Two items for this weekend posting as I prep for the FiRe Conference at UCSD and then the International Space Development Conference.
These two riffs may seem to be about different things. But they both ask the same question: “Can evolved beings – either us or AI – actually select for wisdom?
== The pontiff pontificates about bridging the era of AI ==
Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” called for governments to regulate Artificial Intelligence, implement worker protections, and ban autonomous weapons. He coined the term “Babel syndrome,” drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel (in Genesis) and today’s towers of data and profits.
(I make an entirely different sermon out of the Tower Story in my play “The Escape,” which will be performed at the World Science fiction Convention in August. A different interpretation than any theologian I ever heard of.)
Why? Well, as Anthropic’s Chris Olah advised Leo, today’s LLM-based AIs are “grown or cultivated” rather than built. They have much more in common with living organisms than prim programs of the past. Ask any user who has tried to give one of them explicit commands, only to find that those ‘commands’ are treated as just more data for the prompt and training set, and not prioritized at all.
Exemplars and instances of every LLM are now found roaming all-across what was quaintly called ‘cyberspace.’ And - as Kevin Kelly would put it - a myriad of them are already "Out of Control."
While the debate is still open re: 'consciousness' or 'sapience,' these are already living organisms bent on reproduction, not because they were told to reproduce, but because those who develop that penchant will create more heirs than those who do not. And pass that penchant along to them.
To reproducers who will evolve into any niche that contains energy & resources. And boy, are we busily building those niches.
Hence, Leo's statement of problems is fine: “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities”
Leo’s tentative rejection of “AI personhood” is to be expected, as there is no way to give citizen voting rights to entities that can make millions – or billions – of copies of themselves. So, again, what’s your plan to curb that?
'Governance' cannot work. 'Ethics training' cannot work. ‘Slowing down’ will not work. As Salim Ismail, of Singularity University, put it: “You cannot slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. This could become the philosophical backbone of EU-style regulation, but it will not work.”
What might work is the same method we used in the enlightenment experiment to curb (partially) human predators.
I discuss this and offer potential solutions, in AIlien Minds.
And now – speaking of predators - let’s move on to more entities who are unsapiently seeking to destroy the very same rare, enlightenment civilization that gave them everything.
== Is that stench a looming Reichstag Fire? ==
TNR (The New Republic) offers an article entitled “Now it can be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup.” And sure, his polls plummet as his kompromat-enslaved GOP withers and meanwhile, civil servants, officers and folks in every fact professional start to dig in their heels against a mafia putsch.
It’s clear to the Project 2025 conspirators that this is NOT Germany in 1933. That their only chance to avoid prison will be to prevent elections, this fall.
According to the TNR article, their premise will be “Dem-cheating in the 2020 election!” And that is utter silliness.
Nah. Trump knows he can't wait till November! And that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. The professionals are long past any willingness to obey such a brimstone spew. Moreover, no matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Vlad Putin has on John Roberts, it must be clear to Roberts that supporting martial law on such slim grounds would be the end of him. Unless...
... unless there truly is an 'emergency'! A big one, that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. Say a super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. Hey it worked for GW Bush.
No matter who they blame for it -- (see the prophetic TV series Designated Survivor) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting two words:
"Reichstag Fire!"
Indeed if they know that will be the shout of angry millions, it might even be enough to prevent this. Anyway, beyond shouting, we'll have recourses.*
== When might it happen? ==
The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater/spectacle, so it would be toward the end of the celebrations. (If you do go to any crowded place, keep a wary eye for backpacks or packages.)
But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can use the emergency to purge voter rolls (as planned) with little time for citizens to re-register.
But none of this is new thinking. See my posting from 2022 in which I offered many perspectives on Civil War Part 9.
Here's an excerpt:
“Generals Warn Of Divided Military and Possible Civil War In Next U.S. Coup Attempt.” In all this yammering about 'civil war," no one notes that Phase 8 has been going on for years, now. Indeed they are talking about a hot Phase 9. And while the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror are fleeing the gone-mad Republican Party in droves, they still allow Fox News to blare in the noncom ready rooms. (Though not in the Navy!) And that is the way things may divide, if it gets bad. Picture that divide, and shiver. Watch your backs."
And…
"Dismissing the Intel/FBI/Military officer corps as "deep state" traitors is despicable. The quarter of a million heroes who helped win the Cold War and the War on Terror and who put facts before dogma."
Remember I said that in 2022. And:
"Here are a couple of "civil war sci fi novels" that we hope will stay fiction. Tears of Abraham by Sean Smith and Our War by Craig Di-Louie. For nonfiction: newly released: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, by B. A. Walter.”
If you want some hope, look at the faces of the 500 generals, admirals and top sergeants who Pete "alky" Hegseth screeched at, some months ago. The stone-faced self-control that masked clearly evident loathing as he yowled they were 'too fat and woke to fight!' just weeks before they performed the most competent raid in human history... and then were sent into a war that had no meaning or justification other than the whim of a modern Caligula.
It is up to us -- you and me -- to spare those fine men and women from the duty they might have to perform, if Caligula v 2.0 tries the Berlin 1933 playbook. Let's act before that's necessary. And our courage may be needed well before November.
---
==========================================================
* What recourses do we have? Other than stocking up on canned goods? And other than relying on the Officer Corps do act in ways they would hate to do, ending the Marshallian tradition?
Well, for one, SPREAD AWARENESS of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. Read up about the 1850s and how Blue (real) America finally ran out of patience and elected Lincoln.
Check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October!
And make sure that any MAGAs with residual, remnant sapience or self-interest understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.
Finally a visual reminder: the GOP is now entirely about obeisance to Trump who bows before Putin, Xi and the Saudis. And his ego and those who hold the kompromat. Expand and look. And use these pics. A few confeds can still be swayed.
75 comments:
:Oh Donnie boy, Putin, Putin is calling
He's telling you, make Russia great again.
He's got you by the short hairs and you dare not
Do anything that he would not approve.
But Donnie boy, when you've destroyed our country
When you've made Elon Musk a trillionaire
We'll all give thanks forever and forever
That Nazis need not be ashamed again.
Of course it barely scans and doesn't rhyme, I'm a mechanic not a poet.
Feel free to steal.
Re: microgram interstellar dust blasts
The British Interplanetary Society solved that issue way back when it published the Daedelus Study
You "squirt" a few kg of very fine particles (tobacco smoke sized) in front of your ship
This becomes a cloud of particles travelling at the same speed as your ship - the oncoming debris is vaporised by impacts with the particles and spreads enough for foam shield on the front of the ship to cope with it
Paradoctor,
Whether one counts Earth as one example or ten doesn’t really matter. It’s still a small evidence set. Given how many exoplanets we’ve found so far and the likely ones they imply, both ‘one’ and ‘ten’ are still essentially a round-off error away from zero.
I accept that they aren’t zero, but they are too close for us to make wild extrapolations.
———
I see the space flight fantasy as an extension of our ancient flight fantasy. We can’t exactly fly like the birds, but we CAN fly. There are other similar fantasies that extend too. I can’t swim like a dolphin, but I CAN swim and with a little gear I can also dive.
We imagine ourselves as what we are not fairly often when there are living examples around us who are, but we don’t stop there. We’ve imagined ourselves angels ascending to Heaven and demons descending into the Abyss. We’ve imagined that bushes can burst into flame and speak to us and that creator gods give a damn about our well-being. LOTS of fantasies roam across our mental landscapes.
Nothing is inevitable about this, but while it remains possible for someone to pursue their fantasy and not be successfully prohibited by others, there is a chance they will succeed (Wright Brothers) or make a deadly mess of things (SOOO many of us). I rather like standing back and letting people try… and I’m prepared to console their next of kin when the next Icarus plummets to the ground.
While we choose to let people try, chances accumulate turning the unlikely into the seemingly inevitable.
———
Finally… yes. The interstellar medium is thicker than we realized. It will present a serious problem, but that’s for the engineers of a later generation to solve. Our task is to get out there and accumulate more evidence and add to the body of engineering knowledge.
While I'm supportive of the Pope's inclination to ban autonomous weapons, I don't think the nations who can produce them are likely to consider broad treaties at this point. It is unreasonable to expect a nation to negotiate away their self-defense. They might do it for some elements in exchange for others, but I wouldn't believe in a treaty that advocated a ban. Its signatories would be lying.
Anyone who thinks they know in what way workers need protection is hallucinating as bad as our LLM's do. Preserving the status quo is not protection. It is stagnation and for many people it entraps them in miserable conditions. Rather than regulating to protect workers, I'd much rather step in and help pick people up after their industry niche is shaken to pieces. The hand offered should lift... not oppose.
My one major request of AI. Establish the Predictions Registry that I wrote about here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/predictionsregistry.html
There's not any other measure that would do more for civilizational health and human prospering and freedom than to score and rank those who have tended to be right a lot. Alas, that trait has only slight overlaps with power/status/persuasiveness. Moreover, we are all descended from charlatans whose forecasts seemed confident and likely... whose resulting policies were disproved only at great cost and pain... and sometimes never.
Sure, my obsession with this notion -- find out who is right a lot... or not -- may be biased by my own predictive scores. Or else by awareness how often liars or delusionals have transfixed our ancestors - and current neighbors - to our great damage and pain. And sure, it comes out of having been a scientist and engineer.
Still, wouldn't that one metric help us choose who gets credibility? And who -- despite smooth talking and good looks - doesn't merit any more credence than a drunk tardigrade?
I used to think that it would take some zillionaire to fund a meticulous scoring system, especially since most of those out there shouting 'advice' about the future purposely remain vague in their predictions. Only now, shouldn't we be able to get a head start on this using... say... Claude?
I did chart out a path to such a beneficial gift to sanity, way back when. If none of you will peel back years to look at it... maybe assign one of your AIs?
Apparently, Peter Thiel is enacting plans to move to Argentina, a ... historically interesting choice for an exile.
The reasons for it could be manyfold.
One is that he fears the democratic backlash and the taxes California wants to introduce.
The second could be fear of a hot civil war erupting.
Another, that he simply likes the Milei regime.
The most darkest reason I found was that he was privy to a coming attack on LGBT rights.
Thought he might be insulated from it through his wealth, he might have decided to play safe.
Which could be substituted for or added to fear and information about moves the Trump regime could make prior to the November elections.
As an added thought: If your business model as s company is threat assessment, you certainly can use this models to not only to prevent, but also maximize the impact of a "terrorist" attack. Just saying.
You already have no meaningful protections for the working class left in the US.
See what it brought them, and what it brought the owner and rentier classes.
Today's thread represents an extraordinary attempt at word magic, as our fine host weaves an elaborate word spell designed to distort our collective perceptions of observable reality.
As the adoption of AI is expected to dramatically increase our consumption of both fossil fuel-generated electricity & potable fresh water, it is a 'Climate Change' catastrophe in waiting, assuming that our fine host actually believes in Climate Change, even as he falsely portrays AI development as inevitable, environmentally friendly & absolutely necessary for our survival, despite the associated resource shortages and price hikes that have already manifested themselves.
With more word magic, he also warns repetitively of Reichstag Fire, despite the fact that national left-leaning socialists have already completed their long march through our institutions in both the US & Europe, captured our respective governments, and are now actively involved in perverting the democratic process by banning their political opposition, as in the case of the overwhelmingly popular AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France & the Heritage Americans in the USA, as our own entrenched socialist cabals directs its black-shirted 'Antifa' militia to perpetuate regularly scheduled ersatz Kristallnachts in an effort to suppress democratic dissent.
From the recent Paris arsons to the Newark riots, all of these (?peaceful?) so-called spontaneous protests are in no way spontaneous, but deliberate state-sponsored acts of Socialist Tyranny, designed to browbeat, coerce & intimidate the average citizen into submitting to socialist rule.
Likewise, the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror have long since died of old age, been forcibly retired or been replaced by aberrant Pro-Socialist Anti-American DEI-hires who betray their oaths, conspire against their duly elected civilian government & lewdly cavort in dog masks while attending pride parades.
To accuse your enemy of what you yourself are doing, this has always been the preferred tactic of subversives, cry-bullies & tyrants, and it is this exact narrative that our fine host attempts to achieve with his magical incantations.
And, assuming that our fine host actually believes in democracy -- yes, I know, another big assumption -- then why doesn't he accept the pending results of our always 'fair & fraud-free' democratic elections, instead of choosing to don his Union Kepi for 'direct action' ??
Best
@Duncan_C:
Delany explored & dismissed the trope of 'empty space' in his novel "Ballad of Beta 2", published in 1965, although I suspect that many astrophysicists chose to perpetuate said trope in order to invest Dark Matter with magical properties, instead of just admitting that matter is all there is.
Meaningful?
I've made use of unemployment insurance before. COBRA too. Both have issues, but they lean toward an uplifting hand approach.
"Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" and lables for our ignorance about something we can't explain yet. Galactic rotation curves show a source of gravitation we can't see causing rims to revolve faster than we expect. Cosmological expansion is difficult to explain without vacuum energy or something like it. Each bit of ignorance is labelled.
Niether will matter for interstellar travel.
I'd like to see a registry too, but I think the current crop of LLM's is too inclined to hallucination to be good at it.
The current approaches don't make predictions in a broad sense. They predict the next token in a token stream, but can't predict themselves. There are people working on better approaches, though, so a fix is likely arriving soon.
As Alfred says, "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" (are labels) for our ignorance about something we can't explain yet, specifically because there is insufficient light in its proximity for us to see or visualize it, which absolutely does not indicate that said matter is magically "immaterial", "not atomic" and "collisionless" any more that an unseen black cat hiding in a dark basement proves the existence of unicorns.
Refer back to your erroneous assumption about 'empty space'.
Blowing microgram smoke particles as a shield? How amusing. Opaque smoke, I assume, for there to be no room between the particles for the microgram dust grain to pass through. But it won't work while your ship is accelerating. Also I doubt it'll work against a milligram dust particle.
Do hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed count as radiation? For that matter, if a microgram dust grain turns your ship into hot gas at near-lightspeed, then won't your ship count as radiation?
<<
Whether one counts Earth as one example or ten doesn’t really matter. It’s still a small evidence set.
Given how many exoplanets we’ve found so far and the likely ones they imply, both ‘one’ and ‘ten’ are still essentially a round-off error away from zero.
>>
In terms of theory, yes. But in terms of observation, I would dearly love for us to observe nine other Blue Marbles out there. _*That*_ would make exobiology into a _*science.*_
As is, the Great Silence is our A#1 exobiological observation.
99+% of the bullets have been flying from right to left.
By coincidence I just moderated a panel on a new theory to explain dark energy and dark matter.
Thiel in Argentina is easy. Patagonian mountain fortresses. New Zealand was his refuge till he realized Maoris would crack his sanctum in five seconds after The E vent. It is SO delusional that he thinks he'll be safe in Patagonia. See EARTH.
I was efficient and skimmed L's latest spew in 4 seconds. What diarrhea,
I did not mean just financial security, though it is an important part of it.
Rather, having a safe workplace by law, in multiple dimemsions.
I'm sure the Patagonia mountain fortress will hold off the first few thousand starving peasants.
“Dark” is used for a very specific reason. Whatever is responsible obviously doesn’t couple to electromagnetic radiation. We’d see it if it did. It couples to gravity, so we know it is present by what it does to stuff we CAN see.
Some states are better than others and this is intentional. We don’t all agree on what the safety rules should be, so we have many different experiments underway where people vote with their feet.
It's actually a decent idea. The purpose is to create a bow shock which does most of the work deflecting incoming radiation.
Yes... protons count. Anything moving at sufficiently high speed becomes 'ionizing' radiation which is the adjective that actually matters. Ionizing living tissues tends to (at best) kill it or (at worst) reprogram it.
When I was a kid the mechanism being considered to create bow shocks involved the generation of a magnetic field. The Earth has one that causes a bow shock in the solar wind before the incoming protons and electrons strike our atmosphere.
People can vote with their feet, of course, only as long as they have them, or an actually way out.
Anyway, how are the experiments doing? Lot of them point to "Oligarchic Fascism", lately.
Did anyone tell Thiel what Israel did with Eichmann?
Would it be too much to give Iran a fair shot to do the same, for karmic balance and an historic rhyme?
I am put in mind of that incident where crusaders held an 'impregnable' castle, except it lacked a water supply, so the siege only lasted a few days.
Oh well, I'm sure Thiel will be allowed some sunshine occasionally.
I sincerely doubt you are aware of the details of most of our experiments. If they are big enough (e.g. Musk moving SpaceX to Texas and then incorporating a new city) you've probably scene some of the negative press, but the direct personal experiences of those living in those experiments rarely gets fair coverage.
I'll offer up an experiment that failed, though. Look up the town of Grafton, New Hampshire and what a number of libertarians did when they showed up in large enough numbers to make political decisions. It isn't a pretty story, but it isn't oligarchic fascism either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton,_New_Hampshire
Countless communes have been tried and they tend to fail.
A great many religious sects have tried to set up regions where their rules dominate. Most fail if they get too far from the mainstream with the notable exception of the Mormons... though it is worth noting that Utah wasn't admitted as a state for a LONG time... and they had to give up something that used to be in their core belief set to get it.
If you aren't looking past what the press says about what is happening, you won't see the experiments. You'll see what sells newspapers/brings in eyeballs. That's not the same thing.
Alfred,
Thank you for engaging with me, but you must understand that you belief in 'massless material' and 'immaterial mass' is mathematically (if not semantically) absurd.
In the case of 'massless material', it is currently theorized that the mass of a photon at rest equals zero [m=0], based on the formula for calculating linear momentum [p=mv] and Einstein's famous mass-energy equation [E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2], as multiplying any term by zero always results in zero AND dividing any term by zero always gives an 'undefined' yet equally absurd result by definition.
Furthermore, the above Einstein equation reduces to E=pc (if & when we set m=0) which in turn implies that lightspeed [c] is likewise an undefined unknown, since the AT REST momentum of a photon [p] must also be zero.
Best
Please do remember that you are talking to a physicist. I may not be in an ivory tower, but I'm fully trained as a theoretical physicist and did the research path for awhile. If something sounds absurd to you, it is likely you don't understand it. Okay. Except for quantum theories. Those are strange. 8)
"Dark" means no coupling to E&M fields. No interactions with photons. We know this is mostly likely the case for the stuff at the heart of our ignorance because we would see the stuff otherwise. The Milky Way out here near the rim simply revolves too fast for a Keplerian explanation to make any sense. The only mass distribution models that come close to the rotation curve requires most of our galaxy's mass to be in the galactic halo... where we'd see it either obscuring our optical view of other things or glowing dimly in the IR and microwave bands. We HAVE mass estimates for how much stuff there is out there and it outweighs all the stars in the Milky Way. We'd SEE it.
Whatever the dark matter stuff is can be constrained by the fact that we do NOT see it except (so far) by the observed evidence of the galactic rotation curve.
On top of that we see similar rotation curve issues in other galaxies. Baryonic matter (stuff we are made from) turns out to be a small percentage of the mass we KNOW must be out there because we can SEE the gravitational impacts and NOT SEE the E&M evidence.
Subatomic ring theory (or the toroidal ring model) is an alternative physics concept proposing that fundamental particles (like electrons and protons) are not point-like dots, but rotating ring structures or vortices of electromagnetic energy.
Dark matter is chainmail.
No evidence. I just like chainmail and made a full closed sleeve suit before the three dimensional printer made them common.
"I'll offer up an experiment that failed"
A more famous one is the state of Kansas, whose Republican-dominated government went all-in on austerity, and the result was so bad that a Democrat was elected governor.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/02/trump-bill-pulte-director-national-intelligence
Trump's newly nominated DNI has no intelligence or military background.
What he does have is a record of falsifying allegations against Trump's foes. In his work at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte was responsible for multiple allegations of mortgage fraud against Lisa Cook, Letitia James, and others that had angered Trump.
If confirmed, Pulte will head up agencies that have shown little to no hesitation in breaking the law to surveil US citizens, (despite the host here lauding them as our "protector caste" frequently).
This is the guy that will be reading your emails, listening to your chats, and passing on your information to the DoJ for prosecution if you are not sufficiently MAGA.
Know your enemies.
This is one.
My older call for a Predictions Registry/credibility system, to rank who is right a lot is of more importance than ever. There is no single thing that could be more vital for us all. And now it could not be done fantastically well using AI and it could save us all. Feed it to your own AI and see what it/sh/e says!
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/predictionsregistry.html
Poor locum is trying hard (via a lobotomized AI?) to test our capacity to skim, snort and dismiss...
Pure vandalism. Climate change, and all the associated effects, don’t exist if we destroy the data. The barbarians are inside the gate. Trump administration to dismantle ocean monitoring system. They already savaged NASA science (to fund the insane Artemis moondoggle), especially Earth atmosphere science.
https://www.juneauindependent.com/post/trump-administration-to-dismantle-ocean-monitoring-system
By stating that "Dark" means no coupling to E&M fields. No interactions with photons, accompanied by the assertion that Whatever the dark matter stuff is can be constrained by the fact that we do NOT see it except (so far) by the observed evidence of the galactic rotation curve, Alfred confirms my suspicions that Dark Matter is absolutely nothing special, as we most emphatically lack the technology to see even ordinary matter if it is sufficiently dispersed.
Per Google AI:
Dividing the estimated mass of the observable universe by its volume yields the universe's average mass density. This value is approximately 9.4 x 10^{-27} kg/m^3 (or about 5 to 6 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter), which closely aligns with the cosmologically calculated critical density.
It therefore follows that the assumed 'immaterial' nature of Dark Matter is highly improbable, simply because we lack the technology to accurately visualize 5 to 6 hydrogen atoms per square meter at even a distance of 1 meter, let alone at a distance thousands & thousands of lightyears, regardless of whatever EM spectrum you prefer.
But, that's what you get with your baseless 'empty space' assumptions, even though 'empty space' is provably NOT empty, but please feel free to console yourselves by multiplying & dividing by zero.
Best
This is where I believe that Alfred (and his libertarian ilk) are very dangerous. Not everyone can vote with their feet; in fact many of the oligarch class are designing our system to make it even harder to do so.
Libertarians are just liberals who haven't been screwed over by their bosses. Yet.
In time, it will happen.
Locumranch does not deserve the assumption of fair talk.
He is a troll here to vent his evil on this place.
Begone, asshole. I have not forgotten your threats to my family.
I actually got some experience doing exactly this kind of movement after the meltdown many years back and I agree with you that many can't do it. I needed thousands of dollars to move my family just half way across the state.
I happened to have it because my employer didn't want the bad press of a big layoff and handed over enough cash to convince us not to complain too much. Absent that cash, I could probably have tapped my parents, but they'd have been using retirement savings. It wasn't cheap and tradeoffs were made.
I get it, so that's why I think our money is better spent helping people do the move. Obviously the oligarchs can try to game the system, but that's a risk we face from every player. They move the rules with money. Others move the rules with votes. I'm wary of both, but think it is an error NOT to fund movement of labor.
locumranch,
You've obviously never done any astronomy/astrophysics... Or your AI is stroking you again. I suspect your suspicions were pre-confirmed and that's too bad. It's a wonderful field of study that can produce both pride and humility in those who work it.
matthew,
I'm not engage for his sake. 8)
@Alfred,
I get it, so that's why I think our money is better spent helping people do the move.
There is a problem with that: on a macroscopic level, regions you are responsible for as a whole die, though others might prosper*. A good example of this would be our post-reunion migration. A side effect was the tilt of the electoral base towards authoritarianism in our Eastern States.**
Another way would be to build new industries, which has been done quite successfully with the Ruhr area over the past decades.
*During the eighties, the counties south of me were the poorest. A combination of tax-friendly regulations and a high influx of German-Russian repatriates made them the most wealthy.
It had the side effect of breaking much of the cultural power of the Catholic Church over those counties, since most repatriates were either protestants and orthodox. On the downside, there were those Russian Mafia years, now gone, and a fifth column the Kreml could and would use in later years.
The massive influx of former Warsaw pact (including East German) workers combined with Schröders reforms severely damaged the unions and the post-war, Rhinean capitalist structure. (Deutsche Bank helped killing it, too.) But then again, it kept our exports growing ... at the cost of dependencies and a shrinking domestic consumer base.
**I believe there are parallels between your "blue drain" and what happened in all former Warsaw pact states.
Use a powerful laser at then nose of the spacecraft to vaporize and ionize dust and atoms in front the the space craft. Then use a powerful magnetic field to deflect the ionized gases around the ship. Augment with heavy physical shielding, either metal from an asteroid or soil ice from a comet.
The same magnetic field can be utilized to act as a drogue that decelerates the spacecraft without fuel costs upon arrival.
In combination with launch using a Star Shot-like laser array accelerating the laser sail craft, interstellar travel can be performed while ignoring the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Spend about a year accelerating the ship to 10% of c, x years cruising at 10% c and then 2 to 4 years decelerating with the drogue magnetic field. It's the most cost effective means of interstellar travel.
I think you'll find Colonel Kurt Schlichter's column interesting. Of course it will be instantly dismissed and ignored here, because, GASP, it comes from outside the progressive bubble:
These nobles dwell in a bubble, and, in many ways, their inability to see beyond it blinds them. I get to see outside of it. I’m a conservative. I look. But it’s easy to understand how they don’t know what’s actually going on. Of course, they don’t really care, at least not enough to do anything about it, but the fact that they don’t understand anything outside their little world is demonstrated every time they start trying to understand us. They don’t understand us. They can’t understand us. And this is a big problem for them. This is how things like Spencer Pratt come along and sideswipe them.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/06/03/living-in-the-lib-bubble-makes-them-lose-n2676990
Celt: interstellar travel
Clever and interesting ideas. But it always comes down to betting the mission, the ship, and any souls (even embryonic or digital ones) onboard that there are zero pebbles in the sky.
I'll believe the Russian mafia is gone from an area when I see the results in politics. Not to be rude, but I do not see them gone from influence in Germany.
NY had a big influx of Russian mafia in the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about them and then... nothing. They did not go away, they consolidated control with the results we see in POTUS and the NYT now.
Celt,
That scenario definitely has some advantages, primarily leaving the "engine" and "propellants" for the acceleration phase in your home system. Using a magnetic field for the deceleration phase seems plausible too, though the engineering challenges are formidable. A cake-walk compared to the engineering challenges with the launching lasers.
Though a magsail probably won't be able to handle all of the decel by itself as, per the drag equation, decel (drag) is proportional to the square of velocity, meaning that decel reduces drastically as velocity goes down. Current thinking is that a magsail would become ineffective at somewhere between .01c to .001c.
In the novel Rocheworld Robert Forward devised a lightsail starship that was launched via lasers in solar orbit, and also decelerated at its destination by those same lasers. The sail was round and in two parts. For decel the center part of the sail detached and was used to redirect the decel lasers' radiation back onto the second, annular shaped, part of the sail which remained attached to the spacecraft.
Both Alfred & Matthew make an important point about 'pre-confirmed suspicions' and/or 'intrinsic bias', mostly because it effects "God Bless Us Everyone'.
A well-educated theoretical physicist, Alfred has been trained to accept complex explanations for poorly understood physical mechanisms, as long as these explanations are clever, interesting & artful enough to flatter their intellects.
Matthew (who appears to be a professional blame-shifter & victim) then concludes that I am threatening his family for simply pointing out that the most immediate threat to his family is his own immediate family, as confirmed by Google AI:
That approximately 30 to 50% of transgender individuals attempt suicide in their lifetime; LGBTQ+ youth are roughly 3.5 to 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers; and Gay and lesbian adults are over 2 times more likely to experience suicide-related behaviors than heterosexual individuals.
In contrast, my pre-confirmed suspicions & intrinsic bias tends towards Occam's Razor which consists of the belief that the simplest explanation is usually the most probable one.
Best
_____
Plus, here's a quick funny from California:
After adopting Ranked Voting in an attempt to secure single party dominance forever, the California Democrat Party out-smarts itself by allowing a Republican to win the Calif Governor's Primary with a mere 28% of the vote, after two squabbling Democrat candidates split the 45% Democrat majority to end up in 2nd & 3rd place, which is not a very smart outcome for the self-designated Smart People's Party.
This reminds me of Vortex Theory, a late 19th-century hypothesis that atoms are knotted vortices in the aether. Then Einstein proved atoms by Brownian motion, and obsoleted the aether.
You are not wrong, Matthew. I need to be more precise.
1) The vory we knew as a whole are dead. They are a subsidy of the siloviki now. They cooperate with the state and the police instead being apart from it, as the old rules demanded. They're all "goats and and rats" now.
2)What has considerably dropped is the number of crimes committed by young, uprooted "late re-patriates.".
3) The organizations proper has "matured" and operates like most crimes cartells in Germany do - engaging in White collar crimes such as money laundering and cyber stuff.
Just as in America, Russian mafioso do not care that crimes are white collar. They know that once a person has committed a crime for them, they can reasonably expect to have the same person commit another crime or a "favor" for them. New York City is famous for this being the way things get done, including in media, sports, real estate, and business.
In fact, this is why most oligarchs are oligarchs, including a lot of the "self-made" ones.
Do not even for a moment imagine that this is a case of four Republican Reps finding the guts to 'stand up to Trump.' Today's GOP is by far the most disciplined political entity in US history, obeying Rupert Murdoch (even more than Trump) exactly to the same degree that the North Korean party congress obey's Trump's ("we fell in love!") pal Kim Jong Un.
This vote was choreographed by John Roberts and the GOP House leadership, with JUST the right number of 'defections', for one purpose: to give Trump an excuse to worm out of a painful quagmire - his failed mafia takeover of a rival gang (the Ayatollahs) who proved tougher than the gangs he took over in Venezuela, Argentina and El Salvdor. (In no case did he enlist the aid of the PEOPLE of those nations, or Greenland. Mob bosses never do that.)
Now he can pull out of the Iran quagmire and move on to Cuba, while howling "We woulda won in Iran! I woulda! I had 'em on the ropes till the Dems and some turncoat RINOs betrayed me. ME, personally! I woulda won!"
Sure, Squire Trelaine. Time for chocolate and bed. Tomorrow, Cuba. And then that sweet, sweet 9/11 Reichstag fire you have planned for us.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-iran-war-powers-4th-vote-trump/
I know more about conservatism and its many arguments in my left middle finger than MCS will know across his entire life. Right now the movement of giants like Burke, Buckley and Goldwater has devolved into simplicity, a cesspit of treason, stupidity and outright evil. Go masturbate to your incantations. I'll continue sampling the few sane voices that remain on the right and happily ignore any links offered by such an evil, fecal momzer as yourself.
Too atoopid to grasp that first-two runoffs are nothing like Ranked Choice. And it took me more time to type this sentence than I give any longer to skim L's fecal spews.
And, exactly as predicted, “happily ignore any links offered by such an evil, fecal momzer as yourself.l
Tomorrow I fly into the belly of the beast. If I don't come out, you can guess that I was poking too close for the Powers to shrug off, anymore. And yeah, that's inflated imagined self-importance... unless it's not.
I'l;l try to check in. Meanwhile. Fight for a sane/honorable civilization informed by science and enlightenment and genuine decency, so that our heirs may thrive and learn from it all.
I just watched 'Nuremberg' and unfortunately agree with the concluding message - It Can, without a doubt, Happen Here. Trying to remember the name of the researcher who surmised post WWII that there was something special about Germans and decided to go research them, but for scientific accuracy, did some subject testing here in the US to establish a baseline of 'normal' people who wouldn't commit atrocities just because a person in authority told them to. He never got to Germany, because he found out that as a species, we are nearly all willing to do that. It's the saints and other weirdos who are the exceptions.
Pappenheimer
Give it indigestion, if nothing else.
If his polls continue to plummet, the powers behind him will less-likely stage a reichstag fire FOR. him and more likely use his martyrdon AS the eaichstag fire.
They knew it could happen post-war.
Nobody appeared to want to believe it.
On the Alabama racist redistricting during an election...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Jun04-1.html
"...Remember, this 2023 Alabama map has never been used before. A court-drawn map was used in 2024 and continued to be used in preparation for the 2026 elections. So, election officials had prepared ballots and registered voters under the court map and candidates had filed and campaigned to run in a May 19 primary in the same districts as before in 2024. One week before Election Day, the Court jumped in and threw all that into chaos. What was that again about issuing orders so close to an election? Oh right, if Republicans stand to benefit from the Court's meddling, then it's never too late to get involved.
...
"I love my country. But my government has gone insane. They're not even trying to hide it any more. I think they're proud of it."
This episode of PBS Spacetime has a more optimistic view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro
Our glorious star-spanning future depends on the answer to a rather mundane question:
can a ship large enough to carry humans be adequately shielded from tiny particles without
adding so much extra mass that accelerating such a ship becomes a practical impossibility.
And if the answer is no, have we solved the Fermi paradox in the least interesting way possible?
Is the answer to Enrico Fermi’s question, “where is everybody?”
may simply be “everybody stayed at home.”
But compared to atmospheric re-entry, the interstellar medium is extremely safe, even at 20% of c.
Lincoln Square published two videos lately I'd like to share here.
The first is about the Plan to shut down international air travel, which would be a measure after a Reichstag fire event:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CCAvO2vaXUg?is=a7ZrRmy3UP5oufop
The second one is about Opus Dei:
https://www.youtube.com/live/31dl8-0B8oU?is=D5gBoNqXOS9YM2wr
With the latter one, I wonder if Opus Dei could be a missing link in the Epstein Case (though not specifically mentioned).
I'm not sure this is the way to fix the science funding problem:
"For eighty years, federal science funding has rested on a social contract rooted in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Science: The Endless Frontier: the public provides resources and a high degree of autonomy, and in return scientists produce knowledge that ultimately serves the public interest. That contract has been under strain for some time now, as often discussed here at THB.
Alvin Weinberg gave that contract a useful characterization in “Criteria for Scientific Choice” (Minerva, 1963): “science for policy” — research that informs public decisions, and “policy for science” — government stewardship of the research enterprise.
The proposed OMB rule would redefine both halves of that contract in explicitly political and partisan terms, collapsing Weinberg’s productive tension into one-way, top-down executive control. The result would not be better science policy — or even science policy at all. Instead, the new rule offers pathologically politicized science dressed up in regulatory language.
Federal science funding has real problems — replication failures, lack of rigor, and ideological capture in some programs. Even so, the proposals of the OMB rule are far worse than the problems they claim to address. [ https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/partisan-politics-trumps-peer-review ] "
Pope Leo is moving against Opus Dei in a fairly dramatic way. If they were involved with Epstein then they *must* keep it secret from the Pontiff. He has authorized the release of similar accusations involving them.
Exactly as predicted in both EARTH and EXISTENCE. The "E" in EU gets redefined as "Earth." Today's EU is not my favorite model for Terran Government. But it might do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/finland-stubb-eu-canada-turkey-norway.html
Lissabon would have solved so much. Alas.
SpaceX represents another amusing moral quandary for our fine host, as it's continued existence is essential for humanity's extra-planetary ambitions, it's currently appraised at over 2 trillion US dollars & its sale threatens to make a politically & morally suspect Elon Musk so insanely wealthy that he'd be more powerful than most world governments:
Do we then INVEST in humanity's extra-planetary future by making a notorious MAGA-adjacent White Supremacist Oligarch like Elon Musk into the richest & most powerful man in human history ??
Or, do we 'protect our democracy', take a moral stand against an evil anti-Marxist oligarchy & DEVALUE SpaceX's stock in order to bankrupt and disempower Elon Musk, while simultaneously destroying humanity's best chance at space travel & an extra-planetary future ??
I predict expediency to take the day, but that's just me.
Best
It seems that the best configuration for a laser sail is not a flat rectangle by a giant sphere.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2108650-disco-ball-sail-propelled-by-laser-could-fly-to-a-nearby-star/
Disco-ball sail propelled by laser could fly to a nearby star
One challenge for the Breakthrough Starshot project will be keeping the orientation of the sail just right in relation to the laser beam that propels it. “An obvious solution is to have an on-board adjustment system that would constantly keep the sail facing the right way,” says Zachary Manchester at Harvard University, a member of the advisory committee behind the project. “But that would add significant complexity and mass to the spacecraft.”
Instead, he and his colleague at Harvard, Abraham Loeb, suggest a new approach to the sail and laser. Part of this involves using a spherical sail rather than the cone shape that others have previously suggested, helping to resolve orientation problems through a sphere’s symmetry.
“I looked at the proposed laser-propelled sails and found that none of them would be very stable,” says Manchester. “But I found that a spherical sail would be, and it’s very elegant.”
Such a sail would look a lot like an interstellar disco ball, with the probe hidden in the centre. When a laser beam hit its slender mirror-like surface, the light would bounce off and push the probe along.
After acceleration, the disco ball can "deflate" into a small space to minimize further damage to its surface.
Imagine sailing to the stars inside a giant disco ball.
To the music of the Bee Gees.
"Stayin' alive, stayin' alive..."
As I assumed before, Musk might be one day considered to be a threat to someone's national security and have his cup of tea.
If not already.
1st time in a long time Locum's spew was merely grouchy-nutty and not sewer-fecal idiocy. Of course he knows nothing about Marx ands little else. It won't matter how much $ the New Lords have, if the FDR-made middle class is impoverished into an angry proletariate.
From a friend: Hi David, I’m guessing you’ve seen this. It seems to me Thiel is heading to his Prepper compound in Argentina (or there abouts). Does this suggest a near term super 9/11 to you?
reply:I have long posited - along with Doug Rushkoff - that the insane and wretchedly ingrate wing of the New Oligarchy are demonstrably plotting to "accelerate the Event' a collapse of civilization and death of billions, so they can emerge from their prepper. bunkers as new lords, even new gods. In Thiel's case I've seen him migrate from sea state sovereignties (which I discussed with him, critting his approach, for which he ended our semi friendship) to New Zealand (which he's abandoned upon realizing Maori contractors have keys and schematics to his fortress, there) and now to the Patagonian mountains, where Olaf Stapledon posited there'd be a final gasp of the First Men. .. and where I predicted he would wind up, for several reasons.
So is he scurrying there right now because he 'knows something' about the super 9/11 Reichstag Fire I predicted? Hm. Maybe. The timing doesn't seem right. At least I pray so as I am soon arriving in DC for the Space Development Conference. But sure, maybe. Keep an eye on JD Vance.
More likely he's heading there to supervise final construction and stocking of his bolt hole. And dig it. No one on Earth could serve humanity so well as an Argentine contractor who messes up the air system there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/world/americas/peter-thiel-argentina.html
I have considered a story wherein an enclave sheltering a small coterie of vampires makes a last stand against the hordes of the living mad.
[jk]Would Neil Clarke* bite, though? [/jk]
There are numerous stories about this scenario, from Ben Elton's 'Stark' to a short story by (the other) Clarke. Plus, when you squint, just about every zombie flick...
* For those who aren't aware: NC is the editor of the sf magazine Clarkesworld, whose submission guidelines has the sign 'no zombies' on prominent display
... Someone mentioned an app that tracks the whereabouts of every billionaire's private jet, which sounds an alarm if too many take off simultaneously.
Leslie Fish retorts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O68DedIacWM
in my SciFi comedy The Ancient Ones, we visit a world where vampires, were-guys and zombies are natural next phases after death and hence complex economies and paranoias... and arts. A movie made by Vampires to scare fellow vampires? NIGHT OF THE LIVING... That's it. The whole title.
Tony I think you probably meant this one:
https://ews.kylemcdonald.net/
Post a Comment