I am a co-author of this paper, “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” announcing “Project Sundiver”… offering a wide suite of potential fast interplanetary missions that could accelerate far faster than today’s rockets can manage, by swooping DOWN to pass very close to the Sun, spreading lightsail wings to catch a boost off the blasting brightness there. The team did proof of concept with a grant at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).
But sure, I have another reason to root for “Project Sundiver” ... my first novel, Sundiver!
As for the ongoing UFO silliness… this Forbes journalist back in January did something rare - he asked excellent questions, understood everything I said, and described (condensed) it accurately, in a wide range of topics. “Why Are UFOs Still Blurry? A Conversation With David Brin.”
"Believe" what you like. Just don't claim to be modernist or scientific in this cult that keeps repeating - twice per decade for the last 80 years - the exact same incantations and spells, never producing an iota of actual evidence. Oh, I have studied concepts of the 'alien' all my life! A bazillion concepts that are vastly less tedious and bo-ring.
== Solar System News! ==
The wonderful Japanese probe that brought samples from the asteroid Ryugu has offered glimpses of interstellar dust that likely predates the Solar System. Embedded in the sample rocks are grains of stardust.
Unfortunately, Russia's Luna-25 moon lander suffered an 'emergency situation in lunar orbit, prior to a scheduled touchdown attempt.
A new study featuring data from the NASA Mars Perseverance rover reports on an instrumental detection potentially consistent with organic molecules on the Martian surface.
An observatory made of hundreds of tanks of water observes Cherenkov Radiation when particles pass through them that were created when super-hyper energetic gamma rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. Those super-hypers (up to about 10 Tev each!) are apparently much more common from the Sun than we thought.
NASA and DARPA announced they awarded Lockheed Martin and BWX Technologies to build and develop a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engine. An NTR achieves high thrust similar to in-space chemical propulsion but is two to three times more efficient. We helped develop some precursor techs at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC) – but at half a $billion, this looks to be getting ready for prime time. NASA and DARPA are looking at a launch target of late 2025 or early 2026.
Combining art & science: Ron Miller’s two newest oeuvres. Natural Satellites: The Book of Moons. The natural satellites of the planets―the solar system's moons―are some of the most extraordinary places imaginable. Recently, scientists have turned to the moons for answers in their investigations of the origins of the solar system and the evolution of life on our own planet.
== Farther Out ==
Some really weird objects near the Milky Way’s central black hole.
What a privilege to live to see the twin LIGO observatories, co-founded by my friend Kip Thorne, discover and analyze gravitational waves from converging neutron stars and black holes at ‘short wavelengths of a few hundreds or thousands of kilometers. But what of the deeper growl of longer waves? MUCH longer on galactic scale? Researchers looked at data from about 70 pulsars and found is a pattern of deviations from the expected pulsar beam arrival timings that suggests gravitational waves are ‘jiggling space-time as though it's a vast serving of Jell-O’ … ‘possibilities range from cosmic strings to dark matter to primordial black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang.’
A mirror-like planet with an albedo of 0.80 reflects so much light from its very nearby star that astronomers offer a theory that the planet started out as a gas giant but has been losing mass over time. It must have an atmosphere composed of silica material, like glass, along with titanium. Effectively, then, the atmosphere has a mirror-like composition, super-saturated with silicate and metal vapors. This means that, quite literally, it rains titanium on this weird world.
One side of this white dwarf is (apparently) composed (on the surface at least) of hydrogen, while the other seems made up of helium. Weird! Though the mind spins with notions of sloshing tidal waves of hydrogen, since “Janus” is rotating on its axis every 15 minutes. Especially since some white dwarfs transition from being hydrogen- to helium-dominated on their surface. Or else the answer, according to this science team, may lie in magnetic fields.
== Even farther out ==
A team used gravitational lensing to discover an ultra-massive black hole, an object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the foreground galaxy – a scale rarely seen by astronomers.
Farther out… WAY farther… the Webb is helping several approaches to refining the famed Hubble Constant for how rapidly the universe is expanding. A good summary here.
Interesting article in Universe Today that identifies the distant stars that were in the line-of-sight of high-power, very directional planetary-radar transmissions, estimates when the signal should arrive at each star, and when we might expect a reply if anyone on the other end detects the NASA signal and is able to answer promptly.
Fortunately 99.999% of Earth’s radio emissions – including “I Love Lucy” – fade away long before one light year. The "METI" cult, who are fetishistically and rudely and illegally trying to foist "yoohoo!" so-called messages, aim to send far more lasting, laser-like coherent beams. And my opposition is explained here.
So why don't I mind these deep space radar blips which are also coherent? Because the odds of bad outcomes are hugely lower compared to the beneficial science. And - simply - because unlike arrogant METI, this is not a jerky rude and illegal thing to do.
And as long as we're on rude jerks.... Kooky Dmitry Rogozin strikes again - denying that NASA landed on the moon! This is the same fella who turned down Elon Musk and this unintentionally caused Musk to create SpaceX, the greatest launch success since Sputnik. Of course this is part of the putinist doubling down on riling-up the one force on Earth that might save them... the US lobotomized right.
239 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 239 of 239Did they put him on a scale, or did they just ask him what his height and weight were? I hope they at least put him under oath first.
Almost certainly just asked him, and not under oath. Although would that really have made a difference?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7qvtn7/63_trump_beside_61_obama/?rdt=37645
Here's a picture of Trump standing beside Obama, who supposedly is 6'1". But of course anything Obama did Trump has to have done better. So he has to be taller…
If you haven't, read Commander in Cheat. It's an interesting look at his behaviour well before he was president, among people he had no reason to lie to or care about– and yet he did. He's like the toddler who looks you in the eye, eats a cookie, and with crumbs on his chin says "I didn't touch the cookies". He lied and cheated at golf almost continually. He stole golf balls from children to claim better scores.
Trump lies as naturally as he breathes, and with as little thought.
Robert:
"Did they put him on a scale, or did they just ask him what his height and weight were? I hope they at least put him under oath first."
Almost certainly just asked him, and not under oath. Although would that really have made a difference?
No difference as to what he would have said, but the ensuing perjury trial would have been comedic. No, actually, what would have been hilarious is if they asked him his weight under oath and he took the Fifth.
When I was born ('62) it was common practice for mother's in The West to produce twice as many kids as needed for sustainment. TWICE AS MANY! IN THE WEST!
Look further back. Even larger families were common. Demographically the Baby Boom in America started during World War 2, following a Baby Bust. If you graph birth rate from 1900 it trends down, drops during the Depression, bounced up during the Baby Boom, and then keeps dropping. The increased births during the Boom pretty much balance the missed births during the Bust.
So it appears that during the Depression people put off having children, and started when they could afford them. And that the average family size has been trending down for generations.
Hearing Aides - I am starting to NEED one - but my Scottish soul will not permit me to pay several thousand dollars for something that is just a cheap amplifier
One of my colleagues is losing his hearing, but not enough to warrant a hearing aide. He's found that the free version of Petralex running on his phone, with a pair of headphones plugged into the phone (old-school) does wonders for him.
https://petralex.pro/en
He said the paid-for version has things like customizable profiles which he may eventually need, but right now the free version does him just fine. (And from a business perspective freemium has worked, because he's almost certain to upgrade because he's used to using it.)
I don't think Alfred is arguing that the current episode of "dissuasion" isn't happening. He's arguing that it is not likely to lead to a collapse of our civilization or extinction.
This relatively recent fear that our declining birth rates will lead to our doom in X number of years strike me as just as poorly supported as older fears that we would bury the Earth in human bodies in X number of years. Both are based on extending current trends forward, often a fatal mistake that humans always seem to make when trying to predict the future of complex systems. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should completely ignore such possibilities. I think it's wise to heed the warning that "if things continue like this . . .," but we need to also keep in mind how often such predictions turn out to be inaccurate.
Alfred Differ: Don't fret so much about AI. It will be IA that changes your life.
I've been preaching exactly that since the 1970s:
- Asimov's Prime Radiant
- FORTH: ancient, immortal language spawned in early radio astronomy
- handheld devices from slide-rule to programmable calculator
- Palm computer designs (handheld expert system corporation founded in 2000)
- computational psychohistory (up to and including SELDON I processor)
- computational citizen science efforts/teams (since unshared knowledge is lost)
Attempts at Artificial Intelligence are also an old story. Two ancient attempts at engineering intelligent beings are Idol-Worship and Bureaucracy. With notoriously lackluster results.
And then there was the Corporation, with spectacular results. Some might argue that the magnitude of corporate growth is due to "emergent" effects. But some might also argue that the Corporation optimizes for only one variable.
"Freemium" is a word that sends chills down my spine, every time. Smart hearing aids sound very dystopian indeed. Must admit when I first heard of the product category going OTC I thought, finally Washington got it right, serves the hearing aid industry right with their captive market for high pressure sales pitches, and the audiology profession right for their naked credentialism and guild mentality. Seemed almost too good to be true. I should have realized it was a trap.
I don't know whether the praise of freemium model above is faint praise, or raw irony, or econ textbook type weaponized QED. If you think being locked in a vault with a hearing aid salesperson for an hour sounds abusive, just wait until the freemium hearing aid's actual business model kicks in. If you don't, then, I dunno, maybe your privilege is showing.
"Smart TV" is in EVERY sense the technological equivalent of a telescreen, and then some. Good luck now finding a new "dumb TV," at any price.
Funny how the only phone brand (in the U.S. anyway) that can be de-Googled is a Google Pixel. Or of course an iPhone, which is born de-Googled, but in an even higher-walled garden.
If you think being locked in a vault with a hearing aid salesperson for an hour sounds abusive, just wait until the freemium hearing aid's actual business model kicks in. If you don't, then, I dunno, maybe your privilege is showing.
Petralex isn't a hearing aide. It's an app that runs on your phone (Apple or Android) and does some fancy audio processing.
Their business model seems to be have a free version, and a subscription version with more features. If people use the free version and find it useful enough of them will pay $70 a year to get the features in the premium version. My colleague found the free version more than adequate to his needs, but would happily pay $70 per year rather than have to get hearing aides if his hearing declines enough to need it.
The app doesn't call itself a hearing aide, though. It's more like a magnifying glass: useful for specific situations, but not a replacement for glasses.
Lorraine:
"Smart TV" is in EVERY sense the technological equivalent of a telescreen, and then some.
Agreed. It's like someone took 1984 as a how-to manual.
On August 23rd, KERA’s radio show Think had an interesting discussion about acts against science, facts, and reality. Link is here
https://think.kera.org/2023/08/23/how-to-fight-the-war-on-facts/
Paradoctor,
Writing and mathematics certainly count. Every language does. I'm quite confident in my belief that picking up a second or third language augments us is ways that go beyond simply learning them. We begin to see how we encode reality in different ways in different languages and that gets us meta-information.
What I think is happening now within our gray matter is more at the meta-meta level, but the little tools in our lives (especially future gisters) must operate at the primary and meta levels to take that load.
Why and how this is so is not well understood.
I'm inclined to disagree. I think it's pretty clear that women aren't choosing to have as many because their first few are very likely to survive to have children of their own. From an investment perspective, it makes a lot more sense nowadays to plow a great deal of resources toward a few children than it used to. The odds of any of them busting is historically low.
I sincerely doubt women will come right out and say it that way, but human beings are mammals at our core. The part of us that curbs that realization thinks of itself as a human in a social setting where saying such things carries consequences.
———
My opinion on this probably can't ever qualify as science. I don't know how it could be tested let alone falsified. However, when I was born and women were having twice as many children, a whole lot of people thought they wouldn't stop. They thought we were fated for a Malthusian Hell, but that didn't happen.
Their fears were not unreasonable, though many think so today, because humanity had never EVER turned away from trying to reproduce at such a rate as the food supply allowed. The only reason there weren't enough babies at the start of the 20th century to match the food supply was that women couldn't have them fast enough. My mother and others like her around 1960 were certainly trying, though. My brother was born 16 months after I was. She got busy and managed to produce four of us in just under 7 years. Pop, pop, pop!
Yet, we turned away everywhere a huge fraction of the children tended to survive to have their own. Where child mortality dropped so low that many women didn't know another woman who had lost a child, the birth rate dramatically decreased. Humanity had never, EVER turned away, but we'd also NEVER experienced a near-zero child mortality rate. Never, never, never in our history had we lived in times where we didn't lose them early and often. NEVER!
We are in uncharted territory my friend. The odds are high that we have no clue whatsoever what's going to happen now.
———
To get back at Hitler.
That's a damn good reason.
I hope you all keep it up. (Pun somewhat intended.)
Has it become common to spell "hearing aide" with an "e" as opposed to "hearing aid" the way I'm used to seeing it written.
Both seem to be legitimate descriptions of the thing, but with different connotations, rather than a simple case of alternate spelling. The former suggests "assistant" whereas the latter is more like "helpful device." If the "aide" spelling is a conscious rebranding, say along the lines of "sanitarium" replacing "sanatorium", is the intent to make the thing sound more friendly?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Alfred Differ:
humanity had never EVER turned away from trying to reproduce at such a rate as the food supply allowed.
Isn't this partly because until recently, babies were more of an inevitable result of sexual activity? Because modern birth control hadn't come into use yet, but also because religion shamed people--women especially--into doublethinking that desire for sex meant a desire to produce another child?
Never, never, never in our history had we lived in times where we didn't lose them early and often. NEVER!
That apparently lets Republicans pretend that any miscarriage was really a stealth abortion and prosecute women as if the death of an unborn child could only have happened with intent. In previous ages that would hardly have been the first thought upon hearing of a miscarriage.
"To get back at Hitler."
That's a damn good reason.
I still attended religious services in the mid 1970s, a period in which "zero population growth" was all the rage. I remember a rabbi giving a sermon in which he asserted that Jews were exempt because we lost six million in the Holocaust. At the time, my teenage self thought that was the kind of excuse that any identity group could use to say they didn't count. As I grow older, I understand more where that came from. My wife and I visited Europe in 1998, and I'm sure I was the first in my family to set foot on German soil since WWII. I did have a bit of satisfaction, thinking, "I'm still here!"
I only had one child, but I did marry a Christian and thereupon produce a child who for reasons of her own decided to become Bat Mitzvah. So revenge comes in many varieties.
Robert,
Look further back.
Indeed.
My father's parents produced four children. All survived to reproduce a few times.
My father's father's parents produced 13. Many did not survive childhood. A few had to emigrate because options back in the home country kinda sucked. In sum, there were a lot of offspring.
If I follow my father's line back, they demonstrated they were good Catholics. Lots of children and a decent number of them survived. Some of the mothers died in childbirth related ways, but the men remarried. That portion of my family tree is complicated, but it shows how they thought about life. Have lots of kids and cope with the suffering.
If I try to follow my mother's line back I get nowhere fast. She had a half-brother and hated him. Her mother officially had two kids, but there were probably back-alley abortions done. My grandmother was the kind of woman you could get pregnant and no one expected you to marry her. Get it? She was also a thief and taught me a thing or two about smuggling. Yet… she reproduced even in the face of expenses relating to raising them. Remember… thief. (My mother's father married her anyway and almost got disowned for it.)
———
I don't think there are any simple answers that will help us make long range predictions about our birth rate. The one about expenses sounds good, but only applies to women who are unwilling to do what my little Granny did to survive.
However, when I think of her, I find I can't imagine a future where our population will collapse absent external causes like volcanoes, asteroids, plagues, and mega-wars. Some women will rip your throat out rather than surrender. If they reproduce (they'll find a willing guy somewhere!), they'll teach their daughters much the same. My own mother is all the evidence I need of that.
Darrell E,
He's arguing that it is not likely to lead to a collapse of our civilization or extinction.
Exactly… with one tiny qualification.
Our civilization COULD collapse, but extinction is unlikely. Our civilization will likely morph to include other cultures in the coming century, but its robustness is still largely untested.
The only civilization on the planet that has faced these kinds of tests is centered in China, but even theirs hasn't faced the kinds of tests The West is creating for them… and itself.
There was a short time when I was fairly certain we could nuke ourselves badly enough to cause our eventual extinction. The nukes themselves wouldn't have done it, but our low numbers living on a poisoned world would have left us vulnerable to another shock that could have done it. I think we are mostly passed that now.
Fisk:
Yes, and that's why feudalists oppose the education of women, to keep them barefoot and pregnant. Modernist oligarchs want to use all 100% of our technical talent, and not just 50%, to create and raise the machines that will take care of us in our old age. But then who will take care of the kids? Machines? The kids themselves?
The dilemma all oligarchs face is: how much to educate the masses? Too little, and the masses will be obedient but unproductive. Too much, and the masses will be productive but disobedient. Seek a golden mean of mediocrity, and the two curves may cross, and the masses may know too much to obey, but too little to produce.
Correlation is not causation. There may be hidden factors at work. For instance, why does female education reduce birth rates? What is it that women learn that dissuades them from breeding? Perhaps something wrong about the system itself?
Imagine a tale with a Heinlein-style strong-female juvenile protagonist. She's smart, educated, and confident. She goes boldly to to a far world, where she defeats foes, deprivation, and disaster. Then she completes her triumph by starting a large family. I'm fairly confident that there's at least one Heinlein juvie with that plot. But it requires an empty wilderness for the educated female to expand population into.
If all available niches are already filled, and female education accurately reveals that, then female education reduces birth rates.
Paradoctor:
For instance, why does female education reduce birth rates? What is it that women learn that dissuades them from breeding?
I know very few women who are dissuaded from breeding altogether. They're dissuaded from devoting the entirety of their lives to production and maintenance of babies.
Lorraine 7:45 AM:
I think it is just a matter of time until there's a corporation whose CEO is an artificial intelligence. That way a fictitious person could figurehead a fictitious person. This would be a spectacular success, if measured in a single dimension.
An ancient analog of that was a holy idol at the head of a bureaucracy; also known as organized religion. That too was a spectacular success, if measured in a single dimension.
Larry,
Inquiring minds want to know.
I thought it was just an American VS British spelling thing, but I like your explanation better. 8)
———
Isn't this partly because until recently, babies were more of an inevitable result of sexual activity?
Heh. Well… you do need one to get the other, but in all seriousness I think a fair understanding of history will show that forms of birth control have existed for a long time. One doesn't need a method with 99.99% effectiveness to dramatically reduce the odds. Even simple chemistry and counting days will help.
Human women are pretty good at masking evidence of ovulation. No doubt that helped them avoid maternal mortality risks in the past. We guys have to be around them quite a bit to defeat the counting defense, but women have long had other means. All they needed to use them was a foremother who would teach them and access to the resources.
I find it instructive to adopt a broader, anthropological view of fertility when looking at questions around extinction. Cultures and their religions come and go, but all humans are closely related mammals and that won't change anytime soon. More importantly, we are social mammals capable of justifying pretty much any behavior set through a bit of mental gymnastics. Don't expect any social norm to survive long if it violates mammalian instincts.
…he asserted that Jews were exempt because…
See?
We are all closely related cousins. This is especially true for humans who left Africa. In the big picture, it doesn't really matter which of us reproduces because the genes doing the replicating are almost all the same. I switch off melanin production at a lower level because my ancestors were weird enough to try to live in far northern latitudes, but big whoop. I have an extra copy of one making me lactose tolerant, but who really cares about that?
Well… our genes do… sorta… but that applies to all of us closely related cousins. When we justify behaviors not on the norm, we are usually thinking about things much more abstract than genes which have hijacked/piggy-backed on the 'selfish' gene behavior.
So revenge comes in many varieties.
I'm all for it. His clade deserves to be trashed by history. His actions should be reversed in every way we can manage.
But on a level more important to me, I want our ideas having promiscuous sex. I want them reproducing imperfectly and facing tests in the next generation that determine whether they reproduce at all. We've been busy augmenting ourselves and that matters a great deal to me.
Paradoctor,
It doesn't precisely follow your plotline, but Heinlein's Friday is pretty close to that.
Larry Hart:
There is a Seldonian paradox in projecting demographic trends. Predict overpopulation, and birth rates fall. Predict underpopulation, and birth rates rise. Seldon's Demographic Paradox is like a thermostat. It's a stabilizer.
Reducing birth rates when infant mortality falls makes perfect sense. That's the "low-R, high-Q" strategy of low birth rates and high quality parental care, shared by cetaceans and primates. This contrasts with the "high-R, low-Q" strategy of high birth rates and low quality parental care, shared by cockroaches and mice.
But falling below a fertility rate of 2.1 is puzzling, unless the population self-limits by self-regulation. Perhaps the non-breeder population spends their labor on improving Q for their relatives.
I grew up fearing a population explosion to breakdown, followed by a population collapse to extinction. I hoped for a demographic transition smoothly gliding to a higher equilibrium. Now I expect chaotic fluctuations on the generation time-scale.
Differ:
For what value of N are all humans Nth cousins?
To your intellectually libertine advocacy of memetic promiscuity, I say tut-tut! None of your mental mutts will ever win in a beauty contest! But on the other hand, they will win in a dogfight.
Alfred, Paradoctor,
I don't think that higher levels of education among women is a causal factor in lower birth rates. My guess is that both are a result of something else. The likely cause of both IMO is the gradually increasing rights and respect that enlightenment societies have granted women. And that was likely only possible once our technological capabilities allowed for enough surplus to afford such "luxuries." It seems to me that there is a correlation between ethics and technological capability. Our current ethical standards could not have developed in the bronze age.
Until fairly recently in human history what women might prefer was largely irrelevant because they were subservient to men, and also having many babies truly was a matter of survival for your group. It seems a no-brainer that when those constraints are reduced or removed that most women would prefer not to live a life as a subservient broodmare.
Tony that is naturally very strongly correlated because it reflects the status of women. But I think three things come together, government pensions (you don't need kids for old age security), women's education, and health care (low infant mortality).
I expect that the thing causing women to shift from high-r to high-k reproductive strategy (huge investment in just a couple of kids) is FIRST and foremeost a strong expectation that both will survive to adulthood and benefit from maximum investment.
Other factors, education, empowerment, and the complexity of balancing a career are all very big. But secondary to number one.
I do NOT believe that 'wanting more kids' is that complicated a trait not to have strong compelling drives that will be reinforced by breeders taking over. I believe we have just 2-3 generations to lock in a responsible society before we start acting like Moties! (Niven reference.)
I believe we have just 2-3 generations to lock in a responsible society before we start acting like Moties! [DB]
This comment is problematic on many levels.
Analogous to the historical Red Menace, LN's Moties were literally alien LEFTIES who existed as a highly competitive, highly specialized, asymmetric & nearly insane species which quickly outbred, overwhelmed and infiltrated all available environments like the plague, until they came in contact with, threatened the imminent destruction of & were defeated by an advanced human FEUDAL culture.
Rational Moties (a rarity) were referred to as CRAZY EDDIES, and they were clearly stand-ins for the human intelligentsia subtype 'Nerd' which Lenin described as 'useful idiots'.
The significance of our fine host's statement is therefore unclear, as he is a notorious anti-Feudalist, a leftist-progressive and a card-carrying member of the Crazy Eddie useful idiot class, subtype 'Nerd'.
Clarification is needed.
Best
As usual, our resident-organic Chat-GPT is verbally articulate, has read a lot of sci fi, and has not a single clue what I was talking about, and hence strawman spasmed. Someone else explain it? Verbal, without a trace of OI organic intelligence.
Alfred Differ:
Human women are pretty good at masking evidence of ovulation. ... We guys have to be around them quite a bit to defeat the counting defense,
Well, I'm not one to judge that. My goal was always uncomplicated sex. The woman I dated before my wife had already had her tubes tied, which made her incredibly attractive to me.
I did end up reproducing because my wife wanted children and I loved her enough to accept. After her medical complications following the one child, I was pretty forceful that I would rather have a live wife than another child. Which was the same thing my grandfather said to my grandmother after my mom was born.
Point being, with the right woman I was willing, and in retrospect I can't complain about the daughter we had, but my sex drive has never consciously been about making babies.
What is being described here is Demographic Replacement.
Demographic Replacement is said to occur when any beleaguered minority is faced with possible extinction due to subpar replacement rates or an inability to compete against superior numbers.
It is the overriding theme in Brin's "War on Nerds", Kornbluth's "Marching Morons', Niven's "Mote in God's Eye" and nearly everything described as 'genocidal' since the time immemorial.
It is also said to be irredeemably RACIST, especially when minority white christians (who represent < 7% of the global population) express trepidation about being overrun & replaced by other more numerous identity groups, except in the apparent case of smart people, nerds & others...
Whereas all those who embrace demographic replacement & personal extinction are thought to be GOOD because Mother Nature loves those who self-delete.
Now, GO FORTH, SELF-DELETE and God Bless.
Best
There is no overlap with anything real in this world. Nor with anything remotely close to what I meant by "moties."
But the saddest thing is not the failed sapience or 2D-sepia or the rage at concepts like "up" or 'blue." It is the utter incuriosity, never, ever to utter the words:
"Oh, I strawmanned? I misunderstood? Let me try again: Did you mean_____?"
Honest attempts at paraphrasing, even when it fails, are a sign of actual honestly/curiosity... which means someone is potentially an actual human... far more meaningful than Paul Atreides being able to keep his hand in a box.
I find it instructive to adopt a broader, anthropological view of fertility
If you haven't already, suggest you read Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Excellent book.
I believe we have just 2-3 generations to lock in a responsible society before we start acting like Moties!
Even the Moties from Pournelle's daughter's sequel? They were a lot more detailed, and IIRC (don't have the book handy) it's strongly implied that the boom-bust Moties on Motie Prime are not the originals but more of a failed colony. (I could be misremembering that — read the book when it first came out so over a decade ago.)
"Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy" looking at it now. She's a friend.
The pertinent aspect of Moties is that if they don't bear offspring every few years they die. Hence a boom-bust cycle they can't escape. Far fetched for a tech species. But a scary projection of a potential selection imperative.
The pertinent aspect of Moties is that if they don't bear offspring every few years they die. Hence a boom-bust cycle they can't escape.
IIRC Jennifer Pournelle had her Moties living in a steady state without boom-bust cycles, with the same underlying biology as the Mote Prime Moties. Can't recall the details, though. Too much other reading to do right now to look it up :-)
Robert: Too much other reading to do right now
I'm looking into IA for help in speeding up my glacial reading speed. Several of the newer LLM A.I.s (and even some older ones) don't even bother with huge training lakes. They simply read books. Thousands of them. In minutes.
Question about US constitution:
Is there some immunity that Federal House members enjoy that allows them to freely intimidate, threaten, and investigate State judiciaries? If there is, then I've badly misunderstood your system of checks and balances.
scidata:
Is there some immunity that Federal House members enjoy that allows them to freely intimidate, threaten, and investigate State judiciaries?
That's like asking if the president has immunity for asking Georgia to find 11,780 votes. No, he has no legal right to do that. It doesn't prevent him from doing it anyway. Eventually, consequences may ensue, but regardless of that, Georgia didn't have to comply.
Same with Gym Jordan's subpoenas. Fani Willis and company will treat those with the deference that Miss Lindsey and company treated congressional subpoenas.
Fun things you learn arguing with flatearthers. "Amateur" astronomer Scott Tilley, The Satellite Tracking Channel on YouTube, is receiving signals from the Vikram, including moon bounce from the earth based communications.
onward
onward
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