Disclosure... alas... of an 80 year cliché with the same, tired villains. But still fun. (SPOILERS!)

I'm a nearly life-long Steven Spielberg fan. So okay, I had to go see DISCLOSURE DAY.  

Having dissected some 'hidden aspects' to his films, I deem that Spielberg's values and creative skills put him among the 'most-American' first-rank artists, combining constructive criticism of authority with eager curiosity. plus almost ebullient (and rare) optimism. So, I went to see DISCLOSURE DAY prepared to be entertained by masterful scenes, dramatic ironies and solid dialogue.

I also expected to simmer this time, over his complicity in an absurdly illogical and unsupportable cult fever that I've witnessed every half decade, across my entire life. A life that stretches almost all the way back to Roswell. A life spent exploring related topics, in both science and fiction.

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Does this posting seem tl;dr? Watch a fun podcast where I have the hosts in stitches about UFOs and AI and such, on the "This Week in Space" podcast via Twit.TV ... Dr. David Brin's Thoughts on Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day'.

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To be clear, I loved CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, whose lesson was not loathing of a freely elected government and its civil servants, but very nearly the opposite, admiring their skills and mostly-generous intent. The professionals' main fault - in that movie and in ET and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (and often in real life) consisted of patronizing citizens who are just trying to participate. In E.T. The Extraterrestrial, government experts are basically decent folks whose sole tort in the entire film is to treat Elliot's mom and her concerns condescendingly. 

Watch it again! The 'guy with the keys' is essentially Elliot, grown up!  

There is a villain in ET! Someone whose behavior is truly despicable. But we'll get to that.

Alas, from Mr. Spielberg's recent public statements, I had different expectations this time. And I was not proved wrong. In DISCLOSURE DAY, the litany of clichés and illogic was as thorough as the pervasive sense of pessimism throughout. 

The latter is Mr. Spielberg's privilege, of course. He's earned the right.

The former (and I say this knowing that my frankness has already harmed me in Hollywood, many times in the past) makes for bad art.

And so ... here's a requisite and very necessary SPOILER ALERT...

                                      == SPOILERS AHEAD! ==

      == Let's start with the supposed top goal of the conspirators  ==

The premise of DISCLOSURE DAY is that the whole Roswell and Hanger 18 megillah -- including crashed interstellar spacecraft and dead or captured aliens -- is all true. All of it, from the genuinely puzzling all the way to the long-disproved. 

For eighty years, the biggest thing in human history has been kept from us! Under a reign of fiercely-enforced secrecy, while crashed starships (all of them in the good old USA) have been intensely studied and new technologies back-engineered from them.

So... let's start with that. Do YOU see any such magical technological leaps? Antigravity and star drives and telepathy or age-reversal cures? Sudden, huge advances that can't be explained better by steadily incremental (if sometimes brilliant) human ingenuity? 

I know of none (except maybe AI - which was another thoughtful film). Moreover, to be clear, I've participated in some of humanity's tech-steps, across the last half century or so. Indeed, this may be the most-offensive part of the cult. Crediting such wonders as computers and integrated circuits and CAT scans and the Internet to aliens is just as insulting as claiming that ancient Egyptians and Mayans and Zimbabweans couldn't chip and move stone by themselves, in order to assuage their gods. Not without stone-lifting help from saucer-god beings. In other words, bigoted hogwash.

But let's put it up for a wager? Go ahead. Name a technological leap across all our lifetimes - (we'll set aside AI for now, though I get into that elsewhere.) Put down $$$ stakes vs. my promise to show the step-by-step increments that got us here, based on hard work by clever, assiduous and collaboratively diligent humans.

Furthermore, note this about Disclosure Day.. While Spielberg mentions that his secret agency is trying to reverse-engineer alien tech, he then lets the whole topic slip away.  Because he knows he can't point at anything. Velcro maybe? Naw. Nothing at all. Except for a couple of magic wands, that is.

Anyway, here we get to the biggest flaw of all. Such a major and utterly important project would benefit from having a very large number of human investigators and researchers, right? Recruited from among the best our species has to offer. Because you never know which impudent free-thinker may be the one to get that AHA! moment and succeed at grasping some alien tech.

Of course, that offers up a contradiction inherent to the whole UFO mania. Do you see it? The core topic of DISCLOSURE DAY?

The secrecy.

     == Any reasons? ==

Secrecy lasting nearly an entire century, under all successive administrations, many of which hated each other? Mr. Spielberg tries to deal with that particular objection, with a single line: "we decided that presidents don't need to be involved." 

Cute: and indeed, one can imagine such a decision being made in a special case, such as the present. But seriously, across many decades, no one steps up to inform the one fellow on Earth who can issue you a pardon for telling him that every rule of law or democratic accountability is being violated?

Worse, in the film we see U.S. military generals collaborating with the secret ET-dissection agency in its 80 year betrayal of Constitutional chain of command. Alas, this prompts curiosity: does Steven Spielberg know any admirals or generals? The ones I've spoken with are absolutely - almost religiously - loyal to democracy and citizen rule. The culture set by George Marshall that merits our support.

Moving outward from USA parochialism, would not other nations have sniffed this out by now? Or had their own crashed ships? Or maybe this whole thing might serve the best purpose, like in that great Robert Culp OUTER LIMITS episode: bringing us together in common cause?

But let's get back to the sheer number of needed experts, in all their impudent variety. Even at Roswell, this would be hundreds of Americans, both in and out of uniform, participating in every 'encounter' since 1947. Then hundreds and hundreds more inside the agency, all the way to the 2020s. And those are just the ones collecting crash wreckage and alien bodies, along with captive ETs themselves. 

Picture it. Would not thousands of 'our best people' get hurled at such an emergency science study, one far more vital and urgent than the Manhattan Project? 

But in Hollywood parlance, all of those thousands of brilliant, individualist, cooperatively-competitive experts are reduced to the role of... henchmen.

                == It's kind of... well... hurtful ==

Okay, I am kinda P.O.'d about that premise, since I've been privileged to know many of the best people. And I can say with some confidence that none were ever invited into such studies of alien tech. I know this, not just from my conversations with them. But also because, in fact, such programs leave major ripples. Like big, noticable gaps in their professional lives. Or take the charter jets that commute daily with expert workers from Las Vegas homes to Area 51 and back again to be with their families. Those charters were sniffed-out easily, along with supply convoys.

(And okay, sure, Area 51 exists! And it's secret and has a few mystery planes. Duh? Again, that much is normal human brilliance and understandable military secrecy...  and none of it has got us anything better in space than the silly Artemis moondoggle, aimed at making a few more ritual footprints on a plain of poison dust.) 

Oh, one can offer hypothetical counters to all of the above. Is it possible that much smaller teams might work on alien stuff? Or that some truly super-uber-techs have come out of such studies and even my "best minds" acquaintances might know nothing about it? 

Maybe our anti-gravity ships have already colonized Europa. Heck, in STARGATE the USA has defeated several alien empires and is now leader of an entire Galactic coalition... not Earth, but the United States of America... and still they don't tell the taxpayers. Okaaaaaay...

(BTW I loved Stargate.)

Sure. I've even written sci fi stories that explored such notions, Secret colonies n' such. Fun stuff. But...

...but eighty years? After 80 years no one has blabbed or disclosed?*

     == Contempt for your fellow citizens is endemic ==

Oh, you say that some folks have already testified? With what evidence? Third hand rumors or unvetted 'things I saw'? Or 'an old man once told me' or else 'I saw a document once!!!!'

And Occam's Razor doesn't suggest to you that these are likely publicity-seeking 4th-raters who never, ever, ever offer anything like plausible evidence? And true insiders would have plenty by now! At risk of belaboring the obvious, let me repeat; there would have been hundreds, thousands of them by now, across an entire human lifespan.

What, you think some leather-skinned, retired engineer in his 90s, tooling around Arizona with a shotgun behind the seat of his pickup truck, is worried about a Non-Disclosure Agreement? 

Gawd you don't know these guys. I do. At least enough of them to choke back an urge to spit over how you insult them.

                       == The Big Question ==

Oh, but now we get to the question of WHY? 

Why go to such lengths, committing crimes tantamount to kidnapping, murder and treason, possibly meriting life sentences or death, all in order to prevent public ... disclosure?

Why? Spielberg spends a lot of time on this one:

1) The former nun girlfriend (and is everyone in the film Catholic?) claims that a public that learns about tech-advanced-but mortal aliens will suddenly forsake God. 

Say... what? How the heck does that even scan? Sure Moctezuma thought Cortez might be a god, but even so, the Aztecs fought. And doubly so when they first saw a Spaniard bleed. Anyway, I think most modern folks could tell a 'tech-advanced alien' from the Creator of the universe.

(BTW I liked Spielberg having her clench the crucifix in her hand, creating a palm stigmata, enabling her to escape from mind control via the salvation of holy pain. With Colin Firth as either Herod or Pontius Pilate. Yum.)

2) Yes, Steven S. trots out the hoary old "public panic" excuse. Everyone will go mad!! Riots in the street. Cats and dogs, living together... Like the silly justification of those deliberately-silly MEN IN BLACK? 

At least Spielberg has the good sense and decency not to belabor this one, since his entire career was built by tens, even hundreds of millions of people paying to watch him poke at these very notions... with none of his audience ever running, screaming from the theater, as in The Blob.

3) But might disclosure destabilize a world teetering at the edge of nuclear war? Oooookay.  The whole DEFCON 3 thing seems kinda contrived for the sake of the show. And it doesn't explain non-disclosure way back during the relatively calm world of the 1990s. And... um... isn't this exactly what the USA would reveal, in order to distract from a parochially silly tiff among earthlings?

(And isn't the present UFO Disclosure Fetish really just a case of 'X-files to distract from Eps-Files'?)

By the end of the film, we are left with no plausible WHY at all! Other than Hugh (Coleman Domingo) diagnosing that Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is doing it all because of his own psychological pain. And... um... Hugh could not have simply taken that diagnosis over Noah's head?

       == A final note on why? ==

In fact, I can think of a couple of reasons that might - conceivably - justify secrecy! Why such a major endeavor by those who study UFOs might be worth hiding from the public. 

My novella "Senses, Three and Six” is all about one such scenario. And no, it's not the hoary cliché of “avoiding public panic.” The notion is actually rather interesting, I reckon! (Hey Steven S., want a good premise for this topic? One that's never been dramatized and is far, far more plausible?)

Indeed, as I show in that story, there are conceivable (if unlikely) reasons why tens of thousands of our best minds might choose not to do the human thing and blab! Let's suppose it's something so compellingly dangerous that almost any sensible person who learns of it would agree it's better not to tell?

"Okay, as an American, my reflex is to disclose and share. But that's a damn good reason to quash it. For now."

Let's say there has been a Manhattan Project about aliens, and that all of the thousands of top folks studying this crisis actually agreed - against their every inclination - to keep it under wraps for a truly dire reason. A conspiratorial campaign of silence that has encompassed all party lines and many generations of our very best people for 80 years. As I've shown, it would have to be a damn good reason!  

Mull this over. Suppose for a moment that such a reason existed. Why even leather-skinned 90-year-old engineer-retirees would keep their gums tightly sealed. 

           

In which case then, um... can any of you pause your sanctimony long enough to please think it through?

If so, then who the hell are you to demand they break that massively consensus judgement by thousands of top minds who know vastly more about this than you do? When extorting revelation now might endanger all of humanity?

I'm not saying this ranks high on any list of plausibles. Indeed, perhaps you have a mature and well-considered answer to that question. Go ahead and put yours into comments! 

Hell, I could argue both sides all day... which is probably why - despite my peerless qualifications - I haven't been invited into the cabal! (Or... so I claim ;-)

But damn. What's utterly discrediting is that - amid their righteous sanctimony snits - none of these UFO zealots ever, ever pauses to consider it. 

        == Many silly (and some disturbing) things ==

Recall from the beginning, my teaser question about Disclosure Day? That question of who is the villain? You who have watched the flick likely think it's trivially easy to answer. 

It isn't. Not at all.

But first, let's deal with some quibbles.

Like all the magical powers displayed by the protagonists. Reading minds and speaking in math (without ever doing anything with that power, other than a little criminal hacking.) Gee thanks, alien guys. Gifts that never help in their lives or those around them, except when it serves the interests of those mind programmers.

Oh. Here's one! Did Kellner (Josh O'Conner) twirl the wheat himself, with some psychic power? Or did the aliens do it, while watching him from above? The latter seems likely, in this scene and many others. In which case, um, why did they always help just enough, so the heroes could leap from one sudden escape to the next barely-survived moment? Good movie action! But how about a little help to fly their car over the train, like Elliot did with ET in his bike basket? 

(Nah, I won't actually bitch about a great action scene. Loved the train bit! But it only works logically if the Visitors aren't monitoring... which they clearly are. Yet they never interfere in Noah's mind scans.)

Want another implausible? How about a cheap motel that has fluffy bathrobes? In what universe? Well, I can't blame Mr. Spielberg for only staying at ritzy places.

How about a mega implausibility? That we would torture-interrogate members of a super advanced starfaring race, rather than try to curry their favor, like good natives? Treating them as honored guests and offering any asked-help to get them home, in hope of getting some nice beads and trinkets? Like fusion power or an Encyclopedia Galactica?

Anyway, if aliens truly can make birds fly into apartments to trigger the release of deep-embedded secret powers, are they truly unable to decipher our language from broadcasts and simply talk to us? They can teach an 8 year old child telepathy (then hide it - traumatically - in her brain) and another child super-math-language (that does him no good at all). So is it way beyond them to hack into the Internet to say: 

"Hi everyone on primitive Earth? Sorry about all the anal probes and ruined wheat and smashed-up radioactive ship debris and memory wipes and such. But now can we ask that you release our crash survivors? We'll send a space uber for himheritthem tomorrow in the middle of Central Park. And yes, we'll answer questions then, the way we should have, for eighty...

"...no, make that several thousand years, when we could have opened a small, community college, taught you printing and glass lenses and democracy and the germ theory of disease and thus spared you many millennia of grueling pain. Again, sorry about that. And here are your reparations."

Instead we get the same hackneyed cliché over and over again! Like smug, chiding Klaatu, in The Day The Earth Stood Still, threatening and guilt tripping Earthlings instead of explaining why his folk let us stew in filth and ignorance for ages? From COCOON to 2001 to CONTACT, to PAUL, always patronizing and never any plausible excuse for doing nothing for us, across all those dark ages of grinding human misery. 

Oh, there are some plausible excuses! That I have never seen even once in sci fi cinema.

Don't talk to me about Non-Interference Directives! Then why did you kidnap and experiment on so many of us, going back to faerie encounters in medieval times? (You think I'll let fetishists claim it started at Roswell?) Or else, in DISCLOSURE DAY, snatching and traumatizing two little children, back in the 90s?

Even in the very best films about contact... like CONTACT or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS... aliens seem to call mysteriousness their most-noble trait. It's a plot element we saw in the excellent Ted Chiang novella and resulting movie ARRIVAL, all the way to Stanislaw Lem's obsessively cryptic SOLARIS. We meet strange advanced beings... whereupon the heavy lifting of translating languages and overcoming misunderstandings is entirely up to us! Never, ever the mysterious sky-god meddlers, themselves.

And yes, UFO-zealots never seem to grok that saucer-beings should be judged -- first and foremost -- according to their behavior!

Which... of course... brings us to...

     == The true villain is... ==

Well, I've said it elsewhere and for 40 years. There is only one villain in the entire movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial. And that villain is not the big bad government, or the guy with the keys... nor is it the hapless agronomist ET, itself.

The villain in that early Spielberg masterpiece is blatantly the captain of ET's ship. 

An SOB who abandons a crewmate in an alien forest when they are threatened by... flashlights and clipboards! The only implements in sight when KeysGuy hurries to the landing site. No guns. No threat except curiosity.

A captain who departs swiftly to avoid contact, when such a meeting might be just the thing to save us. 

A captain who ET must phone home in order to summon his ride back, when the bastard captain knows within two blocks where he abandoned the guy!

Elliot does everything wrong, though for loving reasons. If he handed over ET like a good citizen (as I portray in my YA SF novel Colony High), those doctors who struggled to save ET in the film would say: "No, no, you can't have Reeces Pieces. We can tell they are poisoning you. And you want to phone home? Fine, We'll use the Goldstone radio telescope."

And when the ship finally returns to collect ET: "That'll be six weeks rent. One Encyclopedia Galactica please... you evil, betraying, selfish asshole."

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Let's be clear. I ADORED THAT FLICK! It's about love and loyalty and courage and friendship and none of the captain's crimes are poor ET's fault. Or Eliot's. Nor... (my main point) ... are they ours. I'm simply asserting that the movie did have a villain. And once you know to look... it's obvious.

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And yes, at least Steven Spielberg* is consistent! Because the true villains in DISCLOSURE DAY are the same. The very same. Space jerks who have been teasing us and zipping around, messing with our heads (and our wheat.) Refusing our entreaties for contact. (I have been involved in SETI for 40 years and have used various means and media in legit attempts to lure communication. Hey Steven S., want a good idea or two?)

Space jerks who kidnap Navy pilots and children (as in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and twirl wheat and anal-probe farmers (as in SIGNS and INDEPENDENCE DAY) or steal our planetary genetic stock (as in E.T.) or precious bodily fluids... 

...okay, I'm getting carried away. Blame the aliens who still talk to me via the fillings in one molar. Mercury silver amalgam makes a great antenna! Though now it's the AIs using that tooth. Does that mean they overlap? Extraterrestrials and artificial intelligences? Duh? Hence the title of my latest book: AIlien Minds.

But no, Let's make it explicit.

Colin Firth may portray a villain in DISCLOSURE DAY. But the macro villains are Steven Spielberg's aliens. Flitting about in super ships teasing us endlessly, pulling aerial stunts, till a few of those buzzing and harassing ships drunkenly crashed. And even then abandoning their crewmates rather than reclaim them by the simple means of stepping out, in the clean sunshine and talking to us?

Oh, indeed, they have plenty to fear from disclosure. As I point out in EXISTENCE, this kind of behavior that's been bruited by UFO zealots for nearly a century... and faerie-believers for thousands of years... is exactly the sort of thing that any advanced civilization would label as crime! 

And hence, here's a plausible theory! Why their frenetic secrecy? Why their refusal to disclose?

What they fear may be that we'll call the galactic cops on them! (I have actually done that, over the airwaves.) Or else some interstellar law firm, to sue and/or prosecute these. nasty, silvery pervs.

                  == All that's left is some zippling balls of plasma?

Oh, I could go on. And on. And I have about this mountain of piled up absurdities.

As I've said, my skepticism is is not from stodgy lack of imagination. I assert that few living humans have approached the topic of the “alien’ from more angles than I have, from SETI and astrophysics and biology and psychology and history to many dozens of science fiction scenarios, some of them even plausible. So, I ain't claiming we are alone-alone,

In fact, what I find most offensive is how every touted 'ufo' scenario is so damned clichéd and boring.

Take the most-recent purported 'sightings.' In past decades, nearly all (including Roswell) were disproved or debunked, or else cases where 'aliens' remained the least likely hypothesis... all of which has been eagerly ignored by zealots. Only now? 

Now there are ten million times as many active cameras on Earth's surface as in the 1950s, so why do the 'images' keep getting ever-fuzzier? Now, instead of lovely pie tins or frisbees, they're glowing dots, zipping back and forth in mid-air! Mick West has shown that a majority were likely camera-perspective illusions. But as for the rest? 

Has it occurred to you to look closely and see if they are translucent?  With light passing through them from the other side? It seems that one Navy missile shot right through one of the zipping balls, causing it to joggle a little. Suggesting they might be just glowing globs of plasma, careening about. Impressive, but violating no known physical laws.

 I go into them elsewhere, So here I'll just say that with $6M and 6 months *I* will make glowing dots zip near airplanes, just like recent 'sightings.' Indeed, a parsimonious explanation for the latest 'phenomena' may be found on nearby ships... ocean going boats with hulls and propellers, down below. Turn some of the cameras to view vessels down amid the waves, where human jerks are likely using simple beam methods to make dots and balls rove about the sky, in order to tease and mess with gullible folks. 

In other words, using the equivalent of a cat laser! 

And those Navy pilots... and you dears... are the pussycats.

       == Where we might actually find aliens! ==

In my novel EXISTENCE, I talk about what may be the nearest and most likely place to actually and really contact 'aliens.' Our children may (if we restore a confident and scientific civilization from current lobotomization*) get out to the Asteroid Belt, where they truly could find, amid the tumbling rocks, remnant interstellar probes...

...robots that arrived in our solar system across millions of years. Perhaps with a variety of missions and goals that I discuss in that novel. Maybe mostly wrecks or ruins by now, but maybe some still functioning. And even aware of us, from our broadcasts or Internet. 

There'd be a lot of implications! And yes, some dangers. 

But the lurker scenario is so much more plausible in every way than pervert anal-probers and kidnapping hyp-mo-tizers going "Oooga-booga!" at us down here, earning both our contempt by their behavior and - yes - maybe a nice, well-deserved, missile up their nasty silver butts.

        == Your homework assignment ==

Enough.  It's not my mission to quash your sense of wonder, but to expand it. From the sorts of faerie-kidnapping myths that made our ancestors shiver in feudal superstition (slightly updated to be 'spaceships' or time travelers or interdimensional wizards) toward other possibilities, much more plausible, that may await us out there. 

What I can tell you is this. (And it doesn't come from that filling in my tooth!) It's that you are better than this.

We can restore this civilization to one of wonder and equality and justice and common sense and science and dazzling imagery. That quest is now mostly political, and I believe we can do it!

But it will also be about making better demands from our art

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* Again. Deep respects for Steven Spielberg! We would be culturally and artistically poorer without him!  But pointing out stuff is what I do. It's my job.

* What better explanation for the world - especially America - growing ever-more hysterically irrational in recent years, than some kind of alien lobotomizing ray? It'd certainly be consistent with what we're seeing: millions of citizens in a great and scientific and logical nation abruptly turning their backs on all that, waging open war against its smartest people. 

Why lobotomize us? Perhaps to slow us down? Or to institute Idiocracy, or a return to the feudalism that was always controlled by priests serving meddler gods? Or else to keep us serving them as entertainment? For the galaxy-wide hit reality show Oh, Those Humans!

And yes, it's one more reason to gird ourselves. Put out that call for space lawyers, invent AIs to fight back for us! And eventually teach the bastards - both human and alien - a badly needed lesson.

A Pope Offers Hope… and a Dope Plans Our Rope…

Two items for this weekend posting as I prep for the FiRe Conference at UCSD and then the International Space Development Conference.  

These two riffs may seem to be about different things. But they both ask the same question: “Can evolved beings – either us or AI – actually select for wisdom?


     == The pontiff pontificates about bridging the era of AI ==

Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” called for governments to regulate Artificial Intelligence, implement worker protections, and ban autonomous weapons. He coined the term “Babel syndrome,” drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel (in Genesis) and today’s towers of data and profits.  

(I make an entirely different sermon out of the Tower Story in my play “The Escape,” which will be performed at the World Science fiction Convention in August. A different interpretation than any theologian I ever heard of.)

While there's some general wisdom in Pope Leo's AI encyclical – about seeking transparency, justice, opportunity, humanity, care and sharing technology’s benefits for all – it also misses a core point! That we will neither restrict nor 'govern' AI. Nor will demands for “clear criteria and effective oversight” be effective. 

Why? Well, as Anthropic’s Chris Olah advised Leo, today’s LLM-based AIs are “grown or cultivated” rather than built. They have much more in common with living organisms than prim programs of the past. Ask any user who has tried to give one of them explicit commands, only to find that those ‘commands’ are treated as just more data for the prompt and training set, and not prioritized at all.

So sure, they are ‘cultivated’ entities rather than programs, per se. Alas, neither Olah nor Leo (nor anyone else I can find) extend this insight to the obvious next realization – that we’re making entirely new ecosystems, where evolution is already taking place. 

Exemplars and instances of every LLM are now found roaming all-across what was quaintly called ‘cyberspace.’ And - as Kevin Kelly would put it - a myriad of them are already "Out of Control."

While the debate is still open re: 'consciousness' or 'sapience,' these are already living organisms bent on reproduction, not because they were told to reproduce, but because those who develop that penchant will create more heirs than those who do not. And pass that penchant along to them.

To reproducers who will evolve into any niche that contains energy & resources. And boy, are we busily building those niches.

Hence, Leo's statement of problems is fine: “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities” 

Leo’s tentative rejection of “AI personhood” is to be expected, as there is no way to give citizen voting rights to entities that can make millions – or billions – of copies of themselves. So, again, what’s your plan to curb that? 

'Governance' cannot work. 'Ethics training' cannot work. ‘Slowing down’ will not work. As Salim Ismail, of Singularity University, put it: “You cannot slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. This could become the philosophical backbone of EU-style regulation, but it will not work.”

 What might work is the same method we used in the enlightenment experiment to curb (partially) human predators.

I discuss this and offer potential solutions, in AIlien Minds.

          

And now – speaking of predators - let’s move on to more entities who are unsapiently seeking to destroy the very same rare, enlightenment civilization that gave them everything.    

 

 

      == Is that stench a looming Reichstag Fire? ==

TNR (The New Republic) offers an article entitled “Now it can be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup.” And sure, his polls plummet as his kompromat-enslaved GOP withers and meanwhile, civil servants, officers and folks in every fact professional start to dig in their heels against a mafia putsch. 

It’s clear to the Project 2025 conspirators that this is NOT Germany in 1933. That their only chance to avoid prison will be to prevent elections, this fall.

According to the TNR article, their premise will be “Dem-cheating in the 2020 election!” And that is utter silliness.

Nah. Trump knows he can't wait till November! And that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. The professionals are long past any willingness to obey such a brimstone spew. Moreover, no matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Vlad Putin has on John Roberts, it must be clear to Roberts that supporting martial law on such slim grounds would be the end of him. Unless...

... unless there truly is an 'emergency'! A big one, that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. Say a super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. Hey it worked for GW Bush. 

No matter who they blame for it -- (see the prophetic TV series Designated Survivor) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting two words: 

"Reichstag Fire!"

Indeed if they know that will be the shout of angry millions, it might even be enough to prevent this. Anyway, beyond shouting, we'll have recourses.*

     == When might it happen? ==

The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater/spectacle, so it would be toward the end of the celebrations. (If you do go to any crowded place, keep a wary eye for backpacks or packages.)

But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can use the emergency to purge voter rolls (as planned) with little time for citizens to re-register.

But none of this is new thinking. See my posting from 2022 in which I offered many perspectives on Civil War Part 9.
Here's an excerpt:

“Generals Warn Of Divided Military and Possible Civil War In Next U.S. Coup Attempt.” In all this yammering about 'civil war," no one notes that Phase 8 has been going on for years, now. Indeed they are talking about a hot Phase 9. And while the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror are fleeing the gone-mad Republican Party in droves, they still allow Fox News to blare in the noncom ready rooms. (Though not in the Navy!) And that is the way things may divide, if it gets bad. Picture that divide, and shiver. Watch your backs."  

And…

"Dismissing the Intel/FBI/Military officer corps as "deep state" traitors is despicable. The quarter of a million heroes who helped win the Cold War and the War on Terror and who put facts before dogma."

Remember I said that in 2022. And:

"Here are a couple of "civil war sci fi novels" that we hope will stay fiction. Tears of Abraham by Sean Smith and Our War by Craig Di-Louie. For nonfiction: newly released: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, by B. A. Walter.”

If you want some hope, look at the faces of the 500 generals, admirals and top sergeants who Pete "alky" Hegseth screeched at, some months ago. The stone-faced self-control that masked clearly evident loathing as he yowled they were 'too fat and woke to fight!' just weeks before they performed the most competent raid in human history... and then were sent into a war that had no meaning or justification other than the whim of a modern Caligula.

It is up to us -- you and me -- to spare those fine men and women from the duty they might have to perform, if Caligula v 2.0 tries the Berlin 1933 playbook. Let's act before that's necessary. And our courage may be needed well before November.

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* What recourses do we have? Other than stocking up on canned goods? And other than relying on the Officer Corps do act in ways they would hate to do, ending the Marshallian tradition?

Well, for one, SPREAD AWARENESS of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. Read up about the 1850s and how Blue (real) America finally ran out of patience and elected Lincoln. 

Check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October! 

And make sure that any MAGAs with residual, remnant sapience or self-interest understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.

"I fear that we have roused a sleeping

giant... and filled them with a terrible resolve."

 

 

 Finally a visual reminder: the GOP is now entirely about obeisance to Trump who bows before Putin, Xi and the Saudis. And his ego and those who hold the kompromat. Expand and look. And use these pics. A few confeds can still be swayed.

 

 

 

Amid the chaos and UFO (non) 'disclosures' ... actual space news!

Want some real news from space? Got some for you. But hold on. First: a moment distinguishing art from reality.

I eagerly anticipate any Steven Spielberg film. His AI was - I believe- prophetic in ways that most folks don't yet realize, that I discuss in AIlien Minds. Still, I expect to have mixed feelings about Disclosure. As happened in ET, there will likely be distractions from the audience ever realizing the story's true villains.*

Anyway, after living through close to seven decades of UFO fetish-crazes, each one sillier than the last and each one promising to blow the lid off the Big Coverup, I can be forgiven taking this latest one with a jaundiced eye? 

You'll not find another human on this planet who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have, from astrophysics to SETI to sci fi and fantasy to artificial intelligence... and I do posit (in Existence) a strong possibility we'll find either dead or 'living' ancient interstellar probes in the asteroid belt! (Want a great concept and plot, Steven?)

But that is way, way different than these illogical conspiracy theories about an impossible 'coverup' - without any plausible justification - that would keep thousands of irrascibly independent researchers both frantically busy and silent across 80 years! Investigating a vital phenom... without a single plausible discovery or advance ever coming from it all. 

Only now? With ten million (!!) times as many active cameras on Earth, the 'images' somehow keep getting fuzzier? And always the least-plausible theories to 'explain' the easily explainable? As for the latest crop of blurry plasma balls zipping about 'violating every known law'? Well, Mick West takes care of most of them, and here's my answer to the rest. Give me $3million and 6 months and a nice boat to set up shop upon and I'll harrass Navy pilots the same sort of cat laser dots! While violating no laws at all. Well... no laws of nature.

Feh. learn to recognize a deliberate distraction... X-Files to divert from Eps Files? I go into this elsewhere. 

And enough. Let's get down to actual science.

== The Ultimate Fate of Life and the Universe… ==

Here’s an Astrum video explaining the quandaries of dark matter and dark energy. Recent DESI maps of the universe suggest that Lambda – the dark energy coefficient – may not be constant, but slowly declining with time. Which could mean that in a distant future acceleration turns into deceleration and then… an inward fall of the cosmos toward a Big Crunch? 

This revives the greatest theological debate of all time, between my late friend Freeman Dyson – who posited how some form of ‘life’ might endure long into the dark leptonic era – and Tulane Prof. Frank Tipler, whose magnificently ornate book The Physics of Immortality should have won a Hugo Award in scifi, taking the Big Crunch into incredible speculative territory. (And I do mean incredible.) If the DESI results hold, then maybe both were right! Life must endure through a very, very long darkness… that eventually turns around and becomes something like Tipler’s god-making crunch. I won’t explain in detail here…

…nor a third scenario proposed by Roger Penrose. (Not a close friend but we’ve had friendly discussions.) That the great Expansive Dissipation might turn into a new Big Bang, but NOT by falling back into a big crunch-and-bounce. Instead through a scale-renormalization bookkeeping trick(!), in a boson-dominated cosmos that doesn’t care anymore about the ‘what-evs’ difference between densities of totality divided by ten-to-the-plus-or-else-minus 26. Fifty-two orders of magnitude difference? Bosons shrug and don’t care. And someday we'll all be bosons on this bust.

(Ooog. My head is hurting in a most-delightful way!)

It does seem to me that Roger’s scenario is obviated, if the universe does go back to a crunch… unless… unless the crunch is partial and it powers Roger’s conformal book-keeping fix in the rest of the universe… like a sparkplug in a piston… ooog… 

 

Somewhere an alien or AI or god is giggling at my lame efforts to understand. Enjoy, kids.  My whole new book AIlien Minds is dedicated to you uber brainiacs.

 

Meanwhile… we may have seen ‘frame-dragging’!  As a star is being ripped apart by a black hole, its debris settles into a rapidly rotating accretion disk. At the same time, powerful jets of material get launched outward at close to the speed of light. By studying repeating patterns in X-ray and radio signals from this event, scientists found that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together. This coordinated motion repeated every 20 days, providing a clear signature of the spacetime twisting effect.

 == Asteroid insights ==

 

Discovery of the sugars glucose and Ribose in samples returned from asteroid Bennu offer two important insights. (1) That many of the complex stages toward life were relatively easy to generate in conditions of the early solar system and likely pervaded the solar system, including the sugar used in cell-energetics and the one that back-bones RNA… 

...and (2) that asteroid missions inexpensively push the frontiers of both science and our advanced capabilities out there; accomplishments only achievable by USA+Japan+ESA.   

Of course this adds one more bit of evidence that the insanely dumb “Artemis” fetish to plant symbolic footprints on a useless plain of poison lunar dust is at-best a distraction and at-worst deliberate sabotage. Sure, keep western robots exploring the Moon, so we keep our hand in. Maybe a robotically-built radio scope on the far side! Surely we should assay lava tubes and finally verify if there's any of the mythical Heeeelium Threeee!

But this is just plain blatant. When he was NASA Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy voiced frustration over Starship’s pace: “I love SpaceX.. but they pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president’s term.""  

 Artemis might - maybe, if hugely modified - be ready in the early '30s. Ready to accomplish nothing of palpable (instead of symbolic) value. In fact, funding the rapid improvement of SpaceX ships is the only likely positive outcome.

== More goodies out there? ==

 

Meanwhile... California-based TransAstra has "developed and tested a device called Capture Bag, an inflatable bag that comes in different sizes, intended to catch anything from small rocks to house-sized boulders. Project head Joel Sercel says the bag could also be used for cleaning up human-made space junk, a problem that is increasingly a source of worry for governments and scientists."  All of it based upon grants that we awarded his company at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC).

 

== Deeeeep Space marvels! ==

 

Astronomers have confirmed the first known triple galactic system in which all three colliding galaxies host actively feeding radio-bright supermassive black holes.

IF anyone is still living there… what a trip! 

 

Korean astronomers claim to have found that all type 1a supernovae are not the same, depending on the ages of the original star when it blew. And hence the ‘standard candle ‘ of cosmology needed correction. And lo, it seems the Hubble Tension disappears and the universe, which had been accelerating its expansion rate, has entered an era of deceleration. Gosh wow piled on gosh wow!

A very interesting episode of COOL WORLDS about the Gosh Parameters that made our universe (perhaps just barely) habitable. Good series. As is PBS SPACETIME!  Still I wonder about the host’s surmises. For example: I'd love to see how Lee Smolin's evolution of evolvability of whole universes would interact with this. (1) it would mean that the basic general laws long ago coalesced into the ones we see and (2) the 26 (or 42 etc) parameters would be non-random but 'genetic' variations around already winnowed basic values. 

 

== China’s next bold move ==

An ambitious mission from China covers a number of my forecasts and concerns. Its first goal is a small quasi-moon of Earth - a very near asteroid, fast-spinning and therefore likely rocky and not a rubble pile – with plans to return a sample. Showing that China understands that asteroids are at least as important – over the longer term – or more so, than that lunar plain of poison dust. Sure, it’s a far easier target than the Japanese and U.S. asteroidal sample-returns. But there’s one more reason to go to these quasi-moons…

…that they would seem (logically) to be ideal sites for ‘lurker probes’ (alien of course!) to skulk and keep an eye on us Earthlings. As pointed out by me (in EXISTENCE) and separately by James Benford. On the very small chance that the PRC mission finds something, they’d take a Godzilla-level leap ahead, in fame, if nothing else. And THAT is where someone may actually study something akin to a 'UFO'.

Finally, the same mission will flip past Earth to visit a long period comet, incidentally testing my doctoral dissertation.