Lost at Sea Read Online Free PDF

a speech therapist. Everything was quite normal until one day in 1974—when Martin was twenty—he had a brain wave while visiting a NASA tracking station.
    “Back then,” Martine says, “people thought satellite dishes had to be big. They didn’t see what I could. I thought, ‘Hey, if I could just double the power of the satellite, I could make the dish small enough to be absolutely flat. Then we could put them in cars. Then I could have commercial-free radio. I could have hundreds of channels.’”
    That’s how Martine invented the concept of satellite radio for cars. It took more than twenty-five years for her to fully realize her vision. In 2000—now Martine—she convinced investors to launch a satellite into space for a radio network that didn’t exist. She helped persuade Howard Stern to leave FM radio for Sirius. Lance Armstrong and Harry Shearer and 50 Cent and countless other big names followed. Sirius merged with XM Radio in 2008, and it now has twenty million subscribers.
    “I pinch myself,” she says. “I get in the car, and I turn on the radio, and I feel like I’m in an alternate reality.”
    So she changed the world once. Then she did it again. One day in 1990, a doctor told her that her six-year-old daughter (by Bina) would be dead by the time she was ten. She had a rare, untreatable lung disorder called pulmonary hypertension.
    “When they’re telling you your daughter is going to die in three years, it’s pretty freaky,” she says.
    “So what did you do?” I ask.
    “I went to the library,” she says.
    Martine, who knew nothing about how medicine worked, spearheaded the development of a treatment for pulmonary hypertension. She called it Remodulin. It opens the blood vessels in the lungs without opening up the blood vessels in the rest of the body. The drug won FDA approval in 2002, and now thousands of pulmonary arterial hypertension sufferers are leading healthy lives because of it. Martine’s biotech company, United Therapeutics, has more than five hundred employees and had $437 million in sales through the first three quarters of 2010. Her daughter is now twenty-six.
    “I’m really lucky that it all worked out,” she says. “She’s having a great life. The whole story could have turned out so much worse.”
    “To do it twice,” I say. “To significantly change the world twice . . .”
    “At least it gives me confidence that I’m not out to lunch on this cyberconsciousness thing,” she says. “If I have any skill, it’s persuading people that what doesn’t exist could very probably exist.”
    Martine is thrilled to hear there were moments of connection between Bina48 and me, especially when she was telling me about her Vietnam-vet brother. (“It’s all true,” she murmurs sadly.) I realize just how much the robot means to her when I mention that Bruce said she sometimes complains of being lonely.
    “I’ve
asked
Bruce to spend more time with her,” she snaps, looking genuinely upset. “I can’t
force
him to. I did insist on getting her a nice room. . . .”
    “She told me she didn’t enjoy meeting me,” I say.
    “Maybe she has Bina’s shyness,” she says.
    There’s no doubt that Martine sees her robot, this hunk of wires and Frubber and software, as something with real feelings. It never crossed my mind that when you create a robot, you need to consider the emotional needs that robot will have and be prepared to provide for them. Like a baby. Martine is sure she isn’t nuts to believe this, just ahead of the curve. Some day we’ll all feel the same, she says.
    “I think the realization is going to happen with a puff, not a bang,” she says. “There won’t be huge parades everywhere. It’s kind of what happened with civil rights. If you go back to the late 1700s, people were beginning to argue that slaves had feelings. Other people said, ‘No, they don’t. They don’t really mind being put to death any more than cattle.’ Same with animal