The AI Dilemma continues onward... despite all our near term worries

First off, although this posting is not overall political... I will offer a warning to you activists out there.

While I think protest marches are among the least effective kinds of resistance - (especially since MAGAs live for one thing: to drink the tears of every smartypants professional/scienctist/civil-servant etc.) -- I still praise you active folks who are fighting however you can for the Great (now endangered) Exxperiment. Still may I point out how deeply stupid the organizers of this 50 501 Movement are?

Carumba! They scheduled their next protests for April 19, which far right maniacs call Waco Day or Timothy McVeigh Day. A day when you are best advised to lock the doors. 

That's almost as stoopid as the morons who made April 20 (4-20) their day of yippee pot delight... also Hitler's birthday.

Shouldn't we have vetting and even CONFERENCES before we decide such things?

Still, those of you heading out there (is it today already?) bless you for your citizenship and courage.

And now...

There’s always more about AI – and hence a collection of links to…

== The AI dilemmas and myriad-lemmas continue ==

I’ve been collecting so much material on the topic… and more keeps pouring in. Though (alas!) so little of it enlightening about how to turn this tech revolution into a positive sum outcome for all.

Still, let’s start with a potpourri…

1. A new study by Caltech and UC Riverside uncovers the hidden toll that AI exacts on human health, from chip manufacturing to data center operation.
 

2. And also this re: my alma mater: Caltech researchers have developed brain–machine interfaces that can interpret data from neural activity even after the signal from an implant has become less clear.   

 

3. Swinging from process to implications… my friend from the UK (via Panama) Calum Chace (author of Surviving AI: The Promise & Peril of Artificial Intelligence) sent me this one from his Conscium Project re: “Principles for Responsible AI Consciousness Research”. While detailed and illuminating, the work is vague about the most important things, like how to tell ‘consciousness’ from a system that feigns it… and whether that even matters.

Moreover, none of the authors cited here refers to how the topic was pre-explored in science fiction. Take the dive into “what is consciousness?” that you’ll find in Peter Watts’s novel “Blindsight.” 

 

…wherein Watts makes the case that a sense of self is not even necessary in order for a being to behave in ways that are actively intelligent, communicative and even ferociously self-interested.  

 

All you need is evolution. And an overall system in which evolution remains (as in nature) zero-sum.  Which – I keep trying to tell folks – is not necessarily fore-ordained.

== And yet more AI related Miscellany ==

4. Augmented reality glasses with face-recognition and access to world databases… now where have we seen this before? How about in great detail in Existence?

5. On the MINDPLEX Podcast with AI pioneers Ben Goertzel and Lisa Rein covering – among many topics - training AGI's to hold each other accountable, pingable IDs (using cryptographic hashes to secure agent identity), AGI rights & much, much more! (Sept 2024). And yeah, I am there, too. 

6. An article by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei makes points similar to Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreeson, that the upsides of AI are potentially spectacular, as also portrayed in a small but influential number of science fiction tales.  Alas, his list of potential benefits, while extensive re ways AI could be "Machines of Loving Grace,"* is also long in the tooth and almost hoary-clichéd. We need to recall that in any ecosystem - including the new cyber one - entities without feedback constraints soon evolve into whatever form best proliferates quickly. That is, unless feedback loops take shape.

7. This article in FORTUNE makes a case similar to my own... that AIs will improve best, in accuracy and sagacity and even wisdom, if accountability is applied by AI upon other AIs. Positive feedback can be a dangerous cycle, while some kinds of negative feedback loops can lead to incrementally increased correlation with the real world.

8. Again, my featured WIRED article about this - Give Every AI a soul... or else.

My related Newsweek op-ed (June'22) dealt with 'empathy bots'' that feign sapience and personhood.  

== AI generated visual lies – we can deal with this! ==

9. A new AI algorithm flags deepfakes with 98% accuracy — better than any other tool out there right now. And it is essential that we keep developing such systems, in order to stand a chance of keeping up in an arms race against those who would foist on us lies, scams and misinformation...

   ... pretty much exactly as I described back in 1997, this reposted chapter from The Transparent Society - "The End of Photography as Proof."  

Two problems. First, scammers will use programs like this one to help perfect their scam algorithms. Second, it would be foolish to rely upon any one such system, or just a few. A diversity of highly competitive tattle-tale lie-denouncing systems is the only thing that can work, as I discuss here. 

Oh, and third. It is inherent – (as I show in that chapter of The Transparent Society) – that lies are more easily detected, denounced and incinerated in a general environment of transparency, wherein the greatest number can step away from their screens and algorithms and compare them to actual, physically-witnessed reality.

For more on this, here’s my related Newsweek op-ed (June'22) dealt with 'empathy bots' that feign sapience. Plus a YouTube pod where I give an expanded version.

== Generalizing to innovation, in general ==

10. Traditional approaches to innovation emphasize ideas and inventions, often leading to a losing confrontation with the mysterious “Valley of Death.” My colleague Peter Denning and his co-author Todd Lyons upend this paradigm in Navigating a Restless Sea, offering eight mutually reinforcing practices that power skillful navigation toward adoption, mobilizing people to try something new.  

=== Some tacked-on tech miscellany ==

11. Sure, it goes back to neolithic "Venus figurines" and Playboy and per-minute phone comfort lines and Eliza - and the movie "Her." And bot factories are hard at work. At my 2017 World of Watson keynote, I predicted persuasive 'empathy bots' would arrive in 2022 (they did.) And soon, Kremlin 'honeypot-lure babes" should become ineffective! Because this deep weakness of male humans will have an outlet that's... more than human?

Could that lead to those men calming down, prioritizing the more important aspects of life?)

12. And hence, we will soon see...AI girlfriends and companions. And this from Vox: People are falling in love with -- and getting addicted to -- AI voices.

13. Kewl!  “This tiny 3D-printed Apple IIe is powered by a $2 microcontroller .” With a teensy working screen taken from an Apple watch. Can run your old IIe programs. Size of an old mouse.  

14. Paragraphica by Bjørn Karmann is a camera that has no lens, but instead generates a text description of when & where it is, then generates an image via a text-to-image model.  

15. Daisy is an AI cellphone application that wastes scammers’ time so that they don’t have time to target real victims. Daisy has "told frustrated scammers meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting, and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details."

And finally...

== NOT directly AI… but for sure implications! ==

And… only slightly off-topic: If you feel a need for an inspiring tale about a modern hero, intellect and deeply-wise public figure, try Judge David Tatel’s VISION: A memoir and Blindness and Justice. I’ll vouch that he’s one of the wisest wise-guys I know. "Vision is charming, wise, and completely engaging. This memoir of a judge of the country’s second highest court, who has been without sight for decades, goes down like a cool drink on a hot day." —Scott Turow. https://www.davidtatel.com/

And Maynard Moore - of the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Age of Science - will be holding a pertinent event online in mid January: “Human-Machine Fusion: Our Destiny, or Might We Do Better?”  The IRAS webinar is free, but registration is required.

== a lagniappe (puns intended) ==

In the 1980s this supposedly “AI”- generated sonnet emerged from the following prompt, "Buzz Off, Banana Nose."  

Well… real or not, here’s my haiku response. 

In lunar orchards

    A pissed apiary signs:

"Bee gone, Cyrano!"

 

Count the layers, oh cybernetic padiwans!  I’m not obsolete… yet.

Twenty things about The Mess that no one has mentioned, so far. From tariffs to signalgate to DOGE to Houthis and...

I've been distracted by local vexations. But truly, it's time to weigh back into this era in America, that Robert Heinlein accurately forecast as The Crazy Years. 

This is a long one. But here are things you ought to know, that you've not seen in the news. Starting with...

 == The Tariff War ==

* Ninety-five years ago a Republican Congress passed the biggest tariff hike til Trump. Which even Republican economists now call the dumbest policy move ever. The thing that swerved a mere stock market downturn into the Great Depression. 

Want it explained in a way that's painfully funny? But sure. Some of you already knew that. 

* Only have you considered how Trump's tariffs on China give Xi and the Beijing Politburo exactly what they want?

China's economy has been in decline for two years, with bad prospects ahead, especially for youth unemployment. The Tariff War will worsen things for millions of Chinese... but not for Xi!  What Xi gets out of this - personally - is someone to blame for China's already-underway recession! 

"It's all America's fault!"  Thus solidifying his own continued grip on power. He was already doing that, riling (unearned) anti-American fever. Only Trump now proves his case! While ensuring that the USA swirls down the same economic toilet. 

Always look at who benefits! So far it sure looks like Putin and Xi.

* Oh, and this... Want the biggest reason China's economy was already in decline? No one in media is touting that the USA was already experiencing a renaissance of manufacturing. 

HOW is that not a major part of the story? As a direct result of the 2021 Pelosi bills, investment in U.S. domestic factories skyrocketed!**   Shortening supply chains, reducing use of toxic ocean freighters and dependence on China. Only now, if it continues, Trump will claim "My tariffs did it!"

Because Democrats have the polemical skills of a tardigrade.

(Oh, and the USA has been energy independent and a net exporter of oil etc. since Obama. Care to bet? "Drill baby drill?" The Saudis are already scared. They won't allow it.)

== Want another aspect you hadn't considered? ==

* This nutty Tariff War will end the status of the US dollar as the world reserve currency. 

It is fast underway, as we speak. Long a fond goal of the Chinese politburo, along with Putin and the Saudis. All of them our close friends. Though even our actual allies won't trust the dollar anymore.

Take a look at what's happening with the dollar... and be proud. So proud.

== Might a Tariff Gambit have been done better?

* By effectively banning Chinese imports to the U.S., Trump is sending commerce into chaos and prices skyward. Still, while it's totally dumb and risky, I suppose that a carefully selective tarrif tiff might have worked.  

If the aim was to replace China as our top supplier, it could have been done tactically, by favoring friendlier cheap-labor nations like Vietnam and Malaysia.  First, that would keep supply chains going. It would also help to solidify those nations as allies in opposing Beijing ambitions southward. And give US businesses a way to transition more gently.

Better yet... Mexico. 

While our southern neighbor has been fast transforming into a middle class nation - largely thanks to trade with the U.S. - it's still pretty cheap labor. Only with many added bonuses. First, as Mexicans become more prosperous, they buy a lot of stuff from the USA. Three dollars out of every ten that we spend on Mexican value-added goods - say in maquiladora parts-assembly plants - comes right back. 

Second, U.S. manufacturers will tell you they invest more in US factories when they can partner with Mexican ones. (Shall we wager over that assertion?)

(*Elsewhere I explain why turning Mexico middle class has been one of America's greatest accomplishments! I can prove it. For example, during all of the Right's ravings about illegal immigration, do you hear that it's Mexicans flooding the border? No you don't. The fraction of border-crashers who are Mexican citizens has been in steep decline for a decade. Increasingly, it's refugees from Central American right-wing caudillo regimes and so on. Because most Mexicans can now find decent work at home. Try actually tracking such things for yourself.)

Want another selective tariff that could have advanced U.S. interests? 

How about we use tariffs to pressure countries to stop buying Russian oil, till Putin withdraws from Ukraine? And punish countries like Panama and Gabon and all the other 'flags of convenience' till they stop shilling for Russian tankers that are evading sanctions and rusting into ecological time bombs? More generally, notice that Trump made no actual demands!

Instead? Notice that Russia was left out of any mention on Trumps list of a zillion super-tariffed nations. Why would that be?

Because while Don howls words occasionally toward Putin -- purely for show -- he never ever ever ever does any actual acts that negatively affect his Kremlin master. 

Ever.

== The distilled frothy essence atop the poop pile ==

I could go on about the Trump Tariff War. But of course it boils down to two things that should be plain to anyone. 

First: it's primarily the USA and our friends who will get harmed, but never our enemies...

... and second: it's all jibbering lunacy! Perp'd by a clown car of capering idiots. 

Dig it: during Trump v.1.0 (#45) he at least appointed a veneer of adults to top positions... then got pissed off when ALL of those adults (Tillerson, McMaster, Barr etc.) turned on him, denouncing him as a raving moron and Kremlin agent. 

The one absolute fact about Trump v 2.0 (#47) is the total absence of any adults in the room. 

None. Anywhere. Not one appointee who is actually suited or qualified for the job. Just toadies. Lickspittle and (my personal theory) blackmailed to ensure utter loyalty. See the pattern. Because no one in media - not even a single liberal pundit - is tracking the obvious.

== A few more things to notice ==

I was gonna do all the tariff stuff as 'blips' but there was no way to condense those complicated aspects. So, here are a few items that may qualify as 'blips':

SIGNAL GATE. Remember the Signal Idiocy? 

("Oh, Brin, that was so 'last week.'" Yeah yeah. Libs never notice that a core KGB/MAGA tactic is to distract from one scandal by moving on to the next one!)

Sure, liberal and moderate media did an okay job blaring at some aspects of the insipidly dumb "Signalgate" Scandal, wherein a dozen top Trumpian cabinet officials illegally used an non-secure, unvetted chat system to giggle-blather top secret information about a looming US military action against the Yemeni Houthi rebel enclave... while one member of the chat was even in a notoriously non-secure Moscow hotel, at that very moment! 

And of course, everyone in media shouted that our National Security Adviser invited a top-level critic/reporter into the chat without vetting nor any participant (not even the Director of National 'Intelligence') even noticing.   

Still and alas, as always, no one in either moderate or liberal media commented that:

1. Not a single military officer was part of the conversation about a major military operation. Sure, it's consistent with the all-out Republican campaign against the entire senior officer corps. The men and women who have been most dedicated to service and fact-centered responsibility. And competence! 

No, no, we can't have anyone like that in a conversation about a military operation. Some common sense might leak in and pollute the purity of blithering idiocy.

2. Um... but... WHY attack the Houthis? I am sure someone in media must have asked that, but I never saw it.  Indeed, the dumbitude aspects of "Signalgate" perfectly distracted from that bigger question.

Think about it. The Houthis are at war with the Saudis. And every Republican administration, without exception, does the bidding of the Saudi Royal House instantly and without question. Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and Trump. Good doggies.

But are WE served by enraging potential new bin Ladens into swearing revenge on America?

Sure, the Houthis are Shiite friends of Iran... and Iran is best buds with Putin. But then so are the Saudis... and so is Trump. Confused yet? Then look for the common thread. 

What they ALL want - and seek from Trump - is the fall of American liberal democracy. And any sign of a world governed by a transparent Rule of Law. 

Distilled in its essence, the Houthis are the least culpable party in any of this. All they want is to be left alone. Oh, their current leadership is likely a pack of radical jerks. But if a fair referendum were held, 90%+ of the population of North Yemen would vote for independence and peace and membership in the family of nations. 

Above all, do we really need more enemies, right now?

== And WHY the DOGE mass firings? ==

Ay Carumba!  I've seen NO ONE in media or politics even try to penetrate this question!

Dig it: The oligarchy and their foreign backers don't give a damn about the Department of Education. Or massive firings at the VA or Social Security, or Commerce or Agriculture or Parks and so on. There's no underlying goal of "efficiency." 

If they wanted that, they could have done it the way that Al Gore did with his massively effective efficiency campaign in the 90s.

No. All the slashed civil servants I just mentioned, and thousands more were attacked and their services to citizens cauterized for one reason. The same old reason that liberal and moderate pundits always fall-for. Distraction from the real targets.

1. I mentioned the United States senior military officer corps. The smart and savvy and dedicated generals and admirals must be brought to heel!

2. The FBI and all related law professionals. Um duh? But above all...

3. The Internal Revenue Service. The greatest accomplishment of the 2021 Pelosi bills was to fully fund the IRS, which had been starved by GOP Congresses into using 1970s computers and crippled for lack of personnel from auditing the super-rich tax cheaters... 

...cheaters who were left terrified by that legislation!  And I assert that the topmost reason they pushed hard for Donald Trump was to get this opportunity to re-gut the IRS.

And failure to even note or mention that aspect only proves my point about the moderate and liberal and Democrat political and punditry caste.  Oh, many of them are decent people, with far lower rates of every turpitude than their corrupt, perverted and blackmailed GOP counterparts...

...but smart? 

Tardigrades. Tardigrades all the way down.

== There's so much more... ==

...but no time or room for any more this weekend. 

Oh I am sure that some of the items I cite above were mistaken or cockeyed. But suffice it to say that those in media who failed to note any of them are proving to be almost as incompetent and blind as the fools who ran the Harris campaign and put us into this mess.

But YOU don't have to be blind!  

You can spread word about some of these things. Get others to see what has NOT been spoon-fed to them by simplistic media. And if you get any of the complicit dopes to put up wager stakes, I'll happily provide ways and means to take their money.

Heinlein had it right.  The way to ultimately emerge from The Crazy Years is to spread sanity.

----------------------

----------------------

**The idiocy of Kamala Harris's advisers, for not emphasizing the return of U.S. manufacturing instead of just shouting "Abortion!" ten million times - disqualifies them from any future role in Democratic politics. Kamala herself was fine. Her political mavens should have no future role.

Science Fictional News & Updates - spring 2025

First, long-awaited news! My 1st novel -SUNDIVER- never had a hardcover, till now! Phantasia Press has issued a special, limited edition of SUNDIVER, finely-bound with interiors and gorgeous cover, all by the epic artist Jim Burns! Not cheap. But if you want a lovely edition with quality to survive several geological epochs...;-)

(BTW... people keep kvelling about potential Startide or Uplift War movies. But I think Sundiver is the obvious one! A murder mystery in which the victim gets dumped into the Sun? Take that on, CSI!)

 Second 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 Out of Time novels, including great tales by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch, and Roger Allen. The shared motif... teens from across time are pulled into the 24th Century, asked to use their unique skills to help a future that's in peril!  Among 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. 

== A special event ==

This is way cool. A video interview with two terrific academics concerning one of the ‘lost’ founders of modern science fiction – the 19th century author, Robert Duncan Milne – who they are in-effect resurrecting from obscurity in a soon published book. Co-authored by Ari Brin! On the daringly named ‘cast “Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever.”  A new anthology - The Essential Robert Duncan Milne - was released in January.  One of the best anthologies of classic SF I ever saw, along with cogent commentary.

== Lists of great Sci Fi! ==

An insightful top-ten Science Fiction Novels list about the general notion of humanity dealing with inscrutable alien minds - with mentions of Existence along with some great company, including Robert Charles Wilson’s terrific Blind Lake, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. 

And another list: SF novels that won both the Hugo and the Nebula… though that seems almost required, nowadays, now that the voting pools almost precisely overlap. 

Audacity has published a fine audio for your commute - David Brin on First Contact in "Existence,"- wherein I cover a wide range of topics, from AI to the Fermi Paradox.

This one is of actual - or likely - importance to human survival! The TASAT project (There's A Story About That) is doing great! I've touted it before - a special service I tried to bring into the world for almost 20 years. And now, thanks master programmer Todd Zimmerman, it lives!  Come by TASAT.org and see how there's a small but real chance that nerdy SciFi readers like YOU might one day save the world!

Among the many topics that have come up on the lively TASAT site has been great opening lines in science fiction. 

Well, here’s an older blog in which I compile some of my favorites – and many others appear in comments! Though my favorite opening sentence, from a recent novel, The Melody of Memory, goes like this:

“I was nine when my words saved a man’s life; it wasn’t till later that my words killed him.”

== And more sci fi news ==

Taking classic novels to the big screen...Certainly I expect wonderful things, when Denis Villeneuve  films Arthur Clarke’s wonderful Rendezvous with Rama. Still, I nurse a fond hope that Villeneuve will consider splicing in elements from Greg Bear’s magnificent novel Eon. Which expands exponentially on the rather spare (and just a little disappointing) vagueness of Arthur’s story.

Sci Fi great Ed Lerner is interviewed here about fusion and anti-matter, electromagnetic bottles, the Albercurrie drive for warping space-time to get around the speed limit of light, and neutrino communications. Plus the Prime Directive, the Drake equation, the Fermi Paradox, scientific revolutions and evolutions, stealth technologies, and alien monitoring stations keeping an eye on Earth in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.

Want escape? I read opening scenes of Existence. More is free at the book's website. Plus the vivid trailer with tons of great art by Patrick Farley! 

And yet-more news from (or about) Spaaaaaace!

NOTE: I offer a bit of a riff about the rarity of science - not just on Earth but possibly across the cosmos - at the end. 

We are gadually trying to resume 'normal' life after our family suffered a 'disruption' in our living arrangements that has left us frazzled, with little time for blog updates. But things are a bit better now, so here is... a roundup of recent* space news and updates.

*(Well, 'recent' as of when these postings were actually drafted, in January, before we realized how crazy things were gonna get!)

== Heading for the moon ==

Sending landers to the lunar surface: In mid-January, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched two commercial landers - Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander and Japan's ispace's Resilence lander - to the moon. 

The landers contain scientific instruments to analyze the lunar regolith and magnetosphere, and set up a moon-based global navigation system, laying the groundwork for future lunar missions.

*As of March 30... well... any space junkies know how it went.

== Rogue planets all over! ==

One of the imperfectly insufficient (by itself) but substantially plausible theories for the Great Silence or “Fermi Paradox” (terrible name) is that interstellar travel… even at just 10% of light speed… is made very difficult by a minefield of hidden obstacles.  No, I am not talking about my short story “Crystal Spheres.”  But rather, these would be rogue planets that are untethered from stars. Every year we find they are more common in the galaxy.

For example, the infrared-sensitive Webb Telescope has found hundreds… down to Saturn size, just in the Orion Nebula, alone! Forty-two of them are in binary pairs. Wow. Implicit: billions of free-floating planets in the darkness between the stars.

One more incredible accomplishment by this fantastic instrument that this fantastic, scientific civilization created, in our steady and accelerating progress as apprentices in the Laboratory of Creation! 

And yet some ignore the almost (or actual) theological significance of these incredible accomplishments (Robots roaming Mars! New human-made life forms! The new skills to save this beautiful world from … ourselves!) Okay, grad students in Creation’s Lab should respect those who clutch the Kindergarten text given to illiterate shepherds. Fine. 

But those who wage all-out war vs science are clearly the real heretics, here.

See more incredible Webb Wonders!  A way-kewl podcast from Fraser Cain. 

== Monitoring Methane Emissions ==

Among the worst criminals alive today are those who are deliberately venting methane into the atmosphere. After GOP Congresses deliberately canceled or slashed the satellites to track down vents and Trump delayed them, we now, at last, have the policing tools. A satellite that measures methane leaks from oil and gas companies is set to start circulating the Earth 15 times a day next month. Google plans to have the data mapped by the end of the year for the whole world to see. (Thanks Sergey.)

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas estimated to be responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming. Scientists say slashing methane emissions is one of the fastest ways to slow the climate crisis because methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a decade. Though farming is the largest source of methane emissions from human activities, the energy sector is a close second. Oil, gas, and coal operations are thought to account for 40% of global methane emissions from human activities. The IEA says focusing on the energy sector should be a priority, in part because reducing methane leaks is cost-effective. Leaking gas can be captured and sold, and the technology to do that is relatively cheap.

Two new methane-detecting satellites - Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT/EDF are now surveying the planet's climate. Because the Biden admin pushed through the quality methane satellites, the information will be so widely seen that members of the public will be able to act on their own - even despite a suborned EPA and Justice dept.  A case where the right may be bitten by the 'market/consumer alternative to government' that they have long raved about.

== Dark comets, Dwarf galaxies - and Dark Matter ==

If I had followed my original scientific path – not lured away by the likes of you telling me to write more scifi – I’d likely have been in the mix of these studies of “dark comets,” whose orbits get significantly altered by gassy or dusty emissions, the way it happens with regular, icy comets, but without any visible signs of watery volatiles. “dark comets are different from another intermediary category between asteroids and comets, known as active asteroids, although there may be some overlap. Active asteroids are objects without ice that produce a cloud of dust around them, for a variety of reasons…” 

Only the Dark Comets – and some include the odd cigar-shaped interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua' – still have no firm explanation. Though some theories suggest emission of some volatile substance that doesn’t leave an ionized spectral trace.

The Milky Way’s central (huge) black hole is spinning surprisingly fast and out of orientation with the rest of the galaxy; the reasons remain unknown. Now, data from the Event Horizon Telescope - that first captured the black hole's image in 2022 has revealed a clue: The Sagittarius A* we see today was born from a cataclysmic merger with another giant black hole billions of years ago.

Dark matter might not just be the silent partner of the universe—it could be the secret to understanding how supermassive black holes unite in their deadly dance. 

Attempts to figure out dark matter have pinned hopes on the possibility that the dark… bits… whatever they might be… interact with regular matter in some way – even very slightly – beyond just gravity. At least that’s been the hope of particle physicists with their big machines. So far, the indicators suggest ‘only gravity.’ But this study of nearby anomalous dwarf galaxies hints there might be just a little something more.

== A couple of final notes about you-know-what ==

Science is - above all - about chasing down what's true about objective reality, even when the results conflict with your wishes or preconceptions. 

This human-invented process has led to all of the benefits of enlightenment: unprecedented wealth, comfort, knowledge, safety and - yes - comparative peace... along withg our recent ambitions to overcome a myriad errors through cheerful exchange of criticism. Errors like prejudicial assumptions about whole classes of people. Errors like mismanaging a fragile planet.  

Alas, science is a rare phenomenon. Rare across human history and -- given the way that evolution works -- probably rare across the universe. (My own top explanation for the Fermi Paradox, by the way.)

Across human history, science - and its ancillary arts like equality before law - almost never happened. Instead, people in most societies preferred stories. Incantations about the world, told by their parents and then by priests and by kings.  I know about this, having had successful careers in both science and storytelling. I know the differences and the overlaps very well. 

While romance and stories are essential to being human, they also can lead directly to horrors and Auschwitz, if they allow evil incantation-spewers to rile up whole populations toward hatred and cauterized hope. 

Anyone who does not recognize what I just described as THE essential thing now happening across the globe is already lost to reason. 

Moreover, if the recent trend - reverting human civilization back to 10,000 years of nescient rule by inheritance brats and chanting incantation spinners - does succeed at suppressing the rare era of science, then we'll truly have our answer for why no voices can be heard ac ross the cosmos.