolutions of texture comparable to the human finger's at similar stress levels.

A roboticist said of the development, "Incorporation of this sensor into robotic hands may substantially improve their dexterity." Richard Crowder of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Southampton, England, wrote in a commentary: "It's another tool in the armory... And it came out of left field."

Graciously inspired, from left field or any field, this is one new development that should be fully grasped and appreciated—and not just by robots.

The headline for today's story from Reuters on the progress being made to actually publish newspapers via flexible digital readers says it all: "E-newspapers just around the corner. Really". Using flexible electronics for practical, large-scale applications such as this has been "just around the corner" for decades. Ten years ago, they were just a few years away. When we wrote about them last year, they were "at last taking their first tentative steps into a few niche markets," as one of our authors stated. Now, it looks like they may be ready to take bigger steps—and the corner may be looming.

Some big-name publishers have announced plans to give e-newspapers a tryout. According to Reuters, Hearst Corp. in the U.S., Pearson Plc.'s Les Echos in Paris, and Belgian financial paper De Tijd will begin experimenting with the technology later this year. It seems that new offerings from Sony, the Portable Reader System, and Philips, the iRex E-reader, are finally starting to gain traction in the minds of traditionally conservative newspaper executives.

"This could be a real substitution for printed paper," an executive at a global newspaper association based in Germany told Reuters. It's a cautious note of optimism, but with the runaway success of digital handhelds such as the iPod, it might just be time to make sincere understatements about the potential of e-readers again.

Increasingly, newspapers are turning to the Web to find the revenue that keeps them in business. Advertising is up in the world of papers, but the bulk of the profit is coming from online ads. And digital readers could slash the overhead of many publications, which spend great amounts of money on newsprint, the paper papers are printed on, and the physical delivery of the weighty issues.

The Sony and Philips devices employ technology developed by E Ink, which receives funding from publishers Hearst and McClatchy Co. and electronics makers Intel Corp., Motorola, and Philips. The current generation of readers, due in late summer, use glass transistor boards, or back planes; but next-generation devices will employ flexible plastic sheets (or e-paper) from firms such as U.K.-based Plastic Logic Ltd.

With manufacturing costs expected to drop as production ramps up on the new gadgets, the notion of giving away e-readers as part of a subscription package is being discussed by publishers, Reuters reports.

So, we've heard it before, but now there might be reason to believe some of the hype about the newspaper of the future—as long as we cast a wary eye on news that's "just around the corner."

Last week, the European Commission announced that it would delay until autumn finalizing its plans for a European Institute of Technology (EIT). The statement of 8 June 2006 said that "much progress has been made" in planning for the new institute, but that more consultation was needed among the stakeholders so that a formal proposal could be completed "towards the end of the year."

The Commission envisions the EIT as a technology-oriented academy that would be somewhat analogous to U.S. universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its stated goal is to "be an education, research, and innovation operator." However, many issues surrounding EIT remain to be resolved, such as how to fund the €2 billion proposition, where it will be located, and whether or not it will even require a physical facility.

Its proponents say EIT will be "unlike any existing or planned EU initiative or national university." When we wrote about the proposal in this space back in February, though, we noted: "The plan is not without its critics, who claim [it] will drain funding from other educational programs."

As if in response to this controversy, Commission President José-Manuel Barroso said last week: "The EIT will be more than simply an operator in education, research, and innovation; it will be a reference model for excellence at the European level. I would like to see the institute become a European symbol for our renewed effort towards creating a competitive knowledge society, delivering more and better jobs and prosperity."

The Commission stated that an EIT Governing Board will be "at the heart of the concept." The board will "identify strategic scientific challenges in interdisciplinary areas (perhaps, for example, green energy or nanotechnologies)." It will also establish Knowledge Communities—integrated partnerships put together by universities, research organizations, and industry—to carry out the tasks related to their particular fields.

As for who would be employed in the new institute, the Commission called for "maximum flexibility," in which a "range of options should be available" to attract candidates via means such as direct employment, dual affiliation, and sabbaticals. According to the announcement, the Commission intends to see the institute "pool and integrate existing top-class teams from universities and research institutes" from Europe and the rest of the world.

The commissioner overseeing educational matters, Ján Figel, said that EIT would also emphasize a basis of partnering with industry to accomplish its mission. "Businesses will be core partners at the institute's strategic and operational levels," Figel noted. "Companies will be directly involved in research and education activities, thereby helping to nurture an entrepreneurial mindset among graduates and researchers. This is vital if Europe is to achieve its goal of being a dynamic knowledge-based economy."

The EIT initiative began with a study that showed that the European Union, as a technological world player, was falling behind competitors such as the United States, and had oncoming competition from newer powerhouses, such as India and China. According to one published report, this has led some to talk of a new "brain drain" in Europe.

The Commission stated that the unresolved issues in the EIT proposal will continue to be debated over the coming months by all involved parties, leading to a "draft legal instrument" establishing the institute, which would be put to a vote in autumn.

The wheels of progress sometimes move quite slowly. With enormous organizations such as the European Commission, you sometimes begin to wonder how they ever manage to move at all. We'll update you later this year.

By now, you've probably heard about the remarks made by Prof. Stephen Hawking this week to a gathering in Hong Kong about the need for humans to colonize other planets. The famous scientist said our survival eventually could depend on portions of the population locating elsewhere in the vastness of space, as the planet Earth may one day be fatally jeopardized by any number of disasters. It's a far-fetched concept (from someone who earns a living thinking about such things), but it raises intriguing questions.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

He told the audience at his sold-out lecture that if humans can avoid killing themselves over the next 100 years, they should have independent space settlements, beginning with Mars and reaching out to other planetary systems.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," Hawking noted.

It sounds more like sci-fi than sci-fact coming from this most respected of physicists, but so did black holes not too long ago (and he figured that one out). When your field of inquiry, though, stretches from the initial instant of the Big Bang to the end of the universe at some point so far from now that theorists can only guess, looking a few hundred years into the future isn't that great a leap of the imagination. So, let's speculate.

First, just how vulnerable are we? Sure, we've made it this far, over the course of millions of years. But things change. And lately, they seem to be changing faster than ever. What awaits us over the next few hundred years? A vastly changed climate? Weapons of mass destruction unleashed intentionally or by accident? New and incurable disease pandemics? Catastrophic collisions with other cosmic bodies? The rise of the cyborgs?

(As sci-fi author Larry Niven once said: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!")

Second, if we really ever did have to run for our lives, how far would we have to go? Could we terraform Mars? Could we develop space transport to such a sophisticated level that taking the family to Vega would be the future version of relocating to another continent? Would the planets that our astronomers are finding nowadays that seem to be ever more similar to Earth be safe havens? Or will we need to just keep going, never pausing and never looking back, forever?

Third, considering that one of the biggest threats to human beings is human beings, could we ever escape ourselves? Will we ever manage to stop killing one another with greater and greater weapons? If we can wipe out the species today on this planet, what could we invent to wipe it out in the far-flung future?

Will there ever be enough distance between us and the source of our troubles that we can assume we're safe? Will we ever disperse so fully across the galaxy that we can assure the survival of the species?

If in the far, far future nomadic humans reach a point where the odds of some now unimaginable disaster killing off homo sapiens entirely drop to zero, our descendants should mark that boundary between constant peril and guaranteed success by looking back at the scientist who centuries earlier predicted its possibility as Hawking's Point.

But it's a long shot.