Okay SPAAAACE-time. To the chagrin of those trying to destroy our confidence, we keep doing fine and wonderful things!
Let's begin with my own milestone... after 12 years in the funnest gig ever, I just attended (in Houston) my last Symposium for NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - as a member of the External Council watching (and critiquing!) presentations about some of the coolest (and often weird) just-barely-plausible projects that NASA has deemed worthy of small-scale seed grant support.
Cool stuff! Look up the wide range of bold concepts, from several revolutionary kinds of space telescope to Venus gliders that move through the thick haze like manta rays. Or propelling spacecraft by firing fuel pellets at em, from behind! Or several kinds of stimulated isotope nuclear rockets, safer and cheaper than other nukes, but also much faster than chemical ones. From Mars habitats built of algae to a portable pharmacy that might make any drug on demand.
You can either read up on past projects or catch the Symposium recorded free, at the NIAC site.
== How asteroids may offer wealth - or threats.... ==
NASA just launched the Psyche spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket - on its journey to the unique metal-rich asteroid, Psyche. Data from this mission could advance plans for future asteroid mining. Headlines that Psyche is worth "quadrillions of dollars" of course neglect the fact that - after a few measly thousands of tons of gold and platinum harvested to Earth - prices would collapse and you'd be using gold foil to wrap sandwiches. (Now, I wonder which parties here on Earth would not like their mines to go obsolete? And hence pushed for the silly-useless"Artemis" distraction-"race" to re-do Apollo footprint stunts on a vast plain of useless, poison lunar dust?)
The first asteroid sample has been returned to Earth; the sample capsule from the OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu was retrieved after landing in the Utah desert. Samples are being analyzed at the Johnson Space Center.
Meanwhile, the asteroid-defense foundation, B612 – helping track potentially devastating rocks out there - has launched the Schweickart Prize - honoring Apollo 9 & Skylab astronaut Rusty Schweickart’s contributions to space exploration and planetary defense across a 60-year career. The $10,000 award aims to stimulate graduate student contributions to planetary defense and advancement of humanity's cosmic journey, safeguarding our transition into the wider cosmos. Awardees will also receive a museum-quality meteorite. Not just technical advances qualify! Also in fields of policy and education about this existential purpose.
And if that weren't enough... almost daily we get incredible wonders from the utterly intricate James Webb and its partner telescopes, in space and on Earth, some of them mentioned in my last posting about space.
And meanwhile, recovery (with stunning pinpoint accuracy) of perfect asteroid samples, brought back across (literally) a billion miles? The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers doing dazzling Mars science accompanied by a spectacular little helicopter? And that's just marvels we've accomplished in Space!
There's far, far more down here on Earth. Making pessimism kinda... well... one of the dumber attitudes even remotely possible.
== Fermi Redux. I stand by prevalence of Life! Just not folks with starships ==
First. Way fun stuff by John Michael Godier about the most isolated human tribe on Earth… the Sentinelese… and whether they exist in a version of the “Zoo Hypothesis” for the Fermi Paradox. Of course, Isaac Arthur has probaly 30+ videos dissecting the same topic in great detail... that I don't always agree-with! But certainly fascinating riffs!
An interesting and cogent video about the Fermi Paradox by charismatic astrophysicist David Kipping is informative and entertaining. Alas, it is also… ultimately… deeply wrongheaded.
Oh, surely something is depressing the observability of interstellar (IS) civilizations… and as I stated in my 1983 paper – the first that really tried to appraise the range of ‘fermi proposals’ to explain the Great Silence – there are dozens of possibilities, ranging to “They are out there, just hard to notice.”
This fellow’s argument is that LIFE may be the key factor and that the existence of living material on Earth might be the statistical fluke. He goes on, claiming we have no idea what f(L) in the Drake equation must be. And he does poke at some logical fallacies that eager folks often lean upon, to support their faith in Otherness.
Still, while that his claim of “we don’t know F(L)” is true, his ‘hence life on Earth is likely a fluke’ is unsupportable.
In fact, ever since the Miller-Orgel-Urey or MOU experiments of the 60s, each successive stage of self-assembly of organic molecules toward life-like complexity has fallen in the laboratory with rapidity, each being lab-emulated within the next five years or so. Step by step by step, we have not found a next-level of complexity or pre-life that would be statistically hard for a planet-ocean-organic-soup to achieve. Oh, sure, that proves nothing. The next one beyond our horizon might turn out to be the truly hard and rare one! The one that leaves Earth to be uniquely and lucky!
(For appraisal of every variety of "Gaia Hypothesis -- weak, medium, strong and hyper-strong(!) see my novel EARTH, which should have a new edition out, in January!)
Still, the steady series of easy steps beyond MOU cannot be ignored. It has meaning in arranging a general sense of how the universe is trending, in her revelations, via science.
Things start getting more interesting when Kipping finally gets to an actual issue with “life started quickly” on this planet. That would certainly seem to imply it happened easily! He wriggles kinda cleverly, to anthropically dismiss that argument, in a way that’s both cute and…
…and also BS, since there are many other stars that have longer lifespans than ours while still not too dissimilar to Sol. A G5 star will last twice as long without differing in any (likely to be) crucial ways.
And this leaves out the real reason why life pretty much has to be all over the place. The fact that almost every star you see in the sky – even binaries or multiples or unstable flare stars – whatever - likely has planets, including several Europa-type bodies nearby with liquid water oceans covered by ice roofs.
Moreover, each new solar system apparently begins with trillions of icy comets, which start off (likely) with molten, salty, electrified interiors. That is a lot of test tubes for biogenesis!
And let’s not even get started on panspermia.
Sound like I disagree with Dr. Kipping? In fact, I’m not disagreeing with his overall notion that Interstellar civilizations may be rare! What’s very hard to support is his focus on F(L) as the likeliest culprit.
In fact, let me flip and say I do believe that it is very plausibly arguable that the number of extant high tech civilizations is low! Because, while F(L) seems (tentatively) likely to be high - F(I) and F(c) very likely are low! In fact, my top-ranked “fermi” is that human level sapience has evolved in this galaxy only occasionally, tech civ even more rarely...
... and tech civilizations that escape the lobotomizing trap of feudalism - (the ubiquitous historical failure mode that is rearing up - yet again as we speak - to destroy us) - are probably nearly nonexistent.
That is where we are very likely a fluke. At least it ranks way up there on my list.
== As for those freaking UFOs? ==
Yeah yeah. Twice every decade since I was a child, these manias have recurred, always the same insipid nonsense and the same absolute paucvity of anything remotely plausible. Well... see my posting:
What's really up with UAPs/UFOs?
Grrr. even if they were 'real', we still oughta snub the nasty things!
I've always wondered if the mining expedition to something like Psyche would make a good story. There would be massive plays in the futures market as the miners adjusted their mining and refining to what will be most profitable when they get back here. There would be whole industries in upheaval as some previously incredibly expensive materials could now be used in bulk. Imagine Reardon Metal x 10 as various entrepreneurs invented new materials. All kinds of intrigue, sabotage and so on.
ReplyDeletePreviously, glial cells, especially astrocytes, were believed to merely support neuron functions. However, recent research highlights the ability of these cells to release neurotransmitters and directly influence neural circuits.
ReplyDeleteSince I elbowed my way into this community, I never did get around to commenting on this fun fact from a much earlier post.
This provided me some food for thought. My entry into this realm was largely due to me suffering from a bout of dizziness that I have not experienced since going through three episodes prior to valve repair surgery.
Up until last week, I presumed it was due to problems with heart function. Now, however, I begin to wonder if a whole host of weird symptoms I had were due to my doctor prescribing statin drugs.
About six weeks after starting statins I suffered a series of dizziness bouts that each lasted 10 to 14 days which would cause disorientation whenever I moved my head. Further, doctors discovered a neuropathy in my leg and I developed bilateral tinnitus.
Dig into statins (which block cholesterol production due to inhibiting the enzymes that aid its formation) and you'll find that they can cause ALL KINDS of neural problems b/c cholesterol is needed for the maintenance of the myelin sheath that encases nerve cells.
Well, I had higher than ideal cholesterol in my last blood test, so I started taking the remaining statins I had to quickly bring my numbers back into range.
Well, back came the dizziness which now makes me think some of these odd symptoms were due to statins, since if you look on the side-effect list for these drugs all of them are on it (though tinnitus is an unusual side effect).
Well, this role for glial cells in cognition puts yet another nail in the statin coffin. See, the myelin sheath comes from glial cells and could, perhaps, those damn statins affect COGNITION?
Physicians routinely prescribe these drugs when patients get out of ideal cholesterol range on their bloodwork, but all-cause mortality data suggests statin use has little to no appreciable benefit. They do help get lipid profiles back in range, but---really---what do they accomplish?
There are other ways to bring down cholesterol numbers, such as adding regular oatmeal consumption to your diet, taking vitamin e derivatives, exercise (which patients almost never want to do), or wiping out sugar (which is probably the BEST option. Sugar is the freak'n devil).
Just thought some people here might want to hear about this experience.
What we lack is a good set of analysis tools. So much hand waving and guessing, so little experimentation and modeling. Hopefully A.I. will present a smorgasbord of tools. My interest in computational psychohistory has nothing to do with prediction, due to the butterfly effect. It's entirely meant for analysis, to tease out the structures and rules of groups of beings (from bacteria to Kardashev). I'm just a hack (not a great insult to FORTHers), but two fruitful facets are entropy and recursion. Of course, there are brilliant non-hacks working on this too, but they don't have my soldering skills :)
ReplyDeleteJohn V seriously? Even a nany state has no reason to demand the final user keep a tag.
ReplyDeleteHey, even relatively cogent people can get messed up by junk experience and junk information.
BTW, my trial advocacy professor drove this point home to me many years ago. Pretty much EVERY budding trial lawyer will absolutely try to "run over" a contrary witness the first time they attempt "cross-examination." Since the hapless target in a trial advocacy course is another law student, the target isn't really so hapless and will usually snipe at the cross-examiner from the witness box.
This will confuse the tyro cross-examiner and my professor would then explain that we've all been ruined by watching too much TV and our minds are full of "junk experience" which we must root out of our minds.
He'd then go on to explain that the jury relates far more to the witness in a courtroom than any of the legal counsel, and thus will imagine themselves getting hammered by some legal eagle. Thus, coming out aggressively against a contrary witness right out of the box is generally a bad idea because you're just putting a Darth Vader helmet on your head.
Once you grasp the concept of "junk experience" it's a amazing how much of it we've got floating around in our heads. I mean, it's pretty much the entirety of television. Memes and partisan political diatribes on YouTube, talk radio, and cable news opinion shows put all kinds of pithy bs into our noggins.
Then it get mashed up with real experience and out comes transmogrified slop that is really hard to stomach.
McS,
ReplyDeleteRe: asteroid mining
Jerry Pournelle (among others) got a whole series of shorts and at least one novel out of the concept - he also pointed out that mineral-rich nations on Earth could lose out hard and might be willing to play hardball to keep those minerals rare. Pournelle, at least, had the math and science background to build some very hard SF. He didn't do much exploration of it would change society here on Sol III, so have at it!
Pappenheimer
Unknown
ReplyDeleteYou're right! I'd read and liked those long ago and had forgotten about them.
I really liked his benevolent view or corporations.
Thanx!
McS,
ReplyDeleteInteresting. That's when I started to realize that his future wasn't compatible with mine. He even had his US Reform Party mandate only one job per family.
"Benevolent" and "Profit-seeking" are hard concepts to combine. But then, I grew up in India. Did you know that the Calcutta rickshaw drivers didn't own their rickshaws? They rented them from a rich guy and had to pull their customers around by hand more than half the day just to break even. The owner got the nice house and extra meals; the rickshaw pullers, many of them evicted farmers, ruined their health and had nowhere to go home to.
Imagine doing large scale, first-time engineering in a vacuum and having to rely on someone like Elon Musk not to cut corners on your life support equipment. No OSHA out there.
Pappenheimer
I think that we are alone in the universe and that FTL travel is impossible. But I am just a tax lawyer.
ReplyDeleteUnknown
ReplyDeleteMy experience is pretty much what Pournelle described. I’ve got an MSEE, but spent most of my career in software engineering. The number of people who can actually write production quality code is minute, so I was always in demand. I never worried about where the next job was coming from, I just picked the best looking one from all the offers I had.
I’m also amazed at how affordable the energy I need to heat my house is. I can fill these http://theviews.org/Construction/2020/january-16-202-upper-level-framing-started.html up for about $3,000 in spite of the gas company having to drill to 25,000 feet, horizontal drill another two miles and frac the laterals.
I’m amazed at how I can buy an iPhone 15 pro for $1,000 and the chip takes this https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems to build it! ASML shows one big problem with Adam Smith. He assumed the only way you could have competition was by having lots of small companies. The whole world can only support one ASML, but they know they have to make their machines affordable, so their customers can thrive. There is a real example of Benevolent and Profit Seeking.
mcsandberg
ReplyDeleteMost people are quite decent and could run huge companies in a way that is best for all
Unfortunately the way people are "selected" for senior management strongly selects for the nasty even pathological people that we end up with in those positions
duncan cairncross
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is that these huge companies have to have enormous numbers of satisfied customers and the only way to do that is have employees who are happy and interested in having happy customers. Company management behavior is therefore highly constrained.
mcsandberg
ReplyDeleteIf you believe that then I have a fine bridge to sell you - cheap!
duncan cairncross
ReplyDeleteI’m just reporting on what is actually happening. That is how Apple was the first member of the four comma club. An incredible number of happy customers.
An incredible number of happy customers.
ReplyDeleteDESPITE the usual appalling management!!!
Let's take one of your examples, fracking...
ReplyDeleteFracking Side effects:
Contamination of groundwater.
Methane pollution and its impact on climate change.
Air pollution impacts.
Local exposure to toxic chemicals.
Blowouts due to gas explosion.
Waste disposal.
Large volume water use in water-deficient regions.
Fracking-induced earthquakes.
The fracking company has to keep getting new ground to frack and leaves the above issues behind, because the fracking layer is thin and quickly used up in most cases. Who pays for cleanup and amelioration? If the company had to clean up its entire mess, what would your heating bill rise to? The extra cost is hidden, and in many cases paid by the government out of a tax base which the owners have been very successful in pushing onto the middle class.
A lot of corporations use that as a model - make a quick profit and leave the mess behind. Even Apple, I suspect, uses subcontractors who needn't abide by its 'high standards'.
And yeah, customers like low prices and are happy not to have to think about, say sweatshop fires, prison labor, SLAVE labor...and corruption of their government. Praise if you will our benevolent corporate overlords, but don't pretend the malefactors of great wealth do not exist. There's no sharp line between the two.
Pappenheimer
Rant over, but no more replies from me on this one; sounds like we have irreconcilable weltanshaungen. (disclaimer: I enjoyed Pournelle's writing, too, and I stand to inherit rather a lot of Apple stock.)
sweatshop fires, prison labor, slave labor, corruption of their government.
DeleteAnd how they can make an offer one cannae refuse. Was it a surprise what happened in Russia three decades ago?
GMT-5:
ReplyDelete"...alone in the universe and...FTL travel is impossible."
The latter may well be true, and if extrasolar life is so rare that, say it only exists on one planet per million galaxies, the former may be functionally true as well. However, I'm willing to bet life is more common than that, and that we have many neighbors in this galaxy alone. The question is, how many of them can we hold a conversation with, if we do meet? I've only heard of one plankton who's into talking.
RE: FTL, still lots we don't know about physics. Still hoping. Maybe our great-great-great grandchildren will meet in line for the next boat to see the planetoids of E Eridani being coalesced into terraformable real estate - or some joker invents a jump drive next Tuesday.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteImagine doing large scale, first-time engineering in a vacuum and having to rely on someone like Elon Musk not to cut corners on your life support equipment. No OSHA out there.
Meh. He's more likely to automate it to remove the kinds of human mistakes that would kill people. Also, ask yourself if his people would agree to cut those corners. Some of them are feisty. Some are even very talented engineers. They'd know.
———
mcsandberg,
The number of people who can actually write production quality code is minute…
Heh. I found out early the distinction between the kind of code one needs to support OS's and drivers and the kind one needs to support office automation. At one extreme the code must be robust and able to function in the presence of faults. (Power plants, hospitals, and devices rarely receiving human attention). At the other end was the crap we use in most office settings that just has to work most of the time because there are always humans around who catch the silliness.
The number of people who can write good drivers and solid OS libraries IS minute. The number of us who can write functioning crap for office automation is much, much larger… and pays about as well. It was the lack of pay differential that astonished me as a budding software engineer, so I've mostly written office automation for companies willing to throw $$$ around as if they were doing something important.
ASML shows one big problem with Adam Smith.
I disagree. He would have had a difficult time imagining a world where the nation-states tolerated such a global monopoly on something so fundamentally useful. In his world, the nations competed too… or I should say the royal and noble families did. Actual market competition as we would see it was a small, but growing segment of what was going on.
It really is weird how big nations are choosing NOT to compete on some things.
—————
On the post's topic, I am inclined to split f(sub)i into two pieces recognizing the distinction between intelligence and human level intelligence. It seems many of the critters of Terra have developed intelligence to some degree while what we are doing is a quantum step up.
I am not convinced of a correlation between human-level intelligence and detectable electromagnetic radiation. Intelligent dolphins probably wouldn't be broadcasting to the universe using electricity, and they'd be just the kind of thing we are looking for.
ReplyDeleteLarry Hart
ReplyDeleteAlan Dean Foster's "The Road Less Traveled" is an interesting idea. In that universe, stumbling on hyperdrive is much, much easier than going down the road less traveled to mastery of electromagnetism that we took.
Alfred Differ 1:28 AM
ReplyDelete"He would have had a difficult time imagining a world where the nation-states tolerated such a global monopoly on something so fundamentally useful."
ASML is something new - making lithography machines that can image features below about 30nm is so fiendishly difficult, that the entire world semiconductor industry can only support one company. There is also only one company that can fabricate the grazing mirrors to focus 13.5 nm light - Carl Zeiss. If someone were to try to create another company, neither would be profitable.
@John Viril – Gee, that reminds me of my US DOJ Trial Advocacy course a long time ago, on an island far, far away…1997, St. Croix USVI. We were doing an exercise in direct and cross examination of witnesses. We took turns with one of us doing a direct exam of a witness (with one of the instructors posing as a police officer identifying a suspect) and one doing a cross exam (where you ask about all the conditions that would make identification difficult: amount of light, distance, first time seeing that person, etc.). I got to be one of the first students to ask questions and after I was de-briefed on my performance, the chief instructor asked me to act as the witness since we only had a handful of instructors.
ReplyDeleteSo, I get questioned on direct. I tell the story about how I saw the defendant and what I saw. Then comes the cross examination. The woman acting as defense counsel was very experienced; the head of our Juvenile Division. She asked me all the usual questions about time of day, distance, my familiarity with the person. All asked as yes/no questions. During cross exam, the attorney is actually doing the testifying; you want to lead the witness through a precise path. She finally comes to her last question. After a long series of admissions by me that it was dark, he was far away, I was behind him. “So, you really aren’t sure it was him, are you?”
I saw an opening there and I took it. In a loud, assured voice, I pointed at the defendant and said, “No! It was him!” Defense Counsel was stunned. She had a shocked look on her face and she hunched over the lectern. Everyone in the room laughed. The chief instructor pointed to me and told me that I was going to continue playing the witness for the rest of the exercise. What fun.
At the end of the exercise, the chief instructor told us that what I did was funny, but that a jury would see through it and this would lower my credibility. Still, it was a lot of fun.
She finally comes to her last question. After a long series of admissions by me that it was dark, he was far away, I was behind him. “So, you really aren’t sure it was him, are you?”
DeleteI would have added that the cross-examiner had made two fundamental errors:
1. She had given a witness the chance to explain.
2.She expected the witness (you) to admit their testimony was wrong (witnesses almost never do this, despite what you see on TV).
You DOJ trainer was right and the jury would see through it bc there was apparently all kinds of uncertainty to that ID.
But my professor would have said that you never give a witness a chance to explain a nonsensical conclusion bc sometimes the witness can come up with a crazy explanation that nevertheless plays to the jury. He had a specific example that had actually happened to him in his treatise on Trial Advocacy. While she didn't directly ask you to explain yourself, it was sort of implicit in her question.
The second mistake was getting greedy and going for the "big win." Witnesses will almost never admit they are wrong on the stand and you'll often discredit yourself if you try to get them to do so. No matter how often you see witnesses proclaim, "Yes! I killed him, I 'm glad I killed him, and if I had the chance I'd kill him again!" on TV, well you're not getting that in real life.
Sigh. I really wish I had become a trial lawyer at times. I had an absurdly good Trial Ad professor that was way better than you'd expect at my very mid-tier law school. His name was James Jeans and he was an ATA board member. The guy was 6' 7" and had this majestic voice that could have been cast as Zeus in a Greek pantheon movie. He had been a college football coach under Weeb Ewbank, who won Super Bowl 3 as head coach of the Jets.
But the real cherry on top is that his best buddy on the ATA board was Gerry Spence. So, Gerry Spence came to speak at my school and there were a couple of class periods were we had GERRY f'n SPENCE evaluating our fledgling skills.
Allow me to revise my previous remark. When I say that I think we are alone, I mean that I think we may be the only intelligent, technology using beings in the universe. Other life may exist...simple life forms, maybe even complex life like animals. I wish I had more time to fully flesh this out since my terms are vague. I don't want to make further enhancements and be guilty of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
ReplyDeleteWhen I say that I think we are alone, I mean that I think we may be the only intelligent, technology using beings in the universe.
DeleteWell, Isaac Asimov agreed with you, hence humans ruled the entire galaxy in Foundation.
Delete
Alfred Differ: lack of pay differential that astonished me as a budding software engineer
ReplyDeleteI wrote drivers, O/S patches, and lab equipment firmware. I finally left the field when I was asked to bring a COBOL-level hire up to speed on all that in a couple of weeks. I was 'kidding on the square' (thanks LH) when I mentioned my soldering skills. Things like computational psychohistory and AGI are only possible if one starts from the transistor scale.
GMT -5 8032:
ReplyDeleteWhen I say that I think we are alone, I mean that I think we may be the only intelligent, technology using beings in the universe. Other life may exist...simple life forms, maybe even complex life like animals. I wish I had more time to fully flesh this out since my terms are vague.
To me, it's pointless to ask if "life" or "intelligent life" exists elsewhere. The former probably does if your definition includes any self-sustaining, self-replicating systems. To the latter, the answer is most likely, "We have no evidence yet, but then how would we ever prove there isn't any?"
The pertinent question as to whether we are alone in the universe is whether there are any other life forms with which it is possible for us to recognize as fellow-sapients, interact with, and communicate with. That any lifeform exists outside those parameters might pose an interesting philosophical question, but is hardly of practical relevance.
Well, I imagine aliens coming with range of earth's electronic transmissions, tuning into The Kardashians and concluding there isn't any intelligent life on Earth.
DeleteWell, there are no true Scotsman anywhere else in the Universe!
DeleteJohn Viril:
ReplyDeleteWell, Isaac Asimov agreed with you, hence humans ruled the entire galaxy in Foundation.
Did you ever read his stand-alone novel called The End of Eternity?
In that book, a group of self-appointed guardians who have time-travel work through history to make sure mankind stays on a safe path. This also has the unintended side-effect of inhibiting space travel. When humanity finally does make it to interstellar space, millennia after we otherwise would have done so, all the good planets are already occupied by other species who got there first and put up metaphorical "No Trespassing" signs.
Point being, if you go by that book anyway, Asimov might have thought that the Foundation world's entire galaxy was populated by humans because we got there first, not because it was inevitable.
Re: Fermi paradox
ReplyDeleteWe're looking for signals as modulated electromagnetic radiation, because that's the signal we could send to the other civilization. Controlling electromagnetic phenomena requires metal working. To get started in metal working humans needed fire. Fire needs dry land. So a limitation on f( c ) in the Fermi equation may well be planets with habitable dry land. Europa like planets won't support fire. They may have intelligent life, but those beings won't work metal and make radios.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteOther life
ReplyDeleteLife appears to have started very early on earth - then there is a big "gap" - 2 Billion years before the next step - cells with a nucleus -
Earth - may well be an exception in that it has LESS water than an planet our size and position as a result of the collision that created the moon
Deep oceans are "wet deserts" - sunlight at the top but nutrients at the bottom in the dark
With twice as much water there would be less than 1% of the life evolving away so 2 billion years could become 200 billion years
Life may be common
Complex life may be very very rare
I will suggest inventing nuclear weapons at precisely the right time. Had we entered the cold war with only theoretical knowledge of what they could do to a city, hotheads like Curtis LeMay could have prevailed and ended civilization. He was insubordinately screaming about "wasting assets" at JFK.
ReplyDeleteIn order to justify the existence of the so-called Fermi Paradox, one has to make so many unsupported assumptions about the nature of adaption, fitness, intelligence, technology, homogeneity & probability as to be certifiable, insomuch as as any well-adapted species is already fit, fitness predetermines survival, survival does not necessarily require the presence of either intelligence or technology, intelligence most probably develops as a response to poor fitness & adaption, technological development similarly suggests the presence of significant disability and homogeneity assumes a mathematically improbable level of statistical similitude.
ReplyDeleteThe so-called 'paradox' in Fermi's theory is then revealed as a mere probability fallacy, a significant underestimation of the multiplication rule & its exponential nature, as it becomes statistically unlikely that other alien races (even if they exist in the billions) are so sufficiently maladapted, unfit & retarded as to develop our version of intelligence, adopt a similar philosophical worldview that rejects the natural order, depend so thoroughly upon their technology for their ongoing survival and still SURVIVE, all while overcoming vast interstellar distances & qualifying as sufficiently human (by random convergence) to facilitate and even desire communication with other dysfunctional interstellar communities.
On a much smaller scale, look no farther than the Female Delusional Calculator [https://igotstandardsbro.com/] to illustrate the prevalence of probability fallacy & the numerically ignorant nature of gendered humanity, as the statistical availability of US men for mating who are between the ages of 20 to 50, unmarried, of any race, at least 6 ft tall, non-obese & make more than $130,000 dollars/year equal less than 0.16% of the total US male population.
Please note that the above statistical arguments still hold true even if LIFE PRETTY MUCH HAS TO BE ALL OVER THE PLACE (up to & around almost ever star that you can see in the sky) because you're looking for a very specific subset of maladapted, intelligent, technological & similar life in order to make any sort of mutual contact worthwhile and the numbers, I'm sad to say, just don't lie.
Best
Or perhaps as we communicate with dogs and cats—but not vice versa—aliens would hypothetically communicate with us. We snap the command
Delete“Sit” at a dog, and Rover can be trained to know what the command is. But Rover doesn’t know how to command us to sit. Compared to us, they don’t really think; it is as if they’re unconscious.
What was the ending to ‘Hitchhikers Guide To The Universe’? The Earth turned out to be a cosmic Petrie dish?
MCS: In Jack Williamson’s wonderful classic THE TRIAL OF TERRA, the galaxy was settled 15,000 years ago by primitive farmers in the Sahara facing death by desert, who invent anti-gravity and warp before they have the wheel.
ReplyDeleteGMT: “So, you really aren’t sure it was him, are you?” The yes/no questions were kosher. But that one is ‘leading the witness.’
AB: “I don’t get it, couldn’t advanced ETs perfect invisibility, undetectabilty?
Sure. We call Him “God.” Ponder what our shepherd ancestors would’ve.
DC: The ‘dry Earth hypothesis is in my top five. Tho such planets have less TIME…
Locum unwittingly channels the plaint of females, which is a mirror image. As for his Fermi paragraph… it is articulate, well-formed and… finally devolves, as usual, into a dyspeptic nonsense growl. Alas.
Dr. Brin,
ReplyDeleteThanx for making me look a bit harder. It turns out that the story I was thinking of, "The Road Not Taken" is by Harry Turtledove! I read it in There Will be War Volume V by Jerry Pournelle.
Now I've got to check out The Trial Of Terra! Thanx again!
Alan Brooks:
ReplyDeleteBut Rover doesn’t know how to command us to sit.
I can't personally speak for dogs, but cats know darned well how to command us. They can't use words, but they can certainly make their desire for human service pretty obvious. For example, when my cats want to go outside, they can indicate the door handle by looking at it in a way that can't be mistaken for anything other than, "Activate that thing."
This comment has been removed by the author.
Deletecats know darned well how to command us. They can't use words, but they can certainly make their desire for human service pretty obvious.
DeleteIf you have any doubt about your life's purpose, the obvious solution is to get a cat. The cat is 100% certain you've been put in this Earth to do whatever the cat wants.
Cats may 'groom' people, and people may 'grok' animals, but dogs 'groak'.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of our hosts "Uplift" novels, I am pretty secure in hypothesizing that cats actually uplifted us to be their client species for the next 100,000 years.
ReplyDeleteI spent the morning in a stare-down with a ragdoll cat. Intelligence and evolutionary level don't come into it. Without any doubt, it thinks that it's my better.
ReplyDeletemcsandberg,
ReplyDelete…that the entire world semiconductor industry can only support one company.
I think you are overlooking something important. The world COULD support more than one IF nation-states subsidize them. They would do so if the operations were deemed strategic assets AND they sensed an existential threat that could deprive them of those assets.
Ponder what is happening with TSM when China rattles a saber related to the future existence of Taiwan as an independent state. A LOT of business goes through chip foundries of which there are very few because they are frightfully expensive to set up and operate. Is there anyone in the world who wouldn't understand Taiwan's interest in making sure TSM has market advantages? Which other nation might like to subsidize their own to beat them at it?
I think it is amazing that more of this kind of subsidy isn't happening. There are definite geopolitical consequences related to all this.
GMT,
ReplyDeleteWhen I say that I think we are alone, I mean that I think we may be the only intelligent, technology using beings in the universe.
Oof. The universe is REALLY big, so I can't imagine the circumstances leading to anything like us could be SO rare that we'd be that alone. If they were that rare, I'd argue we should be here either.
Change your sentence slightly to "in communication range" and I think you could be correct. Unless we go interstellar (which I think is much harder than spreading across the solar system*) there won't be much of a detectable impact from us until we get to a CIV level where we need to use most of the radiation emitted by our sun.
* We'd have to produce a LOT of engineering experience out there in the Kuiper Belt before I believed we'd have tech that would survive the flight times between stars. We could send small seeding devices [like in our host's EXISTENCE] faster, but Terran biomes are another matter.
Cats are much smarter than we think they are, and a lot less smart than they think they are. It goes the other way, too: we are much smarter than cats think we are, and a lot less smart than we think we are.
ReplyDeleteMy solution to the Fermi paradox is to doubt that there is any intelligent life anywhere in the universe, including planet Earth. For evidence, I refer you to Earth's electromagnetic signals. They are good evidence for technological life on Earth, but not good evidence for intelligent life.
scidata,
ReplyDeleteI finally left the field when I was asked to bring a COBOL-level hire up to speed on all that in a couple of weeks.
Ha! I'd add that competent management (especially executives) of software engineers who do drivers, OS's, and those kinds of things that simply must work is even more rare than the engineers.
The thing is… you could probably have lied to your management about the guy's skill and kept training them as long as you didn't lie to the new guy. Apprentice level skills are acquired through imitation, so you'd need them to be in on the lie. [Might not have been worth it because competent management would have involved you in the hiring decision.]
———
Things like computational psychohistory and AGI are only possible if one starts from the transistor scale.
I suspect we will get to AGI by working the problems from the top AND bottom toward a middle we believe exists. For example, I don't believe for a moment we will ever program one. It will emerge like our minds do from the imperfect interactions of gadzillions of smaller, simpler things that are way above the transistors much like synapses are way above carbon chemistry.
The place of cats in the Universe is covered in Scalzi's 'Three Robots' (the other episode as well)
ReplyDeleteThis is for fans of The Postman.
Alfred Differ said...
ReplyDelete"For example, I don't believe for a moment we will ever program one. It will emerge like our minds do from the imperfect interactions of gadzillions of smaller, simpler things that are way above the transistors much like synapses are way above carbon chemistry."
I entirely agree and have made the same argument in the past. It seems possible to me that it could be as much an evolution of software as hardware, almost certainly both. Perhaps self programming set up initially as an evolutionary algorithm written by humans which then evolves on its own. After it achieves intelligence, as far as we can tell, then we spend the next several years or decades figuring out how it does it, and how to raise it.
On the Fermi Paradox, wouldn't it be fun if Greg Bear got it right in Forge of God and Anvil of Stars? A Dark Forest universe would make for interesting times, in the Chinese proverb sense of the phrase.
ReplyDeleteAlfred Differ
ReplyDelete"For example, I don't believe for a moment we will ever program one. It will emerge like our minds do from the imperfect interactions of gadzillions of smaller, simpler things that are way above the transistors much like synapses are way above carbon chemistry."
Check out The Adolescence of P1 https://www.amazon.com/Adolescence-P-1-Thomas-J-Ryan/dp/0020248806?crid=CRVITAJ4UUS1&keywords=adolescence+of+p1&qid=1701094371&sprefix=adolescence+of%2Caps%2C106&sr=8-1.
Paradoctor:
ReplyDeleteI refer you to Earth's electromagnetic signals. They are good evidence for technological life on Earth, but not good evidence for intelligent life.
Yeah, it makes a good punch line.
But playing straight-man for a moment, what question are we really asking when we ask about finding intelligent life elsewhere? Aren't we looking for companionship, or trading partners, or someone who can teach us things? So we're really looking for life forms which are intelligent (or "intelligent") in much the same way we are. Close enough to communicate and have common enough experiences that they matter.
That you have a more stringent definition of "intelligent" which excludes us is irrelevant.
C.S. Lewis had an interesting postscript in Out of the Silent Planet,though I'm not sure how true it rings to me. He implied that because there were three separate intelligent species ("hnau") on Malacandra (Mars), they had no need to make pets out of animals. The idea was that we humans use pets as stand-ins for contact with other sapient species, and that the Malacandrans had no need to do that because they had the real thing.
LH:
ReplyDeleteI don't _necessarily_ think that we aren't intelligent; I'm just _skeptical_ that we are. What's more, I think that such skepticism is the only _intelligent_ position; for we lack the necessary objectivity to accurately assess our own intelligence.
Note Socrates of Athens, who said that he knew only that he knew nothing; and when he sought wisdom from his fellow Athenians, he failed to find any. They didn't even know that they knew nothing; which gave him the advantage.
In practice the only reliable definition of intelligence is passing the field-tests of life. We have yet to pass those tests. In particular, we have yet to pass the test of long-term offworld habitation; still less the test of interstellar travel; and not even the test of maintaining civilizations for the myriads of years necessary to hold a radio-signal conversation with distant civilizations.
A practical test for intelligence might be the desire to build ever newer and more powerful detectors, such as the Einstein Telescope or even an Entropy Telescope. It's unlikely that a purely subjective hunter-gatherer entity would even conceive of such things.
ReplyDeleteParadoctor:
ReplyDeleteIn practice the only reliable definition of intelligence is passing the field-tests of life. We have yet to pass those tests. In particular, we have yet to pass the test of long-term offworld habitation; ...
You have an interestingly-specific definition of intelligence. It sounds as if you're saying that the only proof of intelligence is if one can figure out how to live forever. If so, then only Jesus counts as an intelligent earth being.
Note Socrates of Athens, who said that he knew only that he knew nothing;
Which is a paradoxical statement. He's admitting that he knows (at least) one thing, but that thing contradicts itself. But that's not so much lack of intelligence as just "lying".
* * *
But seriously, are you differentiating between "a species whose members are intelligent" vs "a species which itself demonstrates intelligence"? Because I'm definitely talking about the former, whereas you seem to be intimating something more like the latter.
"Note Socrates of Athens, who said that he knew only that he knew nothing; and when he sought wisdom from his fellow Athenians, he failed to find any. They didn't even know that they knew nothing; which gave him the advantage. "
ReplyDeleteIn other words - SAYING that was an incantatory trick to give him a morally advantageous and smug position. One likely to draw in angry, rebellious-phase teens.
Similarly smug is the wonderful Eric Idle song about 'hope there's intelligent life, somewhere out in space, cause there's buggar all, down here on Earth."
Yeah-yeah. Like socratic questioning... that incantation is clearly a step TOWARD critical questioning of assumptions... though it is the socially inculcated HABIT of questioning assumptions that I deem our greatest invention. My freedom to interrogate the assumptions of the mighty... and others interrogating mine. If THAT is not a crude form of 'intelligence' then at least it has had vastly better results than all other human societies and systems. Combined.
Dr Brin:
ReplyDeleteSimilarly smug is the wonderful Eric Idle song about 'hope there's intelligent life, somewhere out in space, cause there's buggar all, down here on Earth."
Then again, on SNL, John Belushi as Captain Kirk had found intelligent life everywhere in the galaxy except on one tv network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0xOgFDXFg
Last season of 'Love Death and Robots' had one episode based on the Bruce Sterling story 'Swarm', wherein humans encounter a dominant life form which, although it can express sentience, has little use for it.
ReplyDeleteWhy would an advanced ET be limited to a species? It could morph. It might exist on Earth, subliminally.
ReplyDeleteSuch has been written about, and covered in films, correct? In SF it’s all been done, right?
LH:
ReplyDelete"I am a fool" is indeed a paradoxical statement. If Socrates did indeed know nothing, then he knew that, so he wasn't entirely ignorant; but if he knows something (namely that he knows nothing) then he doesn't even know that he knows nothing, so he really is entirely ignorant.
That's a formal paradox, like "this sentence is false". If true then it's false, if false then it's true. Therefore it is a third value, and tertium datur manifestly exists. It denotes uncertainty, and therefore is hated by dogmatists.
I have been studying paradox logic for a long time, in fact ever since I saw Captain Kirk use paradox to destroy evil computers. I've tried the paradox trick on other binary-minded menaces, and I've discovered to my delight that it works! Toss off a logical conundrum, and fanatic.exe really does go off-line!
If paradox smug if you wish, but if it is good enough for James T. Kirk, and Kurt Goedel, and Bertrand Russell, and Socrates, then it's good enough for me.
LH:
ReplyDeleteA species that is intelligent individually but not collectively is not intelligent at all. I'm not asking for immortality and perfection, just health and excellence.
CITOKATE: but what motivates criticism except the awareness of error, yours and others?
Speaking of which... my last post should have read "Call paradox smug if you wish..."
Paradoctor:
ReplyDeleteIf Socrates did indeed know nothing, then he knew that, so he wasn't entirely ignorant;
Without knowing the full context, I suspect the sense of Socrates's assertion is something like, "I know that what I know isn't as hot s**t as I'd like to think."
I have been studying paradox logic for a long time,...
I could tell that by your preferred pseudonym.
I consider the ability to make that sort of intuitive guesses as one indication of what I think of as "intelligence".
"Why would an advanced ET be limited to a species? It could morph. It might exist on Earth, subliminally.
ReplyDeleteSuch has been written about, and covered in films, correct? In SF it’s all been done, right?"
Um ever read EARTH?
Re: Sew-Krates.
"I'm not aware of too many things.
I know what I know...
...if you know what I mean."
-- Edie Brickell
Also: "Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks..."
I've admired So-crates ever since he helped Bill and Ted save the world with rock and roll.
Delete"... Religion is the smile on a dog."
ReplyDeleteStopped reading SF a long time ago, as it eventually felt like excessive brain-wrenching.
ReplyDelete‘2001’ is a simpler work that anyone can grok. (Which is, one might suppose, why it became so popular.)
This very clever Twitter troll has developed an interesting demonstration of recursive "poisoning." (link by Mike Godwin.)
ReplyDeletehttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1725283749468807410.html
Paradoctor,
ReplyDeleteIf true then it's false, if false then it's true. Therefore it is a third value, and tertium datur manifestly exists. It denotes uncertainty, and therefore is hated by dogmatists.
Mu.
If I recall correctly, uncertainty was only one of the options available. My favorite is that one that points out that the original statement was non-sensical. Truth value can't be assigned in that case.
"The difference between a duck is blue." can be assigned False due to the nonsense, but negating it is a challenge.
Recursive poisoning
ReplyDeleteHow to make an artist scratch their eyes out. 8)
ReplyDeleteBy suggesting insatiable desire as a practical test for intelligence, Scidata reiterates the Faustian Argument and confirms almost everything I wrote (above) about human maladaption & an overreliance on probability fallacy.
Dr. Brin also quipped that my criticisms "unwittingly channel(ed) the plaint of females", but he is wrong in this regard, as this mindset is not gender-specific and reflects our current western zeitgeist, the plaint of a sensate culture which despises cultural stability, the activities of daily living & the continuation of the human species.
In effect, the West has become a transhuman suicide cult, intent on the improvement, elimination & the replacement of existent humanity with something new & novel, wherein any change is thought to be unequivocally 'better', even though this belief in the beneficial nature of change is also a probability fallacy.
This idea of beneficial change qualifies as a probability fallacy because change is rarely good or beneficial, as is the case in carcinogenesis. Also known as oncogenesis & tumorigenesis, carcinogenesis is the process whereby normal self-sustaining systems are transformed into dysfunctional cancerous dead ends.
Of course, it is conceivable that some extremely rare system changes may confer some yet-to-be determined advantage, like an individual cancer cell becoming immortal, but the creation of an immortal cell, an improved human or a transhuman demigod is still such an extremely improbable event that it will most likely prove fatal for any self-sustaining system, organism or host.
Likewise, the idea of a space-faring alien messiah coming all the way to Earth in order to rapture, enlighten & perfect humanity is just so incredibly improbable as to be simultaneously absurd & tragic. It's also derivative. It smacks of both L. Ron Hubbard & religious revelation, and it will likely be about as satisfying as the televised 5 season abortion that was Gene Roddenberry's "Earth: Final Conflict".
Best
Your writing has improved, but a reader will learn more from this than any of your comments:
Deletehttps://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
Wow, I got targeted with a locumranchian tsunami of projection and zero summation. I must be doing something write.
ReplyDeleteAlfred Differ:
ReplyDelete"The difference between a duck is blue." can be assigned False due to the nonsense, but negating it is a challenge.
"No i-t'isn't!"
"There, I've run rings around ya logic'ly."
* * *
"Fruit flies like a banana" can be either true or nonsense, depending on the sense of the words.
In an old National Lampoon parody of USA Today, an article played straight-man and noted the confusion around a popular t-shirt that read "Secretaries Make Fewer Errors". It offered the helpful tip that the shirts should clarify their intent by modifying their slogans to either "Secretaries Type More Accurately" or "Secretaries Commit Fewer Embarrassing Mistakes During Sex."
The fracking company has to keep getting new ground to frack and leaves the above issues behind, because the fracking layer is thin and quickly used up in most cases. Who pays for cleanup and amelioration?
ReplyDeleteWell, even if you pin the environmental problems on the frackers, you now run into that wonderous icon of environmental law called the Superfund (passed under Jimmy Carter, by a DNC Congress, and adjudicated by a Rhenquist Supreme Court).
If a pollution site was caused by more than in firm, it's perfectly legal for the federal government to settle for less than their pro rata share of the harm with larger defendants.
Say Big Evil Co. (who generously donated to MANY political campaigns) caused 70% of the harm settles for 40%. The government can impose the remaining 60% on the other firms, even though they only collectively caused 30%.
Thus, now big companies can use a polluting strategy to club small competitors. Big Evil can pollute like hell, allowing it to cut corners and reduce costs (and presumably prices). Big Evil 's competitors now face the choice of running an honest business and getting their butt kicked in a price war, or using the same tactics as Big Evil. If they follow Big Evil 's lead and everyone gets hit with a cleanup, they get hit twice as hard. Do this enough, and it's hard for the little guys to survive.
I'm so glad the little, Mom and Pop businesses have an ardent protector IN Washington like the DNC!
locum, filtering water now? Fairly cogently expressed... dyspeptic nonsense. If there were ANY respects in which the feudal regimes that oppressed 99% of our ancesters were 'better' than today's dangerous but spectacularly prosperous, knowing, free and hopeful Enlightenment experiment, then perhaps he'd have a point. But since we have been (albeit dangerously-imperfectly) more successful - by orders of magnitude - than ALL of those 6000 years on all continents... COMBINED... it does make for a rather silly assertion.
ReplyDeleteNow... if we are talking about a NEW design that overcomes liberal society's obvious flaws WHIL ensuring we never, ever go back to disastrous versions of feudalism? Well, as the Beatles sang...
"We'd all love to see your plan... shoobee doo-wah."
His discussion of cancer is interesting, for lack of a better adjective. Not something many wish to read about—but he is a doc.
ReplyDeleteHis discussion of cancer is interesting, for lack of a better adjective. Not something many wish to read about—but he is a doc.
DeleteAlan, u talking about locum's cancer analogy for the theoretical role of mutation in evolution?
To me, it's not so on point bc the whole reason the sort of self-directed transformation that will become possible in the future are.intruguing is because they're nothing like cancer.
They won't b random. Instead, they'll be the consequence of people choosing self-modification to achieve certain functional advantages. Obviously, they'll also be subject to the pernicious law of unintended consequences. But, it seems to me, they're much more likely to create fitness advantages than random mutations.
Here's a link to a low-fidelity recording of the premiere of my PLAY! Alt Caltech a few weeks ago. A 'reading' but fully dramatized. A few sound problems. Your impressions or feedback will be welcome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy3qPm74XoE
ReplyDeleteThe oligarchs who used Trump to undermine America now fret about their 'asset.' Either they 'no longer can control him" and he may turn on his masters, as in Cabaret... or they fear he will torch their greatest tool, the GOP, next November.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reuters.com/world/us/powerful-koch-group-endorses-haleys-2024-republican-presidential-bid-2023-11-28/?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBiological species almost never survive encounters with a superior competitor.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to focus on this line in Bill Joy's fascinating article linked by Alan B.
This is a harsh reality the many colonial demonizers that have now gained ascendency among the self-identified humanities intelligentsia either actively ignore or fail to understand.
Once exposed to regular interaction with Europeans, new world cultures were doomed. Since the Europeans could get far more carrying capacity out of the same territory, either the new world cultures needed to adopt their methods or they would perish.
Since the North American Native Americans didn't even have a written language if I recall correctly, there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell they could spread knowledge fast enough to hold off the "white man" takeover.
Thus, the sort of cultural self-flagellation coming from the humanities based on the underlying inference that sufficient cultural and political "firewalls" could have stopped it is delusional wishful thinking. Given the stakes and profit involved, unscrupulous self-interested actors would have overcome even the most inventive of current poly-sci academic theory to frustrate such a takeover.
The best that would have likely to have been achieved is to mollify the worst abuse. Could we, in all of our cultural hubris rooted in post-modern thought, devise a better outcome? Given the ascendency of oligarchs over the last 50 years, I somehow doubt it.
ReplyDeleteHis cancer description glosses over an inconvenient fact. Most of us have functioning immune and repair 'systems' that are reasonably decent at identifying carcinogenic errors. Those systems can and do make mistakes (especially as we get older), but they aren't half bad.
There is also the not-so-tiny issue that what we think is a good description for how things are supposed to work is adapting as we learn more about our own genomes and those of the microbiomes we host.
And finally... the transhuman demigod isn't as improbable as he'd like to think if one recognizes that it won't be a single individual. Our brains aren't big enough. That 'demigod' will likely have to be a large group of us working together in a novel way much like our multi-layered brains do. I'm not saying this is probable, but many of us are moving in a direction consistent with large scale coordination of minds.
Most of us have functioning immune and repair 'systems' that are reasonably decent at identifying carcinogenic errors. Those systems can and do make mistakes (especially as we get older), but they aren't half bad.
DeleteHave read about Dr. David Sinclair's information theory of aging? He says the reason why we age is the modifications that happen to our DNA (including epigenetic effects) over time. These change the conformational shape of DNA, which alters what genes get turned on or turned off.
Bottom line, he says the most effective way to slow down cellular aging is to boost your genetic repair mechanisms.
He says we can do this through "hormesis," which involves subjecting the body to different forms of mild stress which stimulates maintenance of our genetic repair mechanisms. He recommends regular exercise, exposing yourself to heat (sauna) and ice baths, complex games which stress your brain, and medications like metformin (which stresses the body by lowering blood sugar.)
You can find more info on his YouTube channel by simply searching Dr. David Sinclair
Alfred Differ:
ReplyDeletebut many of us are moving in a direction consistent with large scale coordination of minds.
The Borg?
Dr. Brin
ReplyDeleteWith headlines like "Not Only Can Trump Win, Right Now He's the Favorite To Win" (https://realclearwire.com/articles/2023/11/28/no_really_biden_is_in_trouble_against_trump.html) flying around, I'd say they are worried about controlling him. I suspect that the Oligarchs really hate that he's promised to follow https://www.project2025.org which would greatly reduce the size of government.
I enjoy gallows humour, so THE ESCAPE was fun to watch. Also a bit like A CHRISTMAS CAROL, so very seasonal. You seem to be enjoying life, good on you.
ReplyDeleteZero sum was mentioned briefly. I had a thought about that today. Ironically, that fallacy could actually be laid at science's feet. Since Newton, and likely before, we have been saturated by 'equation thinking'. Balancing physical, chemical, particle, and straight-up algebraic equations is a big part of education, especially high school thru undergrad. It becomes so ingrained that we reflexively look for something to be lost or gained to 'balance out' any event, historical pattern, philosophy, or ideology. If Humanity has grown from a scattered band of apes to a space faring civ on the brink of A.I., then something very bad must have been picked up along the way.
But equations are only math, not laws of nature. Algorithms may be much closer to reality than equations and formulae are. And they need not follow zero sum logic.
Larry,
ReplyDeleteThe Borg?
That's just one possible outcome... and I don't think it is likely wrt the other possibilities we can imagine.
John,
One of those "It's a small world" things for me is that my PhD advisor's daughter got a Nobel for discovering the telomeres on the ends of chromosomes. (No doubt it was her and an army of lab and grant writing people.) I read up on her work when the announcement was made along with how they get shortened with each cell generation. I thought "ah ha! Errors will eventually happen!" as did many others well before I learned about it. Turns out if you try to extend them artificially, you tend to turn lab animals into cancerous oozes. Yet another lesson in "It's not that simple."
That reminded me heavily of an earlier situation when we realized RNA carries the information cells use to generate proteins. Ah ha! I thought at that time… we will become bio-engineers. Turns out it's not so simple. Early engineering attempts triggered MASSIVE responses from a lab animal's immune system followed shortly by a quick death. Damn, damn, damn!
BUT…
Others figured out a way around the immune response and eventually turned the trick into our Covid vaccines. They are recipients of recent Nobels. Well earned I say.
Give them ALL more time and I think they'll find other tricks that help protect the tails of chromosomes. I don't know that this will lead to big gains in life extension (I rather doubt it. We already have long lives wrt most mammals.), but we might be able to beat certain kinds of cancers and age-related degeneration of vital systems.
It's going to be an interesting century. I wish I was young again just so I could see more of it.
Alfred, your PhD advisors daughter was Dr. Blackburn? Crazy, I know who she is. In fact, I've built my whole diet around the Ornish/Blackburn studies that showed you could marginally increase telomere length through diet.
DeleteThough I don't severely cut fat like Ornish wants. I focus more on healthy fats and try to hit a variety of fruits/veggies/nuts/ancient grain mix.
It's going to be an interesting century. I wish I was young again just so I could see more of it.
DeleteIf Sinclair's dreams come true you just might. He claims that his lab is dialing back the clock in mice.
He says the body retains the pattern of youth somewhere, as shown by the sheep "dolly." When the adult sheep dolly got cloned, her clones weren't adults. They come out young.
To make a long story short, Sinclair took Yamanaka factors that turn cells pluripotent. Instead of using all 5, he uses 4 of them which unwinds the clock only most of the way back to pluripotency (essentially, undifferentiated stem.cells).
Anyway, Sinclair has done this with optic nerve cells from blind mice (mice get blind when they're old). Reinjects the cells and they can see again.
He thinks he can do turn back the cellular clock in humans in about a decade (of course, this could be researcher twaddle in hopes of getting increased funding).
There also might be unforeseen obstacles that always seem to crop up. I like to cite Nazi scientist Otto Warburg who believed he was going to cure cancer back in the late 30s. He got a Nobel for discovering cancer cells use glucose for respiration instead of O2. German pharma discovered metformin in the 30s (drug that lowers blood sugar), and Warburg thought it was only a matter of fiddling before they could figure out how to starve cancer cells.
Turns out cancer cells can switch to other electron receptors in low glucose environments. Though, to be fair, James Watson (discoverer of DNA) is in his 90s and takes metformin in the belief that a low blood sugar environment slows tumor proliferation and thus gives your immune system a better chance to zap the cancer.
scidata,
ReplyDeleteThat 'balance' stuff came from the Romantics in the next century or so. Even the optimization ideas (Lagrange & Hamilton) that find the correct equations of motion came about quite some time after Newton. We can blame Newton for all sorts of other craziness, but 'Nature is balanced' came from a different set of loons. 8)
[If not for those loons, chemistry would have taken even longer to take off. They are the ones who made solid the case for adding nitrogen to depleted soils so people wouldn't starve to death... on a 'balance' argument.]
So balancing equations is a good servant. But I would argue that it's a bad master.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteKenneth Greider.
His daughter is Carol Greider.
(I'm sure the award got split. They usually do that nowadays.)
------
I find cutting my amount of carbs and certain types of fats tends to work. Not magic for me. It's just that carbs are SO easy to sneak. Getting my calorie intake down near what I actually use (and can measure nowadays) does the bulk of the work.
Alfred, I've pretty much wiped sugar out of my diet. Use a very specific sugar substitute that I put together myself, bc all the blended sugar substitutes on the market tend to use erythritol (which has recently been correlated with bad cardiac outcomes).
DeleteSugar is not only terrible for your lipid profile, calories, type 2 diabetes risk, and oh yeah that fueling tumor growth issue,
it also causes glycation---which is sugar molecule derivatives getting cross-linked into the skin matrix.
Cosmetics companies know that sugar causes wrinkles and glycation is also involved with cellulite. However, collagen and elastin are also the primary proteins that make up your organs and blood vessels.
Glycation helps make your blood vessels more brittle with age. Btw, to accumulate the plaque that breaks off to cause strokes, you first need damaged blood vessels, which is more likely when they're brittle.
So preventing glycation of your organs and blood vessels is a good idea, which means dietary sugar is the freak'n devil.
No way Trump can win. The Democratic party has invested heavily in getting people to vote from home. They develop lists of dormant, disengaged citizens from social media companies then get staff to visit those homes to make sure the people are registered, have ordered absentee ballots, and vote. Focusing energy, people, and money in a few battleground states can turn a close race around.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a conspiracy. It's just smart use of data and resources. The GOP has nothing like this. I know a man who 20 years ago tried to put together a system like this for the Republicans; they weren't interested.
I don't think the polls matter too much right now. If I were a Democrat I would not be worried unless Biden was behind by over 10 points in October of 2024. If the race is closer than that, Biden will win.
@GMT -5 8032:
ReplyDeleteNo way Trump can win.
Much as I'd like to believe that, I must point out that he already did. And he can win the same way this time--too many Democrats in key states do protest votes for Jill Stein or Cornell West or RFK Jr.
There's also the way he tried to win in 2020--complicit election officials and state legislatures gaming the system for him--one might say "rigging"--in his favor. And remember that unlike Biden, Trump doesn't have to get 270 electoral votes to win. If enough states throw the procedure into doubt or chaos, the Republican delegations in the House of Representatives will anoint him.
GMT -5 8032
ReplyDeleteThe republicans actually managed to out harvest the dems in both California and New York. Those gains are why they barely control the house.
Speaking of UFOs, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb has another idea: UFOs may be relics of satellites from a lost civilization 350 million years ago that was the actual cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction.
ReplyDeletehttps://avi-loeb.medium.com/are-uaps-relics-from-an-earlier-civilization-on-earth-86d1190c6539
This notion (it's not even close to a hypothesis, IMHO) illustrates why this UAP stuff is so dangerous. Like his idea that Oumaumau was an interstellar probe, it provides easy answers without the required proof. For Oumaumau, all he had to assume was that there was some alien planet with the required technology which was interested in our solar system that sent a probe from long ago to look at us. For this, all he had to assume was that there was a technological civilization which could have created such long-lasting satellites which was the actual cause of the extinction and which left no other discernable trace. None of these assumptions can be disproven, and he believes the chances of them occurring are reasonable.
But probability can be tricky if you don't know all the parameters, so you need positive indications of something before assuming they are true. Something UFO enthusiasts like Avi appear not to like to engage in, although he does want major funding to find it. :)
Intellectually, we all know that Coin Flip probability gives heads & tails at a roughly equal averaged outcome yet, even so, our biased sensate culture rejects this precious knowledge of the routine & commonplace in favour of the excitingly rare & improbable.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of entertainment, science, socioeconomics, politics & every aspect of our culture, the West discards the conservatively probable, seeks the new & novel and absolutely binges on PROBABILITY FALLACY. I see it everywhere.
Half the posters on this page believe that they may never die; others talk about the perfectibility of man (whatever THAT means); John_V believes that deliberate genetic mutations will give us demigods rather than the more likely cancer; and the nerdish faithful await their biblical rapture by an interstellar messiah.
Even our fine host, who spends the most interesting first 2/3rds of his novel 'Earth' attempting to predict the mundane & humdrum aspects of our probable future, spends the last third on the extremely improbable, combining rogue blackholes & feminism in order to make sentient planets that can magically fly broken spaceships & place environmentalists on the moon.
I can't emphasize this enough, people:
It is sheer insanity to deny that 'Common Things are Common' while you accentuate the improbable.
Best
Where DID you get the idea half the people at this blog think they are never going to die?
Deletelocumranch,
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on the wild way many people ignore probability when pondering what they'll do. I'd add to it their failure to distinguish between risk and impact too. We fret about way too many high impact risks that are incredibly unlikely. However, you have a hidden assumption in YOUR interpretation of probability that undermines your argument.
With a fair coin flip you can know all the possible outcomes and the branching probabilities. Same goes for cards, dice, and all sorts of things. This foreknowledge allows for an interpretation of 'probability' we call the 'frequentist view'. We know the frequencies of outcomes and can work out decent approximations of the chances of sequences of them. One coin flip gives 50/50 chances. Multiple flips means we have to break out a little more math and discuss normal distributions. We can know this all in advance, though, because the systems we are predicting permit listing of possible outcomes.
That is NOT the case with all systems where we see what appears to be randomness. People who price call and put options on stocks, commodities, and other stuff tend to believe in a random element that leads to a 'drift' of probabilities that leads to distributions that look a lot like heat diffusion, so they use the partial differential equations science folks use for heat diffusion. (first order in time, second order in space) Problem is they are using a frequentist view when they can't actually know the branching probabilities. They know the list of outcomes, but THINK they know the branching factors. They don't… and this shows up in markets (spectacularly!) when their PDE breaks down.
(to be continued)
locumranch (continuing),
ReplyDeleteWhen we can't be frequentists we have to fall back to being Bayesian… and that's what you should be doing with respect to possible human futures. I'll offer one small scale example that should align with your past experiences to make the point.
In SEP 2013 I was diagnosed with what we used to call Wegener's Granulomatosis. Nasty disorder. Half the people who get it are dead within five months if they do nothing. I was already three months in, so it was unlikely I would have seen New Years Day 2014. A frequentist view of my situation back then was quite appropriate… up until it wasn't.
To get to that diagnosis, my kidney doctor wanted a biopsy. He explained to me there was a 1/10,000 chance an infection would set in and take they kidney he probed. There was a 1/100,000 chance I'd die from it. I went to brush away this worries, but he stopped me and said he's done enough of them to see the kidney loss one happen. So… I paused a bit and thought about those odds in terms of rolling dice. Very frequentist. I went ahead with his suggestion and got the results my insurer needed to avoid any coverage squabbles.
From there, though, the frequentist view fails. The five month (mode) survival rate only applies for people who don't try to do something useful about it. I didn't want to die, so I started a treatment plan that had many more possible outcomes along that path. A frequentist would say that just means we have to recalculate the possibilities. I was told that the treatment I selected had a 90% survival rate at five years with a 90% chance of some nasty side effects possibly including bladder cancer. Those side effects could be minimized IF I took the cocktail of suggested drugs and drank lots of water to sluice the toxic crap through me as fast as possible. Just recalculate, right? Turns out… No. Each of the drugs might or might not work as advertised. I might or might not have consumed enough water. My own genome might have mattered. My past immune responses might have mattered. I might have met up with an infectious disease while I was immune suppressed.
The right thing to do at that point was shift from a frequentist view to a Bayesian one where we adjust prior beliefs based on new information and do it often. Did I drink enough water today? Yes? Recalculate. Did I see any symptoms for bladder cancer? No? Recalcuate. Did my need for prednisone diminish successfully last month? Yes? Recalculate. Doctors DO this! I saw it every time I had to drag myself in and answer a blizzard of questions. They were acquiring new information on which they adjusted prior beliefs to make future beliefs to be adjusted again at the next appointment.
—————
You are trying to imagine a future human society when you poo-poo arguments about perfectibility. You should approach that in a Bayesian sense because you really DON'T know the possible outcomes. Sure, the odds are stacked against us with respect to godhood-like ascension… but the patient really doesn't want to die. The patient WILL adjust prior beliefs.
Dr. Brin,
ReplyDeleteYou keep touting Joe Biden's economic miracle, yet according to salon.com, a record 28 million people in the US are struggling with food scarcity.
This suggests Biden's overall economy isn't helping the most needy. In poker terms, its a polarized range where he's boosting the overall numbers by helping the already-successful.
JV
ReplyDeletea record 28 million people in the US are struggling with food scarcity.
Could mean that Biden's economy wasn't helping the most needy
Or it could mean that 28 million people are getting MORE than they used to - but still not enough
So Biden's economy WAS helping the most needy - but not as much as we/they want
Duncan,
DeleteThe article cites that there was a spike in 2020 during the pandemic, and a food bank worker saying it's the worst she's seen in 40 years.
The problem is the there aren't many donations to food banks, due to high grocery prices.
One aspect of current economic conditions is inflation disproportionately hit food prices, which is causing the problem both in terms of food insecurity but also unwillingness to donate.
This does not bode well for people who vote their pocketbook, bc food scarcity will pretty much overwhelm any other economic metric.
To be fair, my nephew did get a good job working for Intel in Phoenix due to reshoring chip manufacturing, which effectively doubled his income.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJohn Viril:
ReplyDeleteThis does not bode well for people who vote their pocketbook,
The problem is that we don't have a referendum in which we vote "Like/keep Joe Biden" or "Dislike/Remove Joe Biden," and only then in the latter case decide who replaces him. Not voting for Biden will produce a specific result--a Republican president, probably Trump.
People who vote against Biden because they're miffed at the current economy are not thinking in terms of how a Republican presidency will be worse for them. They're letting their id do the whining.
It's analogous to the economic situation in the early 2000s after the tech bubble burst. Some people learned for the first time that you could "beat the market" and still lose 12-15% of your value if the market average was losing 20%. Emotionally, one could be angry at their fund managers for losing 12%, but those fund managers were doing a good job in a bad situation, and going a different route would (on average) lead to a worse outcome. The id doesn't care. "I don't like losing 12%! Do somethin else! Waaaah!"
The article cites that there was a spike in 2020 during the pandemic, and a food bank worker saying it's the worst she's seen in 40 years.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is the there aren't many donations to food banks, due to high grocery prices.
I thought food prices weren't that high in 2020, since the pandemic had kept inflation low. It was only after the pandemic that inflation started to kick in.
And wasn't Trump president in 2020? ;)
AF, yes Trump was prez. And even moderate food prices are a problem if you don't have a job
DeleteIf food insecurity is so high, that creates a messaging problem if you try to tout the economy. Mean u need to talk about successes,but then say the work is far from complete...which is why I need a DNC Congress...
Duncan,
ReplyDeleteEven though Covid is still with us, the GQP shut down Covid-era public assistance programs as quickly as they could, with help from "Blue Dogs" like W. VA's own Joe Manchin, who argued that his poverty-stricken constituents would just blow the cash on drugs. He directly assisted a sharp jump in the childhood poverty rate with one vote.
I'm trying to imagine how Trump, or any Republican, could lower prices, except by sparking a massive recession and putting at least 28 million Americans out of work. The days of Nixon instituting price controls are long gone. Not that I miss Nixon, mind you. There was a piece of work. But he had some bare competence at the job, and room to work. The GQP is, ideologically, a closed cell these days.
Pappenheimer
David, you just got a citation from Anton Petrov in his latest compilation re the Dark Forest.
ReplyDeleteInflation. Meh.
ReplyDeleteThe pandemic massively disrupted supply chains. Of course there was going to be inflation afterward.
I watched stock markets behave in a ridiculously optimistic way during the first year. Everyone remembers the markets dramatic flop when lockdowns started, the optimism that drove them back up and more in the months to come rarely got reported outside business news channels. That optimism was unrealistic, though. Wishful thinking. We corrected that last year and are now back on our typical path.*
Of course there was going to be inflation. Lots of us were hiding at home while holding our breath in 2020 and walking about gingerly in 2021.** Labor markets took such a massive hit that they HAD to tolerate some of us working from home. They are still reeling from that because some employers adapted while others have tried to return to the old norm. The cost of labor contributes a huge amount to a lot of the things we buy, so uncertainty in those costs means uncertainty in the bottom line. OF COURSE there were going to be price impacts.
I don't think it is fair to blame inflation on any particular politician. It has a little to do with their willingness to dump lots of newly printed money into the markets, but there was going to be a pandemic shock that ripped through everything anyway. Of course prices were going to change. How could they not?
We are way to inclined to blame politicians for bad things in the economy or credit them for the good stuff. Meh. Most of what happens has more to do with us and a lot less to do with them. Food prices can't go up if you can't pay for that change, right? Of course you will, but at the expense of something else. All that shows up in data as sector inflation. Food is usually at very low prices because many governments want it that way, but as we've seen during the pandemic… food price stability wasn't the top priority. Keeping people from being kicked out on the street when they couldn't pay rents and mortgages rated a tad higher in many places.
Give us enough time without another pandemic and I predict relative prices for food will drop to their historic norms. Should we credit some future US President for that when it happens? Nah. WE will have done it… not them.
__________________
* [The MACD indicator tells a VERY interesting story if you know how to read it.]
** [Dates mostly related to behaviors here in the US. Those of you elsewhere might have seen different dates depending on the arrival of vaccines.]
Alfred
ReplyDeleteIMHO prices have a ratchet effect - once they are up its more difficult for them to fall and a lot (most) of the price inflation in the USA has been down to company greed - the USA has too many markets that are dominated by a very small number of companies and those companies have used the "inflation panic" to ratch up their prices
Thing that bugs me most about Avi Loeb is his utterly relentless claiming of concepts that were old in sci fi when he was nursing.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that’ll prevent an all-out MAGA assault on election workers in 2024 is REALLY good undercover FBI work. Do well, guys.
“yet, even so, our biased sensate culture rejects this precious knowledge”… I remain curious what planet you are on. Or what kind of percept would perceive: “Half the posters on this page believe that they may never die; others talk about the perfectibility of man…”
Oy… “It is sheer insanity to deny that 'Common Things are Common' while you accentuate the improbable.”
Uh, again he screams into a mirror, calling the image ‘you people.”
One good outcome from that hallucinatory yammer… getting Alfred to tell his interesting and moving story with the happy (so far) tentative ending… A happy outcome that’ll last at most a few more decades. But we’re glad, anyway.
JV the scales of defining ‘food scarcity’ for 8% of the population keep shifting, as they should with dissatisfaction toward what had previously been a much desired goal. I’d bet real money on that scale slippage, sir. And mind you, expiration of the supplementary, Pelosi child tax credit did let many thousands of families slip back down. So? Tell me now which party wants to reduce wealth disparity and claw back the Supply Side Trillions to invest in new generations?
So? Tell me now which party wants to reduce wealth disparity and claw back the Supply Side Trillions to invest in new generations?
DeleteI'm less concerned with partisan comparisons than I was with handicapping the election. How will the economy affect the electorate?
Presuming regulators haven't been jiggling the numbers for political purposes, high food scarcity suggests a large pool of people who aren't happy and might just vote against the DNC bc Joe Biden is the incumbent.
Looking at it as a political messaging problem, if the DNC celebrates economic accomplishments without addressing food scarcity, you risk enraging voters who.feel their struggles are unseen.
If I was shaping the DNC message, I would celebrate successes then segway to how the job isn't complete. We need to pass temporary legislation to address the "too many" people suffering food scarcity, until our reshoring efforts are fully felt throughout the economy.
Then u make a play for needing a DNC Congress (a give me a big coattail argument).
How that relates to actual solutions is anyone's guess.
SpaceX Starship and Mars "Science Mission"
ReplyDeleteI was reading about the problems that the science community were having about a proposed Martian samples return mission and I thought that the SpaceX Starship completely changes the paradigm
So here is my first cut for a Mars mission using Starship
(1) Starship is launched into Earth orbit with all of the science packages aboard - 80 tons of "science"
(2) Tanker Starships refill the Mars Starships fuel tanks - eight launches for completely full tanks
1200 tons of fuel
120 tons for the ship and 80 tons for payload
Mass ratio of - 7 - exhaust velocity 3.56 km/sec - This gives a DeltaV available of 6.9km/sec
To get to Mars orbit requires 3.9 km/sec - this will leave the ship with 270 tons of fuel - enough for the Starship with a ton of samples to get back to earth orbit
Do an aerobraking maneuver to Mars orbit
Now start deploying the "Science package" -
Main communications orbiter
Probes to Deimos and Phobos
Several landing probes
Several landing and ascent modules
We have 80 tons available!!
The Apollo Lander was 15 tons - and took two astronauts
Wait while the landing and ascent modules do their stuff
Dock with the ascent modules and load the samples
Return to Earth orbit -
Because it's simply not as weight critical the actual Science bits will be at least an order of magnitude cheaper than todays
The launch cost - with all of the parts re-usable would be the cost of Nine Starship launches - at the initial cost of $10 million per launch - $90Million
My ending will happen someday. My job is to push away the killers I know. Someday I'll fail at that... or one I didn't know will get me. So far I'm pretty good at not getting run over by trains because I learned that as a kid and kept the skill. Each day offers more things to learn. 8)
ReplyDeleteI'm 10 years past that particular diagnosis with no relapse. Super cool. I didn't get any of the nasty side effects, but only because the colon cancer that showed up four years later wasn't on the list. Those cancers run in my family and the miracle that is modern medicine makes them fairly survivable if one starts looking for the evidence early.
If I ever do relapse, there is a different treatment plan being used today that doesn't involve a drug whose metabolite makes felt out of your DNA. The good folks at UCLA found a much less toxic technique for telling our immune systems to knock it off without having to suppress them. Not sure how it works, but no one in the US is likely to be prescribed the toxic sludge anymore. Not for that disorder.
So... a very happy outcome from my perspective. Makes me proud of my civilization that we worked out how to do all that and so much more... like the little genetic test they ran to make sure I wouldn't possibly be allergic to the immune suppressor they had me on after the chemo-drug had done its job. Amazing times.
Duncan,
ReplyDeleteImagine 80 tons of engineering instead of science. He has a goal of populating the place. He will be thinking about infrastructure that changes the game even more.
Count on him going for in-situ development of fuel and oxygen. That's probably what he wanted to get done early when he tried to buy a launch from the Russians a little before SpaceX was a thing. They turned him down and the story goes that they insulted him. (No doubt the insults were reciprocal.) Bwa-ha-ha!
Alfred
ReplyDeleteMars is a "hole" - the key resources are on Deimos and Phobos where they can be thrown - thrown! - to a habitat in Mars orbit
Mars is only useful as a way to aerobrake
I hope that Musk realizes that eventually
Alfred
ReplyDeleteActually Musk would want the 80 tons of science - we simply don't know enough about what is on Mars (and Phobos and Deimos) - so the first 80 tons would be "Science"
The next 80 tons.....
Elon wants to melt the Martian poles with nukes.
Delete—
What I don’t get is why ETs would need dry land, fire, metalworking. If they were advanced enough...
Interesting though not surprising:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.npr.org/2023/11/29/915981256/henry-kissinger-dead
A cold warrior who crossed some important lines.
Not much living to do after 100.
DeleteHe served the wrong master, who was winning the reelection—and then Nixon ruined his second term. Seemingly effortlessly.
But he did get to be president at the time of Apollo 11- 17.
Alan Brooks:
ReplyDeleteWhat I don’t get is why ETs would need dry land, fire, metalworking.
I may be misinterpreting your question, but I think the answer is not that ETs would need those particular developments, but that without them, they would not show up when we look for electromagnetic radiation as a sign of ET intelligence out there.
Seen in a "tweet of the week" contest:
ReplyDeleteI'm going to write a book about all the things I should have done with my life. I'll call it my oughtabiography.
SpaceX is happy to provide rocket services to anyone who can pay for them. And if their plans work out, they will be making plenty of Starships to do lots of science missions and lots of engineering missions.
ReplyDeleteAlfred - "Ponder what is happening with TSM when China rattles a saber related to the future existence of Taiwan as an independent state."
ReplyDeleteYou need not worry.
Let Peter Zeihan explain why America has a bright future (and China does not).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d76LRo1sl8
The long version is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTzqIuQ660
Its about the end of the world and why that is a good thing.
1.5 hours long, but well worth the time so grab a cup of coffee.
Demography is god, and Peter Zeihan is its prophet.
duncan - we should forget about Mars (a hellish, toxic, radiation death trap) completely and colonize Ceres instead)
ReplyDeletehttps://www.pagef30.com/2009/04/why-ceres-might-be-better-location-for.html
Ceres has one important detail that makes it much more interesting than one might expect: apparently it has lots and lots of water:
This 100 km-thick mantle (23–28 percent of Ceres by mass; 50 percent by volume) contains 200 million cubic kilometres of water, which is more than the amount of fresh water on the Earth. This result is supported by the observations made by the Keck telescope in 2002 and by evolutionary modelling.
Now let's compare Ceres with Mars as a destination for colonization. How do they stack up?
First of all, getting there in the first place. Mars is closer to us, Ceres is farther out. It would seem that this would result in us not being able to send missions to Ceres as frequently as to Mars...but in fact the opposite is true. Keep in mind that the only time we can reach a destination is when a launch window opens up, and frequency of launch windows is determined by the synodic period (basically the amount of time it takes for an object and the Earth to line up with each other). This image of Spirit's flight path to Mars shows how a launch to a destination like Mars works. The launch window opens up when the two planets are fairly close to each other but the outside object is ahead, then the probe launches, and meets up with the destination planet a few months later on.
Next: getting back. Ceres is much smaller and less massive than Mars:
..which gives it a much lower escape velocity. To escape the gravity of Mars you need to be moving at a velocity of 5.027 km/s (almost half that of Earth), but for Ceres this is a much much lower 0.51 km/s. With a much lower escape velocity not only do you need much less fuel to escape the planet to return to Earth, but the initial mission from Earth (since the vessel and fuel needed to get back also needs to be launched from Earth in the first place) will then require that much less fuel to launch from Earth, which lowers costs dramatically.
(cont.)
ReplyDeleteWe can easily compensate for Ceres' low gravity with spinning habitats (whose floors are angled out slightly from the axis so that the inhabitants feel like they are on a flat surface when spinning at 1g and being pulled down by Ceres at 0.03g).
With massive oceans of frozen water (for life, oxygen and fuel) a permanent base on Ceres can expand industrial and mining operations throughout the asteroid belt.
The goal would not be to mine minerals for Earth - the economics don't work out) but to kick start a new space civilization economy of its own.
Mining metals from Mercury to create a Dyson Swarm that generates a billion times more energy than mankind is currently using.
Mining the atmosphere of Venus for carbon fiber and graphene to construct hundreds of massive habitats, ships, etc.
Mine the asteroid Psyche for a million years worth of steel and other metals production.
Mine the atmosphere of Titan to make a million yeas worth of plastics and other hydrocarbons.
And those are just the big plays.
Millions of asteroids, trojans, Jovian moons, Saturnian rings, and comets await prospecting and mining by robotic workers.
But the hub of this new civ has to be Ceres whose low gravity and synodic period make it the perfect orbital transfer point for anywhere in the Solar System.
Then when we have enough space based industries and resources, we can easily terraform Venus, Luna and Mars (which frankly has zero economic value - few resources and a deep gravity well to overcome).
Duncan, you are also right about Phobos as the place where we should establish a Martian base.
ReplyDeleteWith hollowed out tunnels inside Phobos providing radiation protection, the base personnel can thoroughly explore Mars from the high ground of orbit using remote drone, blimps and rover operating in real time.
Maybe one day construct a space elevator from Phobos down to the Martian surface from ordinary steel. We could do the same with a Lunar space elevator.
In the meantime, Phobos is perfectly situated for orbital transfers.
https://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2015/06/phobos-panama-canal-of-inner-solar.html
Phobos--Panama Canal of the Inner Solar System
Re: Solar system colonization
ReplyDeleteDo everything - serendipity is real. Just be civilized about it - no more empires.
Alfred Differ: Makes me proud of my civilization
Your inspiring Bayesian* recovery story and accompanying gratitude and optimism are powerful. Contrast that with the disgusting Covita vignette after a ponderous orange ass was saved by massive and immediate scientific (ie non-bleach) intervention.
* You'd make a great computational psychohistorian
DP
ReplyDeleteI'm listening to Peter Zeihan and I couldn't believe his numbers. He said China has enough empty condos to house 1.5 - 3 billion people. I thought - no way! So I started researching https://www.businessinsider.com/china-vacant-homes-3-billion-people-housing-crisis-ex-official-2023-9 . He's right!
Textile plants coming back to life in the US, again no way. He's right https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/us-textile-factories-return.html.
Just wow!
ReplyDeleteScidata’s insight – that zero sum might have been exacerbated by math and science… and it’s possible that had an effect on some philosophically-minded folks. But far more influential has been a billion years of deadly competition among ALL of our ancestors. Sure, in group cooperation and empathy can lead to positive sum behaviors even among animals. But even among humans, the hierarchy of needs only shifts WHERE the zero-sum boundary lies.
See: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/07/altruistic-horizons-our-tribal-natures.html “Altruistic Horizons: Our tribal natures, the ‘fear effect’ vs. inclusion… and the end of ideologies.”
Re borg… the writer/director’s intent depends on appearance! If the ‘group mind’ clanks mechanistically while aggressively demanding assimilation, then ‘group mind’ is evil. If it’s represented by smiling, soothing beauties with flowers in their hair, floating forward in lotus position… Well, I make a different approach in EARTH.
I hoped Phobos would be key to it all, if it was carbonaceous with lots of volatiles (e.g water). Alas, it's loking pretty stony.
ReplyDeleteRe Phobos and Ceres and all of the others
ReplyDeleteThey are still too BIG
The best way is to have rotating habitats in space - starting with two "Starships" and a rope
Phobos becomes the material source - the sun is always visible for solar power although the main habitat may be better hiding behind Phobos while its just the power plant looking at the sun - big mirrors!
With copious amounts of energy we don't need specific "compounds" - like water - we need the elements that make them up - so a "stony" lump still has the required elements
Phobos has an escape velocity of 41km/HOUR - so a throwing arm on the surface could throw boulders or bags of material to our habitat
Ceres has an escape velocity of over 1000 mph - need something more than a "thrower"
Building your habitat ON one of the small bodies means that you have to put up with its rotation - your power source moves and hides half the time - and your "Radiation Source" does the same
Building your habitat NEXT to one of the small bodies as its source of raw material makes more sense
Big bodies may be worth the extra time & energy. That's where geological, chemical, and perhaps even evolutionary processes have been active. There's likely more treasure out there than just water and metals. Even the Spanish took side trips from seeking Eldorado to look for the Fountain of Youth. And we have a much better chance of actually finding it.
ReplyDeleteduncan, maybe we can turn Phobos into a large disco ball!
ReplyDeleteDuncan, while I agree about the long term advantages of built O'Neill colonies, there are advantages to digging into a big mass of protective material that can be used in a myriad ways, including as a heat sink. Recycling on your bola colony would have to be utterly perfect.
ReplyDeleteIf the ‘group mind’ clanks mechanistically while aggressively demanding assimilation, then ‘group mind’ is evil. If it’s represented by smiling, soothing beauties with flowers in their hair, floating forward in lotus position…
ReplyDeleteHmm...that doesn't sound so much like a group mind as a groupie mind... :)
Dr Brin
ReplyDeleteYou can do all of that with material you have thrown off from your "source" - a few thousand tons - or even a hundred thousand tons - could easily be thrown from the main source
Small enough to be moved into position - where you can use it as everything from a heat sink to a radiation shield to a source of material
While the bigger mass - Deimos is 1.4 Trillion tons - is just a few hundred miles away
Duncan you are still talking way, way 9th generation tech from now.
ReplyDeleteDr Brin
ReplyDeleteAm I??
Building something in space is going to be EASIER than building something on Mars or on the moon
The Martian "atmosphere" and gravity is more a hinderance than a help
If you drill/dig into the surface the "rock" is not going to be airproof - and will not resist atmospheric pressure - so you need the same or more structure
If you build on the surface and cover it with soil for radiation the structure must cope with those loads
To me a pair of Starships on their tether using their 160 tons of equipment could start building a long term habitat - they would still have enough fuel to return - and could start making more fuel
Its the oxygen that is the heavy part of the fuel and almost everything is an oxide
If that is the 9th generation then landing on Mars and doing the same is the 18th generation
Duncan,
ReplyDeleteMars is a "hole"…
I think the entire region around Mars is a hole… including it's moons, but if that's what gets people out of bed in the morning to work at creating our future I'm not going to anything but smile.
Sure. The Martian moons are easier to reach and leave, but to do what? The engineer in you can point at the various tasks necessary to make us multi-planetary and I'll nod my head… then still call it a hole. The problem isn't "what to do." It's "How do we sell it?"
Remember that SpaceX spun up StarLink. StarLink makes money selling services to people on Earth. SpaceX makes money launching from and returning stuff to Earth. StarLink justifies a LOT of Falcon9 flights while the people on the ground justify StarLink's effort to establish services.
Now look at Mars. Where are the customers? What are they buying? Nowhere and nothing! The customers are all back here on Earth! So… how do we bootstrap our way toward justifying projects anywhere near Mars?!
Well… that's where the Science tenants come in. They'd buy flights to deliver their hardware and bring stuff back. They don't have a whole lot of money, though. In the US, that money either comes from Congress through an agency like NASA or through the NGO science foundations. Serving them will bring in a bit of cash, so being able to serve them cheaply will be a BIG deal. If he can get them as early tenants, he's going to HAVE to look for the equivalent of StarLink to have any chance of getting a lot of people out there. The problem is… I don't know what the StarLink equivalent is. I don't see it.
I DO know what the link equivalent is if he went to NEO asteroids first.
———
Another more technical reason the entire Marian reason will be a hole for a while is it is out there closer to the frost line where there is less sunlight/sq-meter AND the orbits are longer. Time costs money and power is harder to collect out there.
I think the right direction to go is inward toward the sun and then hitch a ride on a NEO. Several NEO's. Start propellant production and stage a depot out near the Earth-Sun L2 point. I know how to make money doing that because the customers are likely to drive by IF they know the restrooms are kept clean.
Sorry Duncan. I have been evaluating new and majorly innovative space development concepts for a long time. in the 80s at Calspace and this last 12 years at NIAC. And it is WAY harder than back of the envelope oughta-bes.
ReplyDeleteDr Brin - I agree - its hard
ReplyDeleteI just don't see how the Martian atmosphere and gravity make it any easier!!
As far as I can see they just make the whole thing far far more difficult
Saying that unfortunately Alfred is probably correct - its not an engineering problem so much as a selling problem
ALL of space development is really a selling problem. The tech can be developed. We know that. The trick is to figure out WHY we should… and that always, always, always comes back to markets.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you in the US who are old enough… Do you remember Stuckey's? If you drove around the US as much as I did when I was a kid in the 60's and 70's, you knew them on sight. Out in the western states, they could be found on the major highways out in the middle of nowhere… but usually along side a gas station. If you did any travel back then you might already know which of the two businesses had the cleaner restrooms.
Odd things happened to land value along US highways. Most of it was nearly worthless, but acreage near exit ramps might sport a fuel station. Since fuel efficiency basically sucked back then we had to think carefully when driving desert and prairie highways. Those gas stations usually had garages to help us with our clunkers, but when something like a Stuckey's place popped up next to them people would stop even if they didn't have a problem with their car.
Fuel depots with garages drew people who needed to stop.
The neighboring candy store with clean restrooms drew people who wanted to stop.
The candy store got customers, but the fuel depot got a lot of them too.
Space development is really about figuring out how to take lessons like this and apply them again and again. Where should we put fuel depots for a multi-planet civilization? Pretty much everywhere… but there are a few obvious places to start like the Earth-Sun L1 and L2 points. Next thing, though, is to figure out what the modern equivalent for Stuckey's is going to be because you'll sell nothing in the vicinity of Mars unless there are people who want to buy things in the vicinity of Mars.
Seems obvious to me now, but it wasn't until about 20 years ago. I began to study what actually happens to populations that experience migrations, diasporas, or come in contact with those who do. Trade between people is a HUGE deal in what gets us to move anywhere. [It's MUCH more important than even wars where invaders try to murder everyone. Even in terrible conditions, refugees account for a small fraction of those who suffer. Many will just hunker down and try to survive.]
scidata,
ReplyDeleteBayesian recovery story
I'm happy to serve in anyway that opposes the ponderous orange ass. Very happy. My 'inner boy scout' thinks there is probably a merit badge in it for ALL of us who try. 8)
...geological, chemical, and perhaps even evolutionary processes have been active...
Agreed. I think a few of us here might understand the need to get our hands on phosphorus (relatively) rich ore bodies out there. Worlds with a water cycle will be ones where we'd use our current knowledge as a start.
Agreed. I think a few of us here might understand the need to get our hands on phosphorus
DeleteSure. One reason is soil depletion. Current farming methods require phosphorus and nitrogen inputs.
This post will please both our gracious host and locumranch.
ReplyDeleteI refer you to "Report from Iron Mountain", here abbreviated as RfIM. Its mid-60's origin is controversial. Orthodox opinion, which I hold, is that RfIM is a super-sharp, super-dark satire of establishment thinking, written as a parody of a government report. Others, mostly on extremes of right and left, think it is a real government report, revealing perverse agendas.
The satire rings true. When I read RfIM, I howl with laughter. Then I ask myself, "why am I laughing?"
Harman Kahn and Henry Kissinger* thought it bad satire. A scoundrel's insult is praise.
RfIM asks: is it possible to eliminate war, and is this desirable? The report's counter-intuitive conclusion, written in clotted prose but with icy logic, is that eliminating war is indeed possible, but not desirable, unless it is replaced with something else that is just as wasteful in money, capital, labor, and lives.
RfIM says that this is because society needs war, or some substitute, to remain stable. For instance, society must waste about 10% of its domestic product annually on some unproductive activity independent of market forces and subject to central control. Price no object, profit no requirement. This is as an economic 'flywheel', to be revved up when the economy slows down, and cut back when the economy overheats. War and its preparation fits this function well.
War also fits society's need for an outlet for the aggression of its young men. It unifies society and centralizes control. War also accelerates the sciences and the arts.
RfIM considered various substitutes for the war system. One was huge expenditures on social welfare, housing, medicine, etc. RfIM rejected this as a long-term solution, for it would be too cheap. The targeted domestic prosperity would soon be attained, and the program would lose its value as an economic flywheel.
RfIM also considered a global battle against pollution. It rejected this as not plausible enough to sell to the paying public, unless pollution were deliberately accelerated first.
RfIM also considered blood sports, and the re-introduction of slavery.
Its favorite proposal (and this should please both Brin and locumranch) is a massive long-term space program with an unattainable objective. RfIM's main problem is how to sell it at the necessary scale of free-from-market unproductive waste. They consider selling it as defense from extraterrestrial invasion, but sadly rejected that as too science-fictional.
I propose that asteroid defense would work fine both politically and (non)economically. The fact that metals mined from Psyche would not turn a profit on Earth is _not_ a disadvantage; it would _perfect_ asteroid mining as a flywheel! Likewise, space flight's health hazards like radiation, isolation, and low-gee are a feature, not a bug, for they impose war-like life wastage.
Use the metals to build craft to take out the Earth-crossing asteroids, by nukes or gravity tugs; vaporize the Earth-crossers or drop them into the Sun or fling them past Jupiter. Sell this as us paying back our blood-price to Gaia. Sure we're causing a mass extinction, but we're preventing the next five! Yay us!
Mining unprofitable asteroid metal to clear out Earth orbit fits both flywheel and unifying functions. Brin's space future is viable, for reasons that locumranch believes, namely Iron Mountain reasons. Note that some of those Earth-crossers _are_ iron mountains!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6cnryxwH6A
Correction: Herman Kahn
ReplyDeleteNote: there are finitely many Earth-crossing asteroids, so their use as a menace to spend money against is limited. But there are tens of thousands of them, so they should last awhile.
ReplyDeleteThere's always lifting the Earth. That'll take awhile.
ReplyDeleteHeh. The NEO's will get used up. Eventually... but we don't have to intentionally waste money. We shall waste some anyway, but no intent is needed.
ReplyDeleteA conversation with my wife about our cats led me to attempt a riff on the Monty Python bit about "Aside from..., what have the Romans really done for us?" except spoken by a cat, and substituting "humans" for "Romans".
ReplyDeleteHaven't quite been able to do it justice yet.
LH, sounds like a YouTube/ticktock/Instagram channel to me
DeleteAlfred Differ:
ReplyDeleteOdd things happened to land value along US highways. Most of it was nearly worthless, but acreage near exit ramps might sport a fuel station. ...
I can't help but think of the visionary, Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, describing his vision for "Cloverleaf Industries" in the late 1940s.
I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
@John Viril,
ReplyDeleteActually, I am not on any social media platform. Yes, I watch some videos on YouTube, but when I post something from there, it's usually something I went looking for intentionally because I already remembered the bit. I'm not surfing the net looking for things to post.
I'm like the aliens in the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok". I communicate using allusions and metaphors.
Actually, I am not on any social media platform.
DeleteWell, sound like an idea to start a channel to. Might b funny.
As for the "Darmok" TNG episode, now there are 3 things we agree upon. One of my favorites.
John Viril "retweeted":
ReplyDelete...understand the need to get our hands on phosphorus
I learned about how animals including humans store energy as ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) as early as high school biology back in the bicentennial year, but never put it together until recently that life on earth is dependent on phosphorus as much as it is on carbon.
"Darmok" was well-done and thoughtful... and yet, how did those people learn the facts to which they referred with literary allusions?
ReplyDelete"Darmok" was well-done and thoughtful... and yet, how did those people learn the facts to which they referred with literary allusions?
ReplyDeleteOsmosis? Hard to believe they could convey allusions clearly using pure allusions. Maybe it was that allusions were so common in their language that the universal translator couldn't link them into a working language, but there was a backbone to convey fact?
"Darmok" was more about a failure mode of universal translators than about minutiae of backstory. Truth to tell, I wasn't that into the episode at first, expecting something more like "Arena", which I believe was intentional misdirection on the part of the writers. But it won me over with the final scene, in which the viewer--me, anyway--marvels that he can understand the interaction which takes place entirely in the alien "language".
ReplyDeleteDr Brin, as a writer yourself, it must occur to you that fiction about alien beings ultimately turns out to tell us something about ourselves. After the fact, I understood that an episode about aliens who communicate in allusions and metaphors is calling attention to the fact that we, the human audience ourselves, largely communicate in allusions and metaphors. How quick yet powerful it is to make a point by throwing out phrases like "A chicken or egg thing" or "What have the Romans really done for us?" or "Turtles all the way down"? What would a real universal translator make of terms like "Orwellian", or "Promethean" or "Holnists"? Is the term "odyssey" an allusion to Odysseus, or is it the other way around?
Even in what would seem like dry scientific language, allusions and metaphors abound with terms like "Fermi paradox" or "Newtonian physics" or "Goldilocks zone".
Our languages are studded with the names of exemplars turned nouns...Martyr, Martinet, Caesar, Quisling*...but I'd assume a true universal translator would be something like an AI sort routine, leaving blanks until it could assign enough meaning to basic concepts to begin to extrapolate the more species-specific. That could take years. Universal translator is the linguistic equivalent of a teleporter - cuts down on time between dramatic scenes.
ReplyDeleteFor one of my unfinished stories, I came up with something similar - a GESS (Global Educable Synoptic Simulation - which could take the base parameters of a new world, and slowly (with the aid of hard data from satellites and ground weather sensors) build a forecasting ability. Being the weatherman on a planet you don't have centuries of climo for would be tough gig - though with us advancing into the Anthropocene, our old data is becoming less useful. When a 'hundred-year flood' starts occurring every decade or so, insurance companies get a bit shirty.
Pappenheimer
*I'm blanking on female examples, unless you include the more recent Karen. Oh, forgot Lady Macbeth.
Pappenheimer,
ReplyDeleteJessabelle.
----------
David,
Human languages are lego-like stacks of analogies with the bottom layers connected to direct sensory experience.
My 'meaning' for the term 'plastic' (as in plastic drinking cup) is connected to a teething experience at the root. I don't directly remember that (no one recalls these roots well), but I did find a heavily grooved cup many years ago that my mother kept and my hands KNEW it belonged in my mouth to be chewed on. Weird experience.
This idea come from or through Douglas Hofstadter. Stacks of analogy turtles all the way down.
----------
John,
I was thinking about our need for phosphorus is we are to be a multi-planet species. Our kind of life depends on it as Larry pointed out, but so far our knowledge of how it is concentrated enough to turn mineral into ore is based on Terran processes. Our vision of the future will be in trouble if we have to export phosphorus from Earth.
Larry,
Judge Doom only missed the most important point. That's how suburbia came to be. Without suburban satellite cities, we'd be a whole lot poorer. 8)
Our roads became like rivers of old by enabling cheap transport and justifications for concentrations of capital. Rail did this too, but I'm not THAT old. 8)
A few meandering thoughts on the Fermi paradox (in several parts):
ReplyDeleteEvolution isn't progressive--there's no predetermined goal, no predetermined direction. However, it is cumulative. What happens at any moment is constrained by history. It also has an inherent "ratchet." As a population with reproductive success of "1.0" increases in size, the chances of a mutation that results in reproductive success of "1.1" also increases. When that occurs, by definition, the latter will displace the former and, as its population increases the chances of a mutation that results in reproductive success of "1.2" will increase--rinse and repeat... It also occurs across a broad front. In real life, most populations conduct many such "experiments" simultaneously. And, the results are winnowed by competition within the context of complex selective pressures (with the "value" of the same experiment often being different in different locations or at different times). In any particular circumstance, there are usually many different pathways/many different local optima. And, there are enough random mutations so that "something" that works will usually emerge even though it's often a compromise/approximation/kludge.
On multiple occasions, I've listened to popularizations state that the symbioses between archaea and bacteria that produced eucaryotic cells resulted from a single fortuitous encounter between two individuals. Hence, that it was a prohibitively rare occurrence that justified a "rare life" interpretation. But, that's not what actually happens. The phrase "most recent common ancestor" of two lineages should really be understood as the "most recent interbreeding population that included ancestors of both lineages," not as an individual. Mutualistic symbiotic associations tend to emerge gradually when a gradient of increasing mutual dependency between two populations correlates with a gradient of increasing reproductive success for both parties. They develop through many small "clicks" of the ratchet without needing any one low-probability event. There were likely many different experiments within the populations from which eucaryotic cells emerged. And, many other experiments in populations that didn't happen to fall on the line leading to the one that survived till the present.
I think similar arguments can be made for other examples of supposedly low probability events. Even the transition from pre-biotic to biological evolution was probably gradual. If the concentration of a molecule is considered equivalent to "population." Then molecules that are formed most easily/are most stable under a given set of conditions/auto-catalyze their own formation will increase in concentration. And, if two molecules tend to stabilize each-other or catalyze each-other's formation, the association will be favored. When the "soup" is compartmentalized by porous structures in rock or formation of micro-spherules, it creates many discrete experiments that are winnowed competitively. So, not much different, if more irregular, than biological evolution.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that life not only isn't rare but that its emergence is almost inevitable given half-way decent starting conditions. And, I suspect that even intelligent life (defined as roughly equivalent to humans) is only moderately rare. But, as I said in a slightly different context, there are probably many different pathways and local optima. So, any two independently evolved biospheres are likely to be deeply incompatible even if all the basic chemistry is the same. They may use different nucleic acids. They will probably use different genetic codes. They will probably use a different mix of amino acids to build proteins. They will probably depend on a different mix of micro-nutrients. They will almost certainly use different sensory systems and find different solutions to environmental challenges... And, although the fundamental processes (photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, respiration, etc...) may be the same, the details are likely to be different (within the constraints of the chemistry).
So, I think we will probably find life pretty much "everywhere" but interaction with it will be limited. We won't be able to eat/parasitize/infect/mate with/be sexually attracted to each-other. Which means that the probability of cross-contamination between biospheres is likely much lower than usually depicted in SF that deals with the subject (the aliens will not die from catching a cold...). But, it will also be much more difficult to colonize planets with endemic biospheres. We won't be able to "live off the land." In fact, it might be easier to uplift an endemic species than to do a "top-to-bottom" redesign of humans so that they could function within another biosphere. In interstellar colonization, getting there is going to be just the start of our problems... Which means, it's even less likely to "happen" than the speed of light limitation suggests.
ReplyDeleteAs for panspermia, I think it's likely to be rare. Transitioning microbes have to not only survive the event that ejects them from their point of origin, the vicissitudes of space and the event of their arrival but they have to land in a spot where the conditions are suitable for their survival and reproduction. Then, if there's already an endemic biosphere at that location, they have to survive and reproduce in the face of local competitors that have already saturated most of the available niches. There was an SMBC strip a few years ago in which the first few panels extol the "heroic" achievements of an alien seed/spore as it survives and lands. Then, in the second to last panel a small purple shoot emerges from a crack only to be eaten by a tardigrade in the last one. It would have been even more realistic if the tardigrade had lapsed into anaphylactic shock and died after eating it. Or, if it had gone uneaten but shriveled up and died due to lack of an essential micro-nutrient or symbiont. I suspect successful panspermia is likely to be limited to a narrow window just before the development of endemic life. And, that window may be quite short...
So, I don't think "rare life" is likely to be a solution to the Fermi paradox.
ReplyDeleteAs for what I think may be:
The Fermi paradox doesn't argue against the existence of other technological civilizations, only against the existence of "expansionist technological civilizations" (with "expansionist" being short-hand for a suite of traits and traditions that promote continuous growth in population, range, resource use, etc). Evolution probably favors expansionist species/cultures. But, traits that are beneficial in one context may not be beneficial in another. And, the development of significant technology certainly represents a change in context. So, I suspect that technological civilizations either self-destruct or, in avoiding that fate, transform themselves in such a way that they are no longer expansionist. And, a post-expansionist civilization is unlikely to do things that are visible from a distance. The whole Kardashev scale is predicated on the idea that continuous growth is inevitable/essential/intrinsically good. If successful civilizations abandon that approach, it's mute as a guide for what to look for. If that is the standard trajectory for civilizations, there may be many of them out there. It's just that they aren't doing anything visible and don't see much point in interacting. Without FTL, colonization/trade isn't practical. Art and other cultural matters are likely to be mutually incomprehensible. Basic research is probably going to be limited, for economic reasons, to sending probes to a handful of nearby stars in order to "ground truth" telescopes (Von Neumann probes really only make sense as advance prep for colonization...). So, looking for relictual research probes in-system may well be the best way to detect other civilizations. But, finding them is predicated on the solar system having passed fairly close to one in the past few billion years...
And, from my perspective, it's "OK" if that's the road we actually take, ourselves. If, in a hundred years or so, we have a reasonably stable, high tech civilization that isn't an authoritarian dystopia that will very much be a "win" even if, at that point, we lack the economic, social or psychological motivation to undertake a program of interstellar colonization, build mega-structures in space or teraform Mars.
ReplyDeleteYes, we'll continue to use space for communication, data collection, perhaps some specialty manufacturing, limited tourism... And, there may be some use of asteroid resources if that proves economically justifiable. Basic research will continue with ever larger telescopes and various automated probes. But, there will be few manned missions. Nearly everything that can be automated will be, due to the economics. So, the need for humans in space will actually decline as technology improves. Sending useful probes to nearby stars may eventually happen but it will be constrained by diminishing returns...
Meanwhile, there probably won't be a "singularity" when everything changes overnight. But, technology WILL continue to improve in a wide range of fields. It will have to if we're going to avoid self-destruction. We'll create our own "aliens" via AI or uplift (and, perhaps, merge with them). We may well change ourselves so that, in a century or two, we're no longer recognizably human... But, to me, that's also "OK". If we're still essentially unchanged by that point, it will probably mean that our civilization has failed and we're well down the "scavengers in the wastelands" fork. And, I like to think we still have a fair chance of avoiding that...
Anyway, I've run on long enough... ;-)
CP
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the problem is as you say "growth"
And that "zero growth" is unattainable - intelligence will either Grow - or become extinct
Pappenheimer:
ReplyDeletenames of exemplars turned nouns...Quisling...
I had known the word "quisling" for a long time before I learned that it was a proper name referring to a particular individual. I was disappointed to find that out. The word itself seems so appropriate for what it describes that if an actual name hadn't inspired the word, something else would have had to do so.
I'm fascinated by the chicken-and-egg relationship between the word "odyssey" and the name "Odysseus". The work The Odyssey would seem to be named as "The story of Odysseus" in the same way that The Iliad is "The story of Ilium (aka Troy)", which implies that the man's name came first and that "odyssey" became a word meaning "like that thing Odysseus did". Except that in school, we were told multiple times that the name "Odysseus" means "wanderer". Was the name prophetic? Or is it turtles all the way down?
I'm blanking on female examples,
I was going to suggest "Mata Hari", in the same vein as Alfred's "Jezebel" (which he spelled differently). "Tokyo Rose"? Seems like we beat up on the ladies, but your male examples were mostly negative as well.
I'm not sure I'd count "Victorian" in the same category, but the word itself has taken on connotations beyond simply "as happened during the reign of Queen Victoria".
Alfred Differ:
ReplyDeleteOur roads became like rivers of old by enabling cheap transport and justifications for concentrations of capital.
I wrote a poem in high school around the notion of the interstate as a river approaching the city and branching off into tributaries.
Rail did this too, but I'm not THAT old. 8)
My wife and I have lived in a few suburbs of Chicago, but never wanted to live in a "bedroom suburb" where you had to drive for miles to get to anything but private houses. We've always been in suburbs with their own thriving downtowns, theaters, storefronts, etc. Probably not by coincidence, they've also always been along the railroad lines.
When I was growing up, "Chicagoland" meant the six-county area surrounding the city proper, and even then, most of the five other than Cook County were farmland. The two next largest cities in Illinois, Rockford and Naperville, were their own separate entities. Now, we're all one big megalopolis, and the local weather forecast includes that for Kankakee, which is about 75 miles south. As a college student, I used to joke that Champaign-Urbana was a south suburb, because so many of the students were from up here. In another generation or so, that might not be a joke.*
* The specific place names won't mean much to you, but I'm sure there are California analogs.
CP
ReplyDeleteI’ve been thinking about the industrial revolution and the Drake equation for a while. If one examines the Fc term - civilizations which develop technology, you come to the conclusion that the industrial revolution would pretty much be that term. The steam turbine was invented by the Greeks, as was the Antikythera mechanism. The Chinese had steel and gunpowder, The Romans had fantastic civil engineering and a democracy that lasted for centuries. Yet none of them had the most important thing in the history of man - the industrial revolution.
Every thing else - steel, engineering, steam happened multiple times, yet the industrial revolution only happened once.
The idea of Intellectual Property was part of the key, but it wasn't enough. Everyone had to be able to participate, so the limited liability joint stock company had to be invented as well. Everything had to come together for the Industrial Revolution to happen.
Martian phosphorus
ReplyDeletehttps://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/7thmars2007/pdf/3228.pdf
duncan cairncross:
ReplyDeleteNeither continuous growth to infinity nor continuous decline to zero are long-term sustainable, nor is permanent zero-growth. But chaotic oscillation between growth and decline is sustainable for geological time. It boosts evolution: increased variation in the growth times, increased selection pressure in the bust times.
Along with Quisling and the like, I did remember one name with positive connotations -
ReplyDeleteMentor
The Iliad is buried pretty deep in European language - everyone knew it, and the Romans claimed a (specious) connection to it. In the ST:TNG episode, those particular aliens must have just taken their myth to the next level.
As I have two young men argue in my story -
"Why would anyone burn a city over a woman?"
"Look, the people here just set fire to a keep to steal some cattle."
Larry,
Lived in Rantoul for AF training a long time ago (Chanute AFB, long since closed). The Rantoulese saw Champaign-Urbana as the Big City.
McS,
Not devaluing the LLC, but the key invention was the printing press. China, IIRC, had had something very close to a corporate structure for centuries; but without a limited government and a literate populace, profits went to rich monopolists related to or bribing government officials.
There's a future where Earth is basically Disney Earth and most humans live elsewhere in the solar system, but it's many centuries away even if we can navigate the next 100 years without falling back.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer:
ReplyDeleteLived in Rantoul for AF training a long time ago (Chanute AFB, long since closed)
Yes, the base was still active when I was a student in Champaign. The express bus home to Chicago even made a stop there.
A few days ago I saw something (or maybe I heard it on the radio - don't remember) that said that new data are showing that a majority of stars in the universe are around 5 billion years old. This got me thinking about Fermi. One possible explanation is that we are simply among the first species in the neighborhood to achieve sufficient sapience to even be able to ask the question. Likely a majority of stars that are from the generations before the current one did not have enough heavy elements for the building blocks of life, but gifted those to our generation of stars by way of nucleogenesis. So there may not be any older civilizations out there to have surpassed us technologically and worked out whatever it takes to travel the stars. However, we may be just one of a sapience baby boom, and over the next several million years, the community will have grown to something more akin to our science-fiction fantasies.
ReplyDeleteI did a quick google and found one reference to this stellar baby boom.
https://phys.org/news/2014-01-galactic-star-baby-boom-billion.html
Paul SB
The Industrial Revolution
ReplyDeleteWas not due to a "key invention" - but to a LOT of separate "inventions" that together became a critical mass
Cheap plentiful iron is different from expensive iron!!
Generally speaking, CP’s missive seemed sensible… in fact, shouldn’t you also have your own blog?
ReplyDeleteI do want to comment on:
“The whole Kardashev scale is predicated on the idea that continuous growth is inevitable/essential/intrinsically good. If successful civilizations abandon that approach, it's mute as a guide for what to look for. If that is the standard trajectory for civilizations, there may be many of them out there. It's just that they aren't doing anything visible and don't see much point in interacting. Without FTL, colonization/trade isn't practical. .”
The Kardashev Scale has always been hugely silly, except as a way to say “we see no galaxies that have been Type III transformed.”
But some degree of colonization and trade is certainly possible without FTL… unless there’s a lot of MACHOs and debris floating between stars.
“Art and other cultural matters are likely to be mutually incomprehensible”
I disagree. Though that is the bias of an artist in a society that’s addicted to eclectic ‘otherness’.
duncan cairncross
ReplyDeleteThe Bessemer process and cheap iron didn't happen until 1874. The sheer scale of the company required to make a blast furnace big enough to work was enabled by the Industrial Revolution.
Yes, a number of inventions had to come together, but they were a different kind of invention that had never been seen before. Never before had the idea that you could own, buy and sell intellectual property existed. Never before had the idea that a lot of people could own a company existed.
onward
ReplyDeleteonward
mcs
ReplyDeleteThe Bessemer process produced cheap STEEL - iron was cheap several hundred years before that!
The stock market was a HUGE contributor - but it and patents which again were several hundred years earlier were nessesary but not sufficient
Humanity has been advancing for thousands of years - every generation introduced more new technologies
Printing helped to spread those ideas (and to stop the losses)
I just don't see any ideas as being "different kinds" - the Industrial revolution is simply what an exponential process looks like
duncan cairncross
ReplyDeleteThe key ideas were that of Intellectual Property and the stock market. For the 1st time non-material things could be owned, bought and sold. That is one of the keys.
"and tech civilizations that escape the lobotomizing trap of feudalism"
ReplyDeleteAt least from the point of view of technological advance, feudalism has had a very bad rap! The feudal era in Europe was roughly 900-1500. At the start of that period, Europe was a technological backwater. By its end, with the invention of mechanical clocks, eyeglasses, musical notation, moveable-type printing, ships capable of long oceanic voyages, and new farming, mining and metallurgical tachniques; and the adoption of paper, the compass, Hindu-Arabic numerals, windmills, gunpowder... it was rivalled in technological sophistication only by China, and was advancing much faster. See for example Jean Gimpel The Medieval Machine, Arnold Pacey Technology in World Civilization and Alfred W. Crsoby The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Furthermore the non-European society which most successfully adapted to, borrowed from and competed with European imperialism was Japan - which had its own version of feudalism in its recent past. Much more likely is that technological cultures (which I agree are rare) all discover capitalism, which promptly destroys their environmental life supports and renders them extinct.