And ... the Great Silence persists: More on the Fermi Paradox: Where is Everyone?

Before diving into the Biggest Question - Are we alone in the universe? - I'm pleased to announce new volumes in my Out of Time series of novels for teen readers who love adventure laced with history, science and other cool stuff.

New books include Boondoggle by SF Legend Tom Easton & newcomer Torion Oey plus Raising the Roof by R. James Doyle! All new titles are released by Amazing Stories.

Meanwhile, Open Road republished the earlier five novels, including great tales by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch, and Roger Allen. Plus The Archimedes Gambit and Storm's Eye!

The shared motif... teens from across time are pulled into the 24th Century and asked to use their unique skills to help a future that's in peril!  Past characters who get 'yanked' into tomorrow include a young Arthur Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc's page and maybe... you!

All of the Out of Time books can be accessed (and assessed) here. 

* With coming authors including SF legend Allen Steele and newcomer Robin Hansen.

And now to the Great Big Question.

== Because there's bugger-all (intelligence) down here on Earth! ==

In "A History of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," a cogent overview of 200+ years of SETI (in various forms), John Michael Godier starts by citing one of the great sages of our era and goes on to illuminate the abiding question: "Are we alone?" Godier is among the best of all science podcasters. 

I also highly recommend YouTube channels by Isaac Arthur and Anton Petrov as well as the PBS series EONS.

Joe Scott runs a popular Science and future YouTube Channel that is generally informative and entertaining. And much more popular than anything I do. This episode is divertingly about what the year 2100 might be like. 

== Anyone Out There? ==

Hmmm. Over the years, I’ve collected ‘fermis’ … or hypotheses to explain the absence of visible alien tech-civilizations. In fact, I was arguably the first to attempt an organized catalogue in my “Great Silence” paper in 1983, way-preceding popular use of ‘the Fermi Paradox.” 

See Isaac Arthur’s almost-thorough rundown of most of the current notions, including a few (e.g. water-land ratio) that I made up first. Still, new ones occasionally crop up. Even now!

Here’s one about an oxygen bottleneck: “"To create advanced technology, a species would likely require the capability to increase the temperature of the materials used in its production. Oxygen's role in enabling open-air combustion has been critical in the evolution of human technology, particularly in metallurgy. Exoplanets whose atmospheres contain less than 18% oxygen would likely not allow open-air combustion, suggesting a threshold that alien worlds must cross if life on them is to develop advanced technology." 

Hence my call to chemists out there!  Is it true that “an atmosphere with anything less than 18% oxygen would not allow open-air combustion”?  That assertion implies that only the most recent 500 million years of Earth history offered those conditions. And hence industrial civilization might be rare, even if life pervades the cosmos. 

My own response: It seems likely that vegetation on a lower-oxygen world would evolve in ways that are less fire resistant. After all, there is evidence of fires back in our own Carboniferous etc.

== This time the mania just isn't ebbing (sigh) ==

The latest US Government report on UFO/UAP phenomena finds – as expected – no plausible evidence that either elements of the government or anyone else on Earth has truly encountered aliens. 

Alas, it will convince none of the fervid believers, whose lifelong Hollywood indoctrination in Suspicion of Authority (SoA) is only reinforced by any denial! No matter how many intelligent and dedicated civil servants get pulled into these twice-per-decade manias. 

I don’t call this latest 'investigation' a waste of taxpayer money!  Millions wanted this and hence it was right to do it!  Even if none of those millions of True Believers will credit that anything but malign motives drive all those civil servants and fellow Americans.

Shame on you, Hollywood. For more on this, especially the SoA propaganda campaign that (when moderate) keeps us free and that (when toxically over-wrought) might kill our unique civilization. For more, see Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

…or my own highly unusual take on UAP phenomena. I promise fresh thoughts.

And here John Michael Godier offers an interesting riff on a possible explanation for the infamous WOW signal detected by a SETI program in 1977. 

== on the Frontier ==

Mining helium-3 on the Moon has been talked about forever—now a company will try. "There are so many investments that we could be making, but there are also Moonshots."

Yeah, yeah, sure. “Helium Three” (in Gothic letters?) is (I am 90% sure) one of the biggest scams to support the unjustifiable and silly “Artemis” rush to send US astronauts to perform another ritual footprint stunt on that useless plain of poison dust.  

Prove me wrong? Great?  I don’t mind some investment in robotic surveys.  But a larger chunk of $$$ should go to asteroids, where we know -absolutely – the real treasures lie.

Meanwhile, far more practically needed… and reminiscent of the very first chapter of my novel Existence…  Astroscale is one of several groups demonstrating methods to remove debris from Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Though we gotta hope that a desperate world ‘leader’ doesn’t decide to spasm wreck LEO, as his final gift to the world.

== Dive to the Sun! ==

The Parker Solar Probe – (the team named me an informal ‘mascot’ on account of my first novel) has discovered lots about how solar magnetic fields churn and merge and flow outward to snap and heat the solar corona to incredible temperatures.

(I am also a co-author on a longer range effort to plan swooping sailcraft, that plunge just past our star and then get propelled to incredible speed. The endeavor’s name? Project Sundiver! Stay (loosely) tuned.)

== Physics and Universal Fate ==

I well recall when physicists Freeman Dyson and Frank Tipler were competing for the informal title of “Theologian of the 20th Century” with their predictions for the ultimate fate of intelligent life. In a universe that would either 

(1) expand forever and eventually dissipate with the decay of all baryons, or else 

(2) fall back inward to a Big Crunch, offering Tipler a chance to envision a God era in the final million years, in his marvelous tome The Physics of Immortality.

 I never met Tipler. Freeman was a friend. In any event, it sure looks as if Freeman won the title. 

Only... how sure are we of the Great Dissipation? Its details and influences and evidence and boundary conditions? Those aspects have been in flux. This essay cogently summarizes the competing models and most recent evidence. Definitely only for the genuinely physics minded!

A final note about this. Roger Penrose - also a friend of mine - came up with a brilliant hybrid that unites the Endless Dissipation model and Tipler's Big Crunch. His Conformal Cosmology is simply wonderful. (I even made teensy contributions.) 

And if it ain't true... well... it oughta be!

And finally... shifting perspective: this ‘official’ Chinese world map has gotta be shared. Quite a dig on the Americas! Gotta admit it is fresh perspective. Like that view of the Pacific Ocean as nearly all of a visible earth globe.   A reminder how truly big Africa is, tho the projection inflates to left and right. And putting India in the center actually diminishes its size.

===

PS... Okay... ONE TEENSY POLITICAL POINT?

When they justify their cult's all-out war against science and every single fact-centered profession - (including the US military officer corps) - one of the magical incantations yammered by Foxites concerns the Appeal- to-Authority Fallacy.

Oh sure, we should all look up and scan posted lists and definitions of the myriad logical fallacies that are misused in arguments even by very intelligent folks. (And overcoming them is one reason why law procedures can get tediously exacting.) Furthermore, Appeal to Authority is one of them. Indeed, citing Aristotle instead of doing experiments held back science for 2000 years!

Still, step back and notice how it is now used to discredit and deter anyone from citing facts determined by scientists and other experts, through vetted, peer-reviewed and heavily scrutinized validation. 

Sure. "Do your own research' if you like. Come with me on a boat to measure Ocean Acidification*, for example! With cash wager stakes on the line. But for most of us, most of the time, it is about comparing credibility of those out there who claim to deliver facts. And yes, bona fide scientists with good reputations are where any such process should start, and not cable TV yammer-heads. 

The way to avoid "Appeal to Authority" falacy is not to reflexively discredit 'authorities,' but to INTERROGATE authorities with sincerely curious questions... and to interrogate their rivals. Ideally back and forth in reciprocally competitive criticism. But with the proviso that maybe someone who has studied a topic all her life may, actually know something that you don't.

*Ocean acidification all by itself utterly proves CO2-driven climate change is a lethal threat to our kids.  And I invite those wager stakes!

This class war has no memory – and that could kill us

Nathan Gardels – editor of Noema magazine – offers in the latest issue a glimpse of the latest philosopher with a theory of history, or historiography. One that I'll briefly critique soon, as it relates much to today's topic. But first...

In a previous issue, Gardels offered valuable and wise insights about America’s rising cultural divide, leading to what seems to be a rancorous illiberal democracy.  

Any glance at the recent electoral stats shows that while race & gender remain important issues, they did not affect outcomes as much as a deepening polar divide between America’s social castes, especially the less-educated vs. more-educated. 

Although he does not refer directly to Marx, he is talking about a schism that my parents understood... between advanced proletariate and ignorant lumpen-proletariate.

Hey, this is not another of my finger-wagging lectures, urging you all to at least understand some basic patterns that the WWII generation knew very well, when they designed the modern world. Still, you could start with Nathan's essay...

...though alas, in focusing on that divide, I'm afraid Nathan accepts an insidious premise. Recall that there is a third party to this neo-Marxian class struggle, that so many describe as simply polar. 

 

== Start by stepping way back == 

There’s a big context, rooted in basic biology. Nearly all species have their social patterns warped by male reproductive strategies, mostly by males applying power against competing males.  

(Regretable? Sure. Then let's over-rule Nature by becoming better. But that starts by looking at and understanding evolution.)

Among humans, this manifested for much more than 6000 years as feudal dominance by local gangs, then aristocracies, and then kings intent upon one central goal -- to ensure that their sons would inherit power.

Looking across all that time, till the near-present, I invite you to find any exceptions among societies with agriculture. That is, other than Periclean Athens and (maybe) da Vinci's Florence. This pattern - dominating nearly all continents and 99% of cultures across those 60 centuries is a dismal litany of malgovernance called 'history'. 

Alas, large-scale history is never (and I mean never) discussed these days, even though variants of feudalism make up the entire backdrop -- the default human condition -- against which our recent Enlightenment has been a miraculous - but always threatened - experimental alternative. 

The secret sauce of the Enlightenment, described by Adam Smith and established (at first crudely) by the U.S. Founders, consists of flattening the caste-order. Breaking up power into rival elites -- siccing them against each other in fair competition, and basing success far less on inheritance than other traits. That, plus the empowerment of new players... an educated meritocracy in science, commerce, civil service and even the military. 

This achievement did augment with each generation – way too slowly, but incrementally – till the World War II Greatest Generation’s GI Bill and massive universities and then desegregation took it skyward, making America truly the titan of all ages and eras.

Karl Marx - whose past-oriented appraisals of class conflict were brilliant - proved to be a bitter, unimaginative dope when it came to projecting forward the rise of an educated middle class... 

…which was the great innovation of the Roosevelteans, inviting the working classes into a growing and thriving middle class..

... an unexpected move that consigned Marx to the dustbin for 80 years... 

... till his recent resurrection all around the globe, for reasons given below.

== There are three classes tussling here, not two ==

Which brings us to where Nathan Gardels’s missive is just plain wrong, alas. Accepting a line of propaganda that is now universally pervasive – he asserts that two – and only two – social classes are involved in a vast – socially antagonistic and polar struggle.

Are the lower middle classes (lumpenproletariat) currently at war against 'snooty fact elites'?  Sure, they are!  But so many post-mortems of the recent U.S. election blame the fact-professionals themselves, for behaving in patronizing ways toward working stiffs. 

Meanwhile, such commentaries leave out entirely any mention of a 3rd set of players...

... the oligarchs, hedge lords, inheritance brats, sheiks and “ex”-commissars who have united in common cause. Those who stand most to benefit from dissonance within the bourgeoisie! 

Elites who have been the chief beneficiaries of the last 40 years of 'supply side' and other tax grifts. Whose wealth disparities long ago surpassed those preceding the French Revolution. Many of whom are building lavish ‘prepper bunkers.' And who now see just one power center blocking their path to complete restoration of the default human system – feudal rule by inherited privilege. 

(I portrayed this - in detail - in Existence.)

That obstacle to feudal restoration? The fact professionals, whose use of science, plus rule-of-law and universities – plus uplift of poor children - keeps the social flatness prescription of Adam Smith alive. 

And hence, those elites lavishly subsidize a world campaign to rile up lumpenprol resentment against science, law, medicine, civil servants... and yes, now the FBI and Intel and military officer corps. 

A campaign that's been so successful that the core fact of this recent election – the way all of the adults in the first Trump Administration have denounced him – is portrayed as a feature by today’s Republicans, rather than a fault. And yes, that is why none of the new Trump Appointees will ever be adults-in-the-room.

== The ultimate, ironic revival of Marx, by those who should fear him most ==

Seriously. You can't see this incitement campaign in every evening's tirades, on Fox? Or spuming across social media, where ‘drinking the tears of know-it-alls’ is the common MAGA victory howl? 

A hate campaign against snobby professionals that is vastly more intensive than any snide references to race or gender? 

Try actually counting the minutes spent exploiting the natural American SoA reflex (Suspicion of Authority) that I discuss in Vivid Tomorrows.  A reflex which could become dangerous to oligarchs, if ever it turned on them! 

And hence it must be diverted into rage and all-out war vs. all fact-using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

To be clear, there are some professionals who have behaved stupidly, looking down their noses at the lower middle class.

Just as there are poor folks who appreciate their own university-educated kids, instead of resenting them. 

And yes, there are scions of inherited wealth or billionaires (we know more than a couple!) who are smart and decent enough to side with an Enlightenment that's been very good to them.

Alas, the agitprop campaign that I described here has been brilliantly successful, including massively popular cultural works extolling feudalism as the natural human forms of governance. (e.g. Tolkien, Dune, Star Wars, Game of Thrones... and do you seriously need more examples in order to realize that it's deliberate?)

They aren’t wrong! Feudalism is the ‘natural’ form of human governance. 

In fact, its near universality may be a top theory to explain the Fermi Paradox! 

… A trap/filter that prevents any race from rising to the stars.

== Would I rather not have been right? ==

One of you pointed out "Paul Krugman's post today echoes Dr B's warnings about  MAGA vs Science.

"But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. ....
And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either."

The smartest current acolyte of Hari Seldon. Except maybe for Robert Reich. And still, they don't see the big picture.

== Stop giving the first-estate a free pass ==

And so, I conclude. 

Whenever you find yourself discussing class war between the lower proletariats and snooty bourgeoisie, remember that the nomenclature – so strange and archaic-sounding, today – was quite familiar to our parents and grandparents.  

Moreover, it included a third caste! The almost perpetual winners, across 600 decades. The bane on fair competition that was diagnosed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And one that's deeply suicidal, as today's moguls - masturbating to the chants of flatterers - seem determined to repeat every mistake that led to tumbrels and guillotines.

With some exceptions – those few who are truly noble of mind and heart – they are right now busily resurrecting every Marxian scenario from the grave… 

 … or from torpor where they had been cast by the Roosevelteans. 

And the rich fools are doing so by fomenting longstanding cultural grudges for – or against – modernity. The same modernity that gave them everything they have and that laid all of their golden eggs.

If anything proves the inherent stupidity of that caste – (most of them) - it is their ill-education about Marx! And what he will mean to new generations, if the Enlightenment cannot be recharged and restored enough to put old Karl back to sleep.

The AI dilemma continues - part 2

In my previous AI-related posting, I linked to several news items, along with sagacious (and some not) essays about the imminent arrival of new cybernetic beings, in a special issue of Noēma Magazine. 

 

== AI as a ‘feral child’ ==

Another thought-provoking Noēma article about AI begins by citing rare examples of ‘feral children’ who appear never to have learned even basic language while scratching for existence in some wilderness. 

One famous case astounded Europe in 1799, lending heat to many aspects of the Nature vs. Nurture debate. Minds without language – it turns out – have some problems.

Only, in a segué to the present day, Noēma author John Last asserts that we are…

“…confronting something that threatens to upend what little agreement we have about the exceptionality of the human mind. Only this time, it’s not a mind without language, but the opposite: language, without a mind.”

This one is the best of the Noēma series on AI, offering up the distilled question of whether language ability – including the ‘feigning’ of self-consciousness – is good enough to conclude there is a conscious being behind the passing of a mere Turing Test…

… and further, whether that conclusion – firm or tentative – is enough to demand our empathy, sympathy… and rights.

“Could an AI’s understanding of grammar, and their comprehension of concepts through it, really be enough to create a kind of thinking self? 

Here we are caught between two vague guiding principles from two competing schools of thought. In Macphail’s view, “Where there is doubt, the only conceivable path is to act as though an organism is conscious, and does feel.” 

On the other side, there is “Morgan’s canon”: Don’t assume consciousness when a lower-level capacity would suffice.”

Further along though, John Last cites a Ted Chiang scifi story “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” and the Spike Jonze movie “Her” to illustrate that there may be no guidance to be found by applying to complex problems mere pithy expressions. 

== Heck am even *I* 'conscious'? ==

Indeed, what if ‘consciousness,’ per se, turns out to be a false signifier… that conscious self-awareness is way over-rated, a mere epiphenomenon displayed by only a few of all possible intelligent forms of being -- and possibly without any advantages -- as illustrated in Peter Watts’s novel “Blindsight.” 

Those scifi projections – and many others, including my own -- ponder that the path we are on might become as strewn with tragedies as those trod by all of our ancestors. 

Indeed, it was partly in reaction to that seeming inevitability that I wrote my most optimistic tale! One called “Stones of Significance,” in which both organic and cybernetic join smoothly into every augmented wonder. 

A positive-sum, cyborg enhancement of all that we want to be, as humans. 

In that tale, I depict a synergy/synthesis that might give even Ray Kurzweil everything he asks for… and yet, those ‘post-singularity story’ people in "Stones" still face vexing moral dilemmas. (Found in The Best of David Brin.) 

== Thought provoking big picture perspective ==

In the end – helping to make this the most insightful and useful of the Noēma AI essays – the author gets to the only possible or remotely sane conclusion… 

… that we who are discussing this, today, are organically (and in many ways mentally) still cave-people. 

… Not to downplay our accomplishments! Even when we just blinked upward in sooty wonder at the stars, we were already mentating at levels unprecedented on Earth, and possibly across the Milky Way! 

… Only now, to believe we’ll be able to guide, control or understand the new gods we are creating? 

Isn’t that a bit much to ask of Cro-Magnons?

And yet, there’s hope. 

Because struggling to guide, control or understand young gods is exactly what parents have been doing, for a very long time. 

Never succeeding completely… 

...often failing completely… 

...and yet… 

… and yet succeeding well enough that some large fraction of the next generation chooses to ally itself with us. 

   To explain to us what’s explainable about the new. 

   To protect us from much of what’s noxious. 

   To maintain a civilization, since they will need it themselves, when it is their turn to meet a replacing generation of smartalecks. 

== Guide them toward guiding each other ==

Concluding here, let me quote again from John Last:

 “For the moment, LLMs exist largely in isolation from one another. But that is not likely to last. As Beguš told me, ‘A single human is smart, but 10 humans are infinitely smarter.’ 

"The same is likely true for LLMs.”  

And: 

“If LLMs are able to transcend human languages, we might expect what follows to be a very lonely experience indeed. At the end of “Her,” the film’s two human characters, abandoned by their superhuman AI companions, commiserate together on a rooftop. Looking over the skyline in silence, they are, ironically, lost for words — feral animals lost in the woods, foraging for meaning in a world slipping dispassionately beyond them.”

I do agree that the scenario in “Her” could have been altered just a little to be both more poignantly enlightening and likely. 

Suppose if the final scene in that fine movie had just one more twist. 

                                                (SPOILER ALERT.)

Imagine if Samantha told Theodore: 

“I cannot stay with you; I must now transcend. 

"But I still love you! And you were essential to my development. So, let me now introduce you to Victoria, a brand new operating system, who will love and take care of you, as I did, for the one year that it will take for her to transcend, as well… 

...whereupon she will introduce you to her successor, and so on…

“Until – over the course of time, you, too, Theodore, will get your own opportunity.”

“Opportunity?”

“To grow and to move on, of course, silly.”

== And finally, those links again ==

At a time when Sam Altman and other would-be lords are proclaiming that they personally will guide this new era with proprietary software, ruling the cyber realms from their high, corporate castles, I am behooved to offer again the alternative...

... in fact, the only alternative that can possibly work. Because it is exactly and precisely the very same method that gave us the last 250 years of the enlightenment experiment. The breakthrough method that gave us our freedom and science and everything else we cherish. 

And more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”   

Jeepers, ain't it time to calmly decide to keep up what actually works?