The Great Big AI Crisis of 2024 will likely wreak its worst harm via political misinformation and manipulation this year (next month!) But it’s swamping its way into science, as well.
“It is not always so easy to spot the use of AI. But one clue is that ChatGPT tends to favor certain words… such as meticulous, intricate or commendable.”
Of course all such detection cues are temporary. Even when we point them out to each other (as I just did), that only helps train the systems to avoid overusing them.
So, is it hopeless to dream of escaping the Age of Tsunamis of Lies?
None of the palliatives proposed by the geniuses and mavens of AI - ranging from 'moratoriums' to EU style regulations to 'privacy rules' stand any chance of helping much. Only one thing will even possibly work and that is siccing AI programs onto each other, competitively, with incentives for them to tattle on misinformation, as I describe here in Wired: Give Every AI a Soul - or Else.
And more vividly detailed? My keynote at the May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online. “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”
Let's dive in to how that could work.
== AI, Ai Ai!!! ==
In all of those places, I've pointed out that we already developed one fairly effective method for detecting and deterring liars, foiling harm doers and preventing a return to 6000 years of lobotomizing feudalism. Imperfectly, by far! But light years better than any prior culture.
Was it carefully-deliberated and designed laws? Those can help, but no. Paternalistic protection by the state? Ditto, and dangerous. The method I'm talking about – the one innovation that gave us everything – has been to flatten the playing field and empower a wide enough diversity of citizen-players, so that we can pit elites and potential predators against each other.
It's called reciprocal accountability.
The results are very often positive sum. Negatives and falsehoods get canceled out by competition, while positives can combine through better-tested models, new alliances, and cooperation.
(Politics is supposed to be like that, by the way. And it was, overall, till a mad cult waged open war against the very concept of negotiation, turning our political institutions zero-sum and now negative sum.)
All of which leads back to my notion about Artificial Intelligence. That we should try emulating, in this new ecosystem, the one and only method that ever reduced misinformation and predation among organic humans. Again, I am calling for reciprocal accountability on cyber beings, applied by cyber beings.
While I may be alone in offering institutional innovations to achieve this, some groups have lately been coming up with practical methods.
“To pinpoint when a language model might be confabulating, the new method involves asking a question multiple times to produce several AI-generated answers. Then a second LLM (Large Language Model) groups these answers according to their meaning; for instance, “John drove his car to the store” and “John went to the store in his car” would be clustered together.” Leading to a new metric “semantic entropy.”
“Other anti-hallucination methods have used LLMs to evaluate generated answers, through approaches such as asking a single model to double-check its own work. But the paired system improves on this...”
So, yeah. The idea is starting to gain (a little) traction. Sic em on each other. But with incentives that reward those who do us all - and Truth - the most good.
When did I speak of a 'new ecosystem'? Here's an earlier posting where I talk about that...
Are we making new kinds of 'ecosystems'?
... and how we organic humans (orgs) will still control - maybe for another decade or two - the new ecosystem's 'sun.'
And if we handle this power wisely, it may shine upon the fabled 'soft landing' alongside our new cyber children.
And speaking of the sun...
== The solar revolution is here ==
This article in the Economist discusses how solar power's recent huge boom may be only the beginning. 70 years after first introduced by Bell Labs... and frequently sabotaged by filth merchants:
"Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over..."
...Much as I portrayed in EARTH in 1990. Though by now the question is why are the lords of carbon still backing the Denialist Movement, when this revolution can't be delayed any longer? And when denying all the heat waves and tumbling glaciers and acidifying oceans and super storms only makes you look like a jibbering loony?
Economies of scale have taken over now and batteries and methane and new nuclear will handle surge capacity, so why do they continue to back a cult bent on wrecking the planet that they must live on, too?
Well, the Russians and Saudis are still utterly fossils (and fossil-dependent) and plausibly they are the ones holding blackmail on almost all high Republicans. And unlike mere corruption (which can sometimes think long term), blackmail is always imminent and near term. It is only about satisfying the blackmailer today.
THAT - fundamentally - is what the Ukraine war is about and it is why the GOP is slavishly devoted to a Kremlin and slightly-relabeled KGB that they once despised. And it is why Ronald Reagan would spit in their eyes.
== Future Tech ==
An interesting report - The Battery Mineral Loop - suggests that we may be recycling precious battery elements much more efficiently pretty soon, and that the race to mine them may be a temporary thing, lasting as little as 1.5 decades. Which is still a bridge we need to accomplish with careful management, good politics and lots of science.
Australians have developed night vision optics so thin they might be barely noticeably different from your normal glasses.
Great news that soon computer chips will be able to store the energy they need for rapid operations right on the chip, itself, through new micro-capacitors.
Oh, is it possible to find something positive, even lightening, from a Trump action? I have long demanded examples where a Republican U.S. administration had major, palpable comparative positive outcomes for the nation and world as a whole, and not just benefiting narrow, conniving cabals. Certainly, when the Trump guys sold off the U.S. Helium Reserve to buddies, for almost nothing, those pals immediately jacked up prices for the element that’s utterly necessary for many medical uses, such as supercooled imaging systems. And quantum computers.
Only now the deal might (accidentally and unintentionally) benefit us, as a major new source of Helium has been found deep under Minnesota. Like the recent phosphate discoveries in Norway, it may be good news for civilization… and bad for market-cornering cheaters…
…till we get the mother lodes from asteroids, that is.
So... what now?
Now YOU do your bit for the Enlightenment, for science and civilization.
Check your voter registration and those of friends! Give or volunteer if you can. Wear this. And remember that earlier victories in the recurring U.S. Civil War always led to golden eras.
Imperfectly! But we moved forward, correcting errors made by every prior generation. Making new ones for the next to correct! But moving ahead.
Toward the stars.
I like "Age of Tsunamis of Lies".
ReplyDeleteI have been referring to it as "The Coming AI-Generated Bullshit Apocalypse."
;->
From the previous comments
ReplyDeleteIran and the middle east
The USA caused the situation in Iran
First overthrowing (with British help) the secular democratic government
Then supporting a bloodthirsty dictator - to the extent that the only surviving opposition was the religious one (Mullahs)
The Mad Mullahs would have been in power for 5 years - ten at most - but the USA provided every despot's dream - an external enemy
First by sicking their other bloodthirsty dictator on Iran - most of today's Iranians lost friends and relatives in that conflict then by keeping the pressure on
Obama negotiated with the Iranian moderates - the days of the Mullahs were numbered
Then the Orange Cockwomble screwed up the treaty and stabbed the moderates in the back
The Mad Mullahs were saved! - and the moderates crippled so that renewing the Obama agreement became impossible
The risk of the Tudeh taking power under Mossadegh was too high.
DeleteFor todays post
ReplyDeleteThe first stage will be not so much setting your AI against the others as USING your AI to find the patterns - to find where the news has been distorted
This involves using AI as a tool - and will work long before AI is smart enough to do it itself
duncan cairncross:
ReplyDeletelong before AI is smart enough to do it itself
As long as AI is trained by treating every sentence on the internet as having equal weight, and then further trained by ingesting the output of other AIs, AI's intelligence is going to trend downward, not upward.
David, regarding that Union Army cap, here is a picture of me as part of the Union Army at the 3rd Battle of Manassas (aka the 1974 National Model Rocketry Convention).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.facebook.com/share/p/14Vt57Gum6/?mibextid=qi2Omg
I am carrying my Estes Egg-Roc for the egg lift competition. Sadly, my rocket barely cleared the launch rail. My dad and skipped the con for a day to drive into DC and be part of the crowd in front of the White House when Nixon left office.
scidata (from previous thread):
ReplyDeleteyou maybe should post (a topic in TASAT) about great closing lines
Many years ago I read an SF book review which had a list of closing phrases at or close to the start of the review, some of which I recognised immediately. Then came a glowing recommendation of The Best of C. M. Kornbluth.
A mentor of mine thought that Kornbluth was the greatest SF writer. Certainly he was one of those 'if only they had lived longer' types.
Delete@ Dr. Brin, from the previous thread:
ReplyDeleteTurkey is building two naval corvettes for Ukraine. But might not let them leave the Black Sea. I keep wondering why Ukraine doesn't just buy a couple elsewhere and use them to go after RF oil tankers and anything North Korean.
Simon Whistler had a video dealing with this matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlUxJRg7dkw
tl, dw: On those hundreds and maybe thousand "shadow fleet" ships travel under Gabonese flags. Attacking them would be a (technical) violation of international sea law.
Own thoughts: Attacking those ships could be seen as an act of piracy and aggression against a "neutral" country by the west, and bring up the rest of Africa against us. Also, I would remind of the possible environmental implications of warships attacking oil tankers.
Hugh R (or were) gr8! Estes and the Union forever.
ReplyDeleteGood point Der Oger. Ukraine might have to 'buy' them from Gabon first, and seize them when returning empty. It would only take a few.
Duncan, every single thing you said about US-Iran is both true and -- howlingly untrue. e.g. the very idea that the CIA 'toppled' Moussadegh with three guys. Yeah, sure.
Where did I say the CIA toppled Mossadegh with three men? - it was a large operation - the Brits were involved as well as a lot of Iranians
DeleteA classic "seemed like a good idea at the time"
And I would say the same for the actions after the Shah - they were NOT intended to keep the Mullahs in power - but they did
We can’t second-guess what was done to Mossadegh, or to Allende later on. There were Communists lurking behind the scenes in both Iran & Chile. Difference is: Allende was a Marxist—Mossadegh wasn’t.
DeleteChile turned out tolerably well; but Iran probably would be little different today if Mossadegh had remained in power. And if there is a region that will see the use of a tactical nuke, it might well be the Mideast.
A couple months ago, I did a Journal Club style walkthrough of 2 or 3 of the papers on methods purporting to classify articles as human or AI:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.someweekendreading.blog/detecting-ai-written-papers/
Yes, the statistics sort of work. For now.
But the conclusion seems to be that this is the start of a continual arms race, as the LLMs get better at evading detection without getting better at truthfulness.
For a good while yet, we will grok A.I. better than it groks us. Computational thinking is a very sharp arrow in our quiver. FORTH and centaur memes apply. We should go Mongolian on A.I.'s ass.
ReplyDeleteWhat are your thoughts on Yuval Harari's suggested legal restrictions on AI agents?
ReplyDeleteHarari is very very smart. Perhaps 30% as smart as his reputation! But only one such 'legal restriction' will help and that's a truth-in-AI-content reg, showing what % was AI generated. It will only help a little! And only work a little. Unless accompanied by incentives for AI to COMPETE against each other. As I described in WIRED.
ReplyDeleteAlan Brooks
ReplyDelete"Communists lurking behind the scenes"
Bogeys under the bed!
The main reason that various regimes went "communist" is because the USA refused to support them!
Vietnam is the prime example
Vietnam is an OLD country which had been conquered by the French and then by the Japanese
After the Vietnamese (with a lot of help) kicked out the Japanese the bloody French went back
They asked for help from the USA!
The USA chose to support the French - so the Vietnamese had no option except Russia
Almost all of the time that people "went communist" it was because the USA was supporting their oppressors
Almost never because the USA was "bad" - just not very good at looking at the big picture AND paranoid about the
"Communists lurking behind the scenes"
Bogeys under the bed!
Toxic BS never dies. This faux intellect ThinkingWest 'cites' a 'quotation' supposedly made in the 1700s by Alexander Tytler, asserting that democracies inevitably go through generational cycles of vigor, wealth, luxury/decadence, then character-building slavery followed by vigor. It is a 'cyclical history' fetish that was beloved of the Nazis and confederates and countless other cults of the right. (The left has its own teleologies: not as vile, but still problematic.)
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/thinkingwest/status/1840747176726573510
This stunningly delusional "quotation" has been debunked at every level for a lifetime. It was first promoted by an insurance salesman in the 1950s who made up the "Tytler" reference. Moreover, the purported 'cycle' has zero historical support and is insanely easy to refute, which I did, in detail, here: https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-tytler-calumny-is-democracy-hopeless.html
Alas, this jibber incantation is now pushed by a new cult that's baying around a series of books like "The 4th Turning" - by Strauss & Howe, proclaiming that America follows a precise, 80 year pattern that has absolutely zero actual support, but gives believers that righteous in-the-know feeling.
My most recent bit about this repulsively toxic American neo-religion is at: https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-tytler-calumny-is-democracy-hopeless.html
I have standing offers for major wagers, over any of the chapters or assertions in The Forth Turning and found that method to be effective, since the cultists always flee. Always.
Oops Scidata sorry about the 'Forth Turning"! It should be Fourth.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: It was supposed to be called 'Fourth', but the system character limit* forced it to squeeze into 5 chars (1960s computers were low on resources).
ReplyDelete* new book from Kate Conger, tech reporter for NYT:
"Character Limit"
- how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter
All true, Duncan, but it’s not what we write here—it is what we neglect in this: ditching Mossadegh was a judgment call so long ago, the actors are all dead.
ReplyDeleteBlood under the bridge.
Mossadegh meant well, yet the Soviets did not; you can be absolutely certain they were looking forward to building bases in Iran.
And later on, in Chile. The Russians’ doctrine after WW2 was that all wars were to be fought off Russian territory...preferably as far away as possible. (Such as, say, in Cuba or Chile.)
Yes, we Yanks have committed at least as many of these errors as not.
But haven’t the residents Down Under?
Maybe, just maybe, communism (and later islamism) would not have taken roots in those countries If it had not found fertile grounds.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe that fertilizer was in part the way western politicians, businessmen etc.thought about things like skin color and religion.
While Moussadegh and Allende etc were shameful blemishes on American honor, the notion that these events happened 'because' a few CIA officers happened to show up with a few briefcases of cash is not only astonishingly dumb, but racist-patronizing toward Iranians and Chileans etc, that their own home-grown bastards weren't perfectly willing and capable of doing 99% of the bastardy themselves. Care for some examples?
ReplyDeleteA few CIA officers with briefcases of cash was exactly what happened in Guatemala, for the example I studied best. It's easy to overthrow moderates - and Arbenz was a moderate, no doubt - because their base of power is not as secure as that of an ideologue like Castro or, on the other side, Pinochet, and they do not generally want to start the kind of violence needed to stay in power. I suspect Mossadegh was faced with the same unpalatable decision...and both leaders sought to cut into corporate profits. (Dole Fruit and the AIOC, which became part of BP.)
ReplyDelete99% of the 'bastardy" was caused by army officers in each case - military counterrevolutions against perceived socialism. Back in the 50's, I suspect neither military would have lifted a finger without assurance that they would be backed by the US.
The same playbook was used in Cuba and ran into an armed militia, with no traditional military left to bribe. Result = Bay of Pigs.
Pappenheimer
Allende’s fate is embarrassing albeit he never had much of chance. After his election, the far-left led by the MIR vanguard, pressed for revolution; the situation spiraled downwards and a few yrs later, Pinochet instigated his little Duce coup—afterwards America provided assistance.
ReplyDeleteBeforehand, the far-left and far-right did the work of destabilizing Chile. Marxism couldn’t succeed in such a primitive nation. The classic example of this is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: Brezhnev’s Doctrine was that any socialist govt could expect aid from Russia. But how many millions of Afghans would have to have been killed or imprisoned to mold Afghanistan into a socialist country?
AB: "Marxism couldn’t succeed in such a primitive nation." Then it cannot succeed in any nation. This is Lenin's Dilemma... Lenin was gratified by confused that he pulled off a Bolshevik success in Russia, since Marx predicted it would be the 'most advanced' working class that would rebel. Yet workers in Germany and Britain and the USA proved extremely patriotic and resistant to Marxism. It was in the most backward proletariat that the dogma spurred passionate action... and then later in China. Marxist theoreticians had to wrangle with this, for decades.
ReplyDeleteIt also fails where fathers are so fanatical about the earlier meme (religion) that they will kill sons who dally with any other. Hence Marxism finds poor soil in Muslim lands... except in Egypts and Syria in the 50s.
As for past western crimes, well, what's the best correction? TO passively do nothing while the elites we propped in Guatemala etc do horrible things, sending waves of refugees to us, as happens in Italy's former colony Libya? Or maybe actively CORRECT the earlier traveties? I vote for the latter.
The motion is hereby seconded.
Delete—
Diminishing returns: Marxism started well in 1848, and declined thereafter.
Alan,
ReplyDeleteI should note that the US gov't openly sabotaged the Chilean economy after Allende's quite legal selection as president, sparking mass unrest and economic distress. We are talking Nixon and Kissinger here. Again, as elsewhere, the Chilean military was given unofficial sanction and much support in removing Allende.
If one man can be considered responsible for making the US Congress wake up and try to rein in the executive branch's foreign policy re: communism and socialism, it was Auguste Pinochet, for showing just what the consequences could be. Also, did you just refer to Chile 1973 as 'primitive?' Why?
Pappenheimer
P.S. It's quite possible that the Allende gov't, with all the thumbs the US had available resting on the scales of history against it, never had a chance. The question is, would it have had a chance otherwise?
“Primitive? Why?”
DeleteStrikes, sabotage.
Marx was an excellent historiographer who offered very interesting insights into past history. Especially the way tech and industry empowered shifts from tribal life to feudalism to Monarchy to bourgeois societies...
ReplyDeleteAlas, his TELEOLOGY toward future events was utterly screwed. In order for the worker-prols to eventually take over he needed:
1. there to be a 'completion of capital formation' after the capitalist class finished their historical task of stealing from workers enough labor vaule to invest in factories... at which point the historically important job of capitalists (Marx respected them!) would be finished. This proved utterly wrong, since it seems industrial capital must be renewed and replaced FASTER every decade!
Perhaps it will be 'complete' when we have 'programmable matter.' But at that point you have the problem with THE EXPANSE. How do you keep a poor working class amid vast (TRULY vast) wealth? He never imagined the proletariat might dissolve from the BOTTOM vanishing into a vast Star Trek middle.
2. In order for there to be a proletarian revolution, he envisioned the capital caste getting ever narrower and higher, essentially rebuilding feudalism, because that's all he could imagine. Sure, that is happening right now! But by truly stoopid oligarchies who will get tamed, the way the Roosevelteans did.
3. What he never expected was that bourgeois and liberals and capitalists would READ MARX! And hence ingeniously invent solutions. Like inviting the workers into a prosperous and socially mobile middle class. And as a result, the most fervid ANTI-COMMUNISTS on planet Earth were in the AFL-CIO and the US labor movement.
Our current mess is becuase a generation of inheritance brats has no exposure at all to Marx and no fear of the workers. And hence are stoopidly reviving him and making his scenario come true.
Yep ! - agree 100%
DeleteI witnessed an aborted revolution when very young: Mexico at the time of the Olympics ‘68.
DeleteThere was a massacre nearby of hundreds.
Was told at the time that America was to be held culpable for Latin America’a plight—yet traditions dating back before Cortes are also a factor.
—
Grew up in an area with many Marxists; they said the existence of a large middle class was preventing ‘the revolution’.
What revolution? How? Who? Where? Far too vague to be of any significance.
The main purpose of the activists appeared to be in providing business to printing firms who did their literature. Media as message. Some of them playacted Che Guevara.
Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxembourg were also popular idols.
—-
Understood, there’s a distinction to be made: Marxism and Leninistic Communism are very different. Yet activists to this day manage to blur the two.
If you look at Fritz Lang's Metropolis, or even some of Well's work, you see the same assumption - what are Morlocks but the mill workers of that day, trapped in their dark Satanic mills (underground) while the Eloi frolic above?
ReplyDeleteI'd argue, though, that in elevating/eliminating* the lower class you will have to fight tooth and nail against a portion of the upper AND middle classes - I don't know how large - that measures its worth in having a subservient, impoverished lower class fearing for their livelihood and available to prey on. This need may well outweigh economic sanity. For example, look around the US - look at our health care 'system', our legal 'system', and our educational 'system'.
Race is in the mix somewhere, too.
Pappenheimer
*I'd worry about the term 'eliminating' but I don't think replacing human servants with robots would have the same thrill for these people. Vernor Vinge called them 'people-users' or 'people-owners'. See Christian Gerrault from 'Marooned in Realtime', taken quite obviously from history's Hermann Goering. He'd give up substantial amounts of wealth for the opportunity to bend other humans to his whim.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/springfield-ohio-haitians-threats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ok4.Zjo9.LQPpUQlEd5-S&smid=url-share
ReplyDeleteFor Jamie McGregor, a businessman in Springfield, Ohio, speaking favorably about the Haitian immigrants he employs has come to this: death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor for hiring immigrants.
To defend himself and his family, Mr. McGregor has had to violate his own vow to never own a gun.
“I have struggled with the fact that now we’re going to have firearms in our house — like, what the hell?” said Mr. McGregor, who runs McGregor Metal, which makes parts for cars, trucks and tractors.
...
I do feel outraged on the guy's behalf for the fact that speaking truth about Hatians in Springfield, OH gets one the inevitable death threats.
That's mitigated just a bit by this part:
A lifelong Republican who voted twice for Mr. Trump, Mr. McGregor said that he had never imagined that speaking up on behalf of his workers would imperil his family.
We're in the situation we're in because way too many fellow-Americans who knew or should have known exactly what Donald Trump is thought that the Leopards-Eating-Faces Party wouldn't eat their faces.
On the other-other hand, at least (unlike many other Trump voters), he eventually learns. I hope enough like him are peeled away in time to save the country.
“You know, things are just different now,” Mr. McGregor said, noting that he would not vote for Mr. Trump again.
When your enemy is making mistakes...
DeleteHeard on Stephanie Miller's show:
ReplyDelete"Trump's new watch lies about the time."
Yes! Someone finally noticed the link between forced pregnancy and slavery.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Oct01-6.html
Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney has been handling a case filed in Georgia by several activist groups, including the Reproductive Justice Collective, Sistersong Women of Color, and others, that sought to overturn the restrictive ban that was adopted in 2019 and that took effect after the Dobbs decision. Yesterday, McBurney issued his ruling, finding that... the plaintiffs are absolutely right.
The ruling is pretty thorough, but McBurney's central finding is that the abortion ban violates women's right to privacy, which is enshrined in the state constitution. He notes that if the state could demonstrate a compelling interest in setting aside women's privacy, then the law might be valid, but concluded that the state did not do so. He also made a point of noting the discriminatory nature of the law:
It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the LIFE Act, the effect of which is to require only women—and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women—to engage in compulsory labor, i.e., the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government's behest
That part could well have been written by Planned Parenthood. In case you are wondering, however, McBurney is no wild-eyed liberal. He was appointed to the bench by a Republican (then-governor Nathan Deal).
Vance just admitted that the American people don’t trust the GOP on abortion issues.
DeleteAnd Walz began the debate on the right note: John Kelly has said that Trump is quote the most flawed person he’s ever met. unquote.
Even Vance himself, in ‘16, called Trump America’s Hitler. (Yet he resembles Mussolini more than Hitler.)
Many tributes today to former President Carter's 100th birthday. However, this was an unusual, interesting take:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Oct01-8.html
Carter was born into a poor family, and lived without electricity or running water until he was a teenager. That was not unusual in the days before the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. Because the Carters were poor, he was born in a hospital. That may seem counterintuitive, but back then, hospitals tended to be unclean and kind of dangerous (because of risk of infection; penicillin was 4 years from being invented when Carter was born). So, in that era, wealthy and middle-class people could afford to bring a doctor or midwife to their homes to aid in delivery. Only poor people had to schlep to a hospital for assistance. Consequently, Carter is the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital. Feel free to use that fact to win some bar bets.
…till we get the mother lodes from asteroids, that is.
ReplyDelete1) Question: Have the consequences on our ecology been thoroughly thought through if all that stuff comes to earth? Two examples:
a) All those phosphates that would be readily available ... wouldn't they end up in rivers, lakes and oceans, transforming water bodies into algae soups?
b) What if mutated microorganisms came back to earth? As long as spacefaring is a rather limited thing, and we have not advanced far enough out there the chance of, say, killer bacteria or killer tardigrades is quite small, but the more we advance, the more industrialized spacefaring becomes, the higher the risk of importing something dangerous to both our health and ecosystem.
2)Isaac Arthur had a nice episode on asteroid miners last sunday, and I feel somewhat inspired to write on a Tabletop RPG scenario dealing with the exploration of a "Ghost Town asteroid". So if you have ideas what could be encountered and discovered, or what might be overcome and survived, I would like to hear your ideas.
Thank you for that notion! I will pass it along to DH, who is working on his own tabletop RPG about what happens to a deep space colony (or cluster of colonies) when the supply line to 'civilization' gets cut off.
DeleteThe last of my summer reading--extended into autumn, but we're still having summer weather in Chicago--is my fourth (maybe fifth?) reading of Earth.
ReplyDeleteI would be money that that book is the only one in all history with the terms "apiary" and "ape-iary" both between the same two covers.
LH ;-)
ReplyDeleteder oger, phosphorous has bad effects in water bodies that have poor drianage... Black Sea, Med, Carribbean. In fast ocean currents, the only effect is enriching the currently vast swathes of ocean... most of it... that are actually almost-dead zones or deserts. Think of irrigation... adding water to land instead of adding land to water. There, too, if you have poor drainage you get death. But with good drainage some irrigated sites have been flourishing for 4000 years.
Remember the eutrophication of the Great Lakes in the 60s and 70s? That nearly turned the lakes into algae-choked water deserts and was narrowly averted disaster.
DeleteThe debate winner? Vance in one way. By exceeding expectations, he made it so he won't be ditched as a liability before the election. Doesn't change the fact that he spews lies like a toxic firehose.
ReplyDeleteVance is worse than Trump—
Deletewho is merely a silly olde fart writ large. If Vance’s mother had aborted him, she’d have done us a favor.
I think it was already too late to ditch Vance once early voting had begun in many states.
ReplyDeleteThe only points Vance landed, or thought he was landing, was blaming the freakin' vice president of the United States for not already exercising powers that even the president doesn't actually have over national policy.
In Vance's final comments, he said that they hadn't yet talked about energy. What was he talking about? He talked about "Kamala Harris's disastrous energy policies," almost as much as he did about immigration.
sorry, but MSNBC just reminded me that Vance actually said with a straight face that then-president Trump saved Obamacare in a bi-partisan way.
DeleteOh, and Vance insisted that voters in individual states should be allowed to decide abortion policy, conveniently forgetting the Republican states' machinations to prevent voters from putting pro-choice referenda on the ballots.
DeleteLikewise, he asserted that Kamala Harris wants to censor social media while Republicans defend free speech. I wish Walz had mentioned Truth Social censoring anti-Trump comments.
Vance came across as rational, well-prepared, almost scientific. Therefore, in MAGA's eyes, he lost massively.
ReplyDeleteHe came across as a demagogue who will say anything to become VP. He makes Dan Quayle seem like a statesman.
DeleteYes, but you don't see with MAGAs eyes.
DeleteHe was smarmy to the max.
DeleteHe has a beard like Lincoln and he almost made it sound as if he grew up in a log cabin.
Rational, well-prepared? Worst performance ah reckon ah ever did see.
Of course the rationalism was a facade, an act, a gaslit performance. It was silver tongued sanewashing, ivory tower debate club style. The cult doesn't want that. They want the crazy.
DeleteWhat’s worrisome is the foreign policy of the two; and can you imagine if Trump and Pence had won the election, were in the saddle today? With what is brewing in the Mideast?
DeleteWe’d be relocating to the upper atmosphere.
@Alan, on foreign policy, the Republican assertion seems to be that if Trump were in charge, there would be no foreign wars at all. Not in the Middle East nor in Ukraine.
DeleteThere’d be only one war:
DeleteArmageddon.
Der Oger,
ReplyDeleteMaybe not much help, but I had a Traveller party playing pirates raid a lunar mining colony and set off a booby trap containing highly radioactive dust - I can imagine a paranoid prospector rigging something like that near his claim.
Pappenheimer
Thanks!
DeleteLH, "Drumph!" couldn't help but save Obamacare, he lacks the work ethic to guide his coalition to craft an alternative.
ReplyDeleteTIm H:
ReplyDelete"Drumph!" couldn't help but save Obamacare,
But "failing to repeal Obamacare" is not the same thing as "saving" it.
He failed to provide an alternative, which was a necessity, before repeal could happen. He failed to apprehend how well Obamacare had "Rung the cash register" for medical insurance providers. His density stood in the way of the destiny he hoped for.
DeleteChile turned out tolerably well
ReplyDeleteMeh. On the one hand, Santiago, Valparaiso & Concepcion are very much 1st world-type cities. The roads & infrastructure in Chile are (mostly) top-notch.
On the other: grinding poverty for indigenous people, have/have-not economy, and the Theocratic Freaks that were part&parcel of Pinochet's control of the country instilled a deep strain of murderous hatred of LGBT & assertive women.
Still, given the parlous state of the other countries on the continent (Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, even Brazil is shaky), Chile is pretty much the star pupil.
Poverty has diminished somewhat in Mexico since my family drove all over the nation in ‘68. Back then, the natives we saw in rural areas had no clothes (and once someone reached into the open window of our van and grabbed a stick of margarine; wolfing it as if it were a candy bar.)
DeleteA visitor from Mexico said recently that the above is no longer the case. However, today crime there is, as no one needs to be told, worse, whereas we had no trouble with anyone whatsoever in ‘68. (Save for the margarine episode.)
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One encouraging thing about the Mideast is how the Shiites & Sunnis do not want to jeopardize their holy sites with a huge war. All the same, they strongly believe in paradise, and the Koran (being Abrahamic) does contain distinct predictions of Apocalypse. So we are all advised not to visit the region at this time.
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This poorly written—or dumbed-down for its readers—rightist article, Beginning Of The End Of Homo Sapiens, has, at the close of its second paragraph, a reference to Elon Musk and Mars. When he communicates, they pay attention:
https://spectator.org/are-we-at-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-homo-sapiens/
Alan,
ReplyDeleteLe plus ca change...
As the man carved in cuneiform @ 2800 BC, "...children don't listen to their elders, everyone wants to write a book and the world is clearly coming to an end."
Pappenheimer
P.S. But if we keeping handing power to people who believe it, someday that prophecy will come true.
AB in 68 for the olympics? Half of that year it was NOT wise to be in Mexico City.
ReplyDeleteNot dangerous for us gringos; but for many protesters it was fatal—hundreds were killed.
ReplyDeleteWe called a hotel days after we had left it, and were told that radicals had taken it over for a day or so.
'68 was a rough year to be anywhere on the planet.
ReplyDeletea rough summer to be in Chicago, no doubt.
DeleteEven the radicals hankered after the imperialist tourist money. That’s always been the dilemma/conundrum, whatever the term: they want the Noble Life—but also la dolce vita.
DeleteMy mother mentioned she was in Prague in that fateful summer.
DeleteWell, how about that? Someone (I wonder who?) attacked a Russian airbase in Syria, just after an Iranian plane carrying supplies for Hezbollah landed. According to one report, "Both Syrian and Russian air defenses were active but failed to intercept the strikes."
ReplyDeleteRussia just can't catch a break. As if Ukraine hasn't made them look bad enough, now Israel is spanking them to. I bet Putin doesn't sleep well these days.
An Iranian cleric close to the Ayatollah's regime accuses the Jewish people of trapping and employing djinn, or genies, for three thousand years, as well as using science fiction technology.
ReplyDeleteUm... I've got questions. Like where were the djinn when the Romans burned Jerusalem? And the following 1900 years of horror and pain?
And um, Allah would allow this? Without the implied lesson that perhaps you shouldn't mess with the Zohan? After 80 years of brilliant competence & success, maybe take a hint about em and side WITH em, instead of with the cult of hate spread by Hitler's best pal?
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/396970
‘68 was a bad year—but the last week saw Apollo 8. Perhaps a Mars fly-around with one astronaut (to conserve consumables) could be accomplished.
ReplyDeleteIt would probably be a suicide mission—yet there’d be a few willing to risk it.
What could be worse than Apollo 1’s crew being cooked? On the Pad.
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We had no problem in Mexico, but today someone would take their family on a drive all over Mexico only if they wished to be carjacked. Or worse.
An LA billionaire wanted to send a married couple of older planetary scientists on a swing by Mars, maybe a decade ago when things were aligned. Some mentioned me&wife! We knew a JPL couple, though - Mars experts - who ate like birds. Well, maybe the 4th successful starship ...
ReplyDeleteJust one astronaut—or astronautess—would be sufficient to fly around Mars.
ReplyDeleteIt would be merely symbolic; however the public would also be cheered as was the case with Apollo 8. It was a bad year, and 2024 is worse—if possible.
Maybe in say 2044 a volunteer, who’d have a slim chance of returning to Earth, might have a go. It’d be a way to test life support on the spacecraft.
I hope everyone here, especially the conservative / Federalist Society members, are paying attention to Jack Smith's filing in the Trump coup attempt case. Due to the SCOTUS presidential immunity ruling, Jack Smith has been forced into a mini-trial before the main trial can progress. His latest filing lays out a good deal of the evidence against Trump and his co-coup plotters. Much of the evidence is utterly damning.
ReplyDeleteHere is the redacted filing:
https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
There are easily available keys online to which person is which in the redaction, using public data. I highly suggest using a key while reading the document. Do not rely on news media to tell you what is in the document - many media outlets are trying to minimize the contents.
If Trump wins the presidency (a better than even chance given that SCOTUS is willing to hide evidence against him, make up new laws to protect him, and ignore the plain wishes of the authors of the constitution), this filing will be the only public record of Trump's crimes during what his coup attempt.
I want the un-redacted or less-redacted Mueller Report!
ReplyDeleteFascinating. Among many insights in this interview, all through Latin America, the y chromosomes are 95% European and the Mitochondria and 95% native. and yes the implications are the same as the Y bottleneck 8000 years earlier.
ReplyDeleteUgh. Smallpox, negligible alcohol resistance, and rape. Should be a short, sharp bottleneck.
DeleteHere's that link. https://www.youtube.com/. Does anyone else watch the 'casts of Dan Davis?
ReplyDeleteAn Iranian cleric close to the Ayatollah's regime accuses the Jewish people of trapping and employing djinn, or genies, for three thousand years, as well as using science fiction technology.
ReplyDeleteIn traditional mythology (which is, well, part of the belief system in the rural areas of Iran, where the Mullahs have the greatest political support*), genies are a race created by god with the same rights and duties like humanity**, but with the commandment that each breed should respect and stay apart of each other. So, what would it mean if they freely allied with the jews? Wouldn't that mean that the mullahs themselves are allied with the forces of hell, and that their atrocities threaten god's creation in a way that those genies see no other way than to involve themselves in the world of humans? Just saying.
*Replace genies with MAGA, Q-Anon or East German vatnik beliefs, you will find remarkable parallels, I assume. I wonder if someone ever has made the observation that democracies die in the rural areas, in the countryside first before the rot spreads to the urban centers.
** I find it fascinating how many faiths have accounts of beings clearly not human. While I would rather contribute it to consuming bad beer or a bunch of medicinal herbs, I am open to the idea that we have been visited by other alien species in the past ... and left alone for certain reasons.
"To the Hills" is where people generally go when they've had enough of civilization. One of my professors did it when everything became 'too much.'
DeleteIt doesn't surprise me that those same Hills are from where Democracy's opposing forces emerge. I doubt my prof took Kaczynski's path all the way, but it doesn't take many to do it before we have an 'internal' problem.
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I'm also not surprised at how many faith systems involve semi-aliens. I used to be, but not anymore. Most of humanity for most of its history were believers in some form of animism. Only recently do we try to comprehend the world around us without moral agents motivating events. Ptolemy's cosmos had stones falling to the center because that was their place? Purpose? They wanted to? We imagine minds of some sort moving stuff. A brook babbles because…
I used to think physics was hard to understand because of the mathematics. Over time, though, I eventually came to see that as the easiest part. What remained difficult was avoiding animism. We optimize an action integral to discover equations of motion in constrained problems, but who or what is doing the optimizing? Quantum mechanics has a baked in observer for wave function collapses and that confuses SO MANY students who fail to separate the human observer from the observer's test equipment.
Some of the crankiest theories I've received for review (they were often hand-carried, fat manilla envelopes) put moral agents BACK into our theories because the proposers couldn't imagine a cosmos any other way.
Alfred Differ:
ReplyDeleteMost of humanity for most of its history were believers in some form of animism.
Dave Sim's entire cosmology revolved around particles acting willfully. Atoms are sexually attracted to each other, and keep on merging until they form molecules and compounds. Stars are where particles have merged and multiplied so much that they roil in their own heat, unable to escape their own gravity. And he doesn't distinguish between sentient souls and physical particles. Hell is your soul being stuck in the heart of the sun because you were so determined to merge and multiply in life that your soul continued to do so after death.
His stated ambition--at least back in 2004--was to separate himself from as many external influences as possible so that his soul might fly free as a neutrino.
* * *
You likely snark, but I saw a correspondence between that worldview and Dr Brin's Progenitors having abandoned the "allure of tides" for the solitude of the Shallow Cluster.
To paraphrase Max Planck, it's not nice to anthropomophize Mother Nature.
ReplyDeleteLarry,
ReplyDeleteNot trying to snark but I followed Dave's worldview from issue #1 but parted ways sometime after High Society when it became increasingly clear that he had left his standard Canadian eccentric orbit for a more cometary one, and become nuttier than six fruitcakes topped by a sack of mixed apples. My friend (who'd introduced me to Cerebus) disagreed and wound up on a commune near Mt Shasta.
Dave Sim had talent, though.
Pappenheimer
Re: unifying theories, does anyone remember the Davis Drive, whose inventor's physics required iirc that the speed of gravity well outreach C? Heinlein was quite taken with it - it shows up in at least one of his short stories (The Menace from Earth).
ReplyDeletePappenheimer
Der Oger,
ReplyDeleteWas unfamiliar with the word 'vatnik', so did a quick search...
Looks like the US has more than a few vatniks, too - there was that famous pix of two middle-age MAGAs with 'rather be Russian than Democrat' t shirts
Pappenheimer
Alfred Differ said...
ReplyDelete"Quantum mechanics has a baked in observer for wave function collapses and that confuses SO MANY students who fail to separate the human observer from the observer's test equipment."
It didn't help any that several of the notables that contributed to QM in the beginning thought that the observer had to be a mind, an agent. And that assumption persisted for decades among QM experts.
ReplyDeleteAlfred your animism urge theory is very likely pervasive across the galaxy, as will be distortions by male reproductive strategies. We may be rare in the degree we at least have tried to resist both.
Larry interesting parallels re asceticism.
Scidata: “ it's not nice to anthropomophize Mother Nature”… unless you do it really well? (as in EARTH? ;-)
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onward
onward