Want some real news from space? Got some for you. But hold on. First: a moment distinguishing art from reality.
I eagerly anticipate any Steven Spielberg film. His AI was - I believe- prophetic in ways that most folks don't yet realize, that I discuss in AIlien Minds. Still, I expect to have mixed feelings about Disclosure. As happened in ET, there will likely be distractions from the audience ever realizing the story's true villains.*
Anyway, after living through close to seven decades of UFO fetish-crazes, each one sillier than the last and each one promising to blow the lid off the Big Coverup, I can be forgiven taking this latest one with a jaundiced eye?
You'll not find another human on this planet who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have, from astrophysics to SETI to sci fi and fantasy to artificial intelligence... and I do posit (in Existence) a strong possibility we'll find either dead or 'living' ancient interstellar probes in the asteroid belt! (Want a great concept and plot, Steven?)
But that is way, way different than these illogical conspiracy theories about an impossible 'coverup' - without any plausible justification - that would keep thousands of irrascibly independent researchers both frantically busy and silent across 80 years! Investigating a vital phenom... without a single plausible discovery or advance ever coming from it all.
Only now? With ten million (!!) times as many active cameras on Earth, the 'images' somehow keep getting fuzzier? And always the least-plausible theories to 'explain' the easily explainable? As for the latest crop of blurry plasma balls zipping about 'violating every known law'? Well, Mick West takes care of most of them, and here's my answer to the rest. Give me $3million and 6 months and a nice boat to set up shop upon and I'll harrass Navy pilots the same sort of cat laser dots! While violating no laws at all. Well... no laws of nature.
Feh. learn to recognize a deliberate distraction... X-Files to divert from Eps Files? I go into this elsewhere.
And enough. Let's get down to actual science.
== The Ultimate Fate of Life and the Universe… ==
Here’s an Astrum video explaining the quandaries of dark matter and dark energy. Recent DESI maps of the universe suggest that Lambda – the dark energy coefficient – may not be constant, but slowly declining with time. Which could mean that in a distant future acceleration turns into deceleration and then… an inward fall of the cosmos toward a Big Crunch?
This revives the greatest theological debate of all time, between my late friend Freeman Dyson – who posited how some form of ‘life’ might endure long into the dark leptonic era – and Tulane Prof. Frank Tipler, whose magnificently ornate book The Physics of Immortality should have won a Hugo Award in scifi, taking the Big Crunch into incredible speculative territory. (And I do mean incredible.) If the DESI results hold, then maybe both were right! Life must endure through a very, very long darkness… that eventually turns around and becomes something like Tipler’s god-making crunch. I won’t explain in detail here…
…nor a third scenario proposed by Roger Penrose. (Not a close friend but we’ve had friendly discussions.) That the great Expansive Dissipation might turn into a new Big Bang, but NOT by falling back into a big crunch-and-bounce. Instead through a scale-renormalization bookkeeping trick(!), in a boson-dominated cosmos that doesn’t care anymore about the ‘what-evs’ difference between densities of totality divided by ten-to-the-plus-or-else-minus 26. Fifty-two orders of magnitude difference? Bosons shrug and don’t care. And someday we'll all be bosons on this bust.
Somewhere an alien or AI or god is giggling at my lame efforts to understand. Enjoy, kids. My whole new book AIlien Minds is dedicated to you uber brainiacs.
Meanwhile… we may have seen ‘frame-dragging’! As a star is being ripped apart by a black hole, its debris settles into a rapidly rotating accretion disk. At the same time, powerful jets of material get launched outward at close to the speed of light. By studying repeating patterns in X-ray and radio signals from this event, scientists found that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together. This coordinated motion repeated every 20 days, providing a clear signature of the spacetime twisting effect.
== Asteroid insights ==
Discovery of the sugars glucose and Ribose in samples returned from asteroid Bennu offer two important insights. (1) That many of the complex stages toward life were relatively easy to generate in conditions of the early solar system and likely pervaded the solar system, including the sugar used in cell-energetics and the one that back-bones RNA…
...and (2) that asteroid missions inexpensively push the frontiers of both science and our advanced capabilities out there; accomplishments only achievable by USA+Japan+ESA.
Of course this adds one more bit of evidence that the insanely dumb “Artemis” fetish to plant symbolic footprints on a useless plain of poison lunar dust is at-best a distraction and at-worst deliberate sabotage. Sure, keep western robots exploring the Moon, so we keep our hand in. Maybe a robotically-built radio scope on the far side! Surely we should assay lava tubes and finally verify if there's any of the mythical Heeeelium Threeee!
But this is just plain blatant. When he was NASA Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy voiced frustration over Starship’s pace: “I love SpaceX.. but they pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president’s term.""
Artemis might - maybe, if hugely modified - be ready in the early '30s. Ready to accomplish nothing of palpable (instead of symbolic) value. In fact, funding the rapid improvement of SpaceX ships is the only likely positive outcome.
== More goodies out there? ==
Meanwhile... California-based TransAstra has "developed and tested a device called Capture Bag, an inflatable bag that comes in different sizes, intended to catch anything from small rocks to house-sized boulders. Project head Joel Sercel says the bag could also be used for cleaning up human-made space junk, a problem that is increasingly a source of worry for governments and scientists." All of it based upon grants that we awarded his company at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC).
== Deeeeep Space marvels! ==
Astronomers have confirmed the first known triple galactic system in which all three colliding galaxies host actively feeding radio-bright supermassive black holes.
IF anyone is still living there… what a trip!
Korean astronomers claim to have found that all type 1a supernovae are not the same, depending on the ages of the original star when it blew. And hence the ‘standard candle ‘ of cosmology needed correction. And lo, it seems the Hubble Tension disappears and the universe, which had been accelerating its expansion rate, has entered an era of deceleration. Gosh wow piled on gosh wow!
A very interesting episode of COOL WORLDS about the Gosh Parameters that made our universe (perhaps just barely) habitable. Good series. As is PBS SPACETIME! Still I wonder about the host’s surmises. For example: I'd love to see how Lee Smolin's evolution of evolvability of whole universes would interact with this. (1) it would mean that the basic general laws long ago coalesced into the ones we see and (2) the 26 (or 42 etc) parameters would be non-random but 'genetic' variations around already winnowed basic values.
== China’s next bold move ==
An ambitious mission from China covers a number of my forecasts and concerns. Its first goal is a small quasi-moon of Earth - a very near asteroid, fast-spinning and therefore likely rocky and not a rubble pile – with plans to return a sample. Showing that China understands that asteroids are at least as important – over the longer term – or more so, than that lunar plain of poison dust. Sure, it’s a far easier target than the Japanese and U.S. asteroidal sample-returns. But there’s one more reason to go to these quasi-moons…
…that they would seem (logically) to be ideal sites for ‘lurker probes’ (alien of course!) to skulk and keep an eye on us Earthlings. As pointed out by me (in EXISTENCE) and separately by James Benford. On the very small chance that the PRC mission finds something, they’d take a Godzilla-level leap ahead, in fame, if nothing else. And THAT is where someone may actually study something akin to a 'UFO'.
Finally, the same mission will flip past Earth to visit a long period comet, incidentally testing my doctoral dissertation.
Of course, there is a catch with extraterestrial drones: they could serve as a "trap" for humanity, a first-strike-early-warning system.
ReplyDeleteLet's say interstellar space travel is possible, but messages still take a lot of time to travel. What you don't want as an interstellar species is to be surprised by an upstart aggressive humanity to outgun you once the message from your probe arrives at home.
.
So you give them autonomy to study and .... react.
The Dark Forest and Berserker Hypotheses all rolled into one.
DeleteDer Oger you might find interesting the last 1/3 of EXISTENCE.
ReplyDeleteOr an old episode of Babylon 5
ReplyDeleteThat'd be S3 ep 3 'A Day in the Strife': an episode with multiple threads, one of which features a rather rude AI probe which demands answers involving advanced science or it will detonate. It turns out to be a berserker intended to destroy 'threat' civilisations that are this advanced. An interesting thought experiment, but a somewhat silly one, when you think of it. A civilisation as advanced as implied would be a) unlikely to be destroyed and b) more than capable of retaliating. That's filler for you, I guess.
ReplyDelete"many of the complex stages toward life were relatively easy to generate in conditions of the early solar system and likely pervaded the solar system, including the sugar used in cell-energetics and the one that back-bones RNA"
ReplyDeleteI'm sure bacterial, viral and prion life forms permeate the universe (which makes it problematic for mankind to colonize the surface of planets and not end up like the Martians of "WoTW" or the human colonists of KSR's "Aurora"), but the math is against intelligent life.
Crunch the numbers using the "Rare Earth" formulations (including: a large stabilizing Moon which prevents climate disrupting wobbles of our axis, a large Jovian planet in the OUTER solar system guarding us from dinosaur killer asteroids hitting every few thousand years, active plate tectonics that recycle carbon and prevented us from becoming Venus, enough active radioactivate metals to heat the core and keep it spinning to generate a magnet field and prevent us from becoming Mars, enough rare phosphorus to make DNA possible, being located around a star outside the violent galactic center and the outer galactic rim which lacks the metals needed for rocky planets, enough atmospheric oxygen on a non-water world to allow for fire and industry, enough non decomposing vegetation to form fossil fuels necessary for technology, etc.) and statistically there is only one intelligent technological species in the galaxy.
That would be us.
There ain't nobody else.
You are assuming and end state like our Earth. That's going to bias your numbers downward.
DeleteIntelligence seems likely to me. Way too many other species are a lot smarter than we wanted to admit. OUR level of intelligence isn't matched on Earth, but that's only true at the moment. Back up 100K years and there was more than one variety of human and they were all pretty damn smart.
Intelligence is rewarded (up to a point) as a hunting strategy in social animals. It also help in avoiding being eaten, but so do a lot of other factors.
As for the other factors, they can reasonably be debated. Then there are the other kinds of worlds that would support life for which we have essentially no experience about evolution pressures.
Celt @ 4:46,
DeleteIsaac Asimov wrote an article in one of the Science Fiction magazines, back in the 1970's, titled 'The Triumph of the Moon' and detailing the advantages of a large moon. It was IIRC a follow-up to a previous article titled 'The Tragedy of the Moon' which had detailed the disadvantages of a large moon.
He speculated that the large tides generated by a large moon were essential as a driver (or at least an accelerator) of the colonisation of the land by multi-cellular organisms, but I don't remember any mention of a stabilising effect.
And on another matter entirely. Am I the only reader who doesn't see the structure of the comments unless I'm posting myself.
I think you'd get enough tidal mixing from the Sun alone... assuming the Earth on its own didn't get tidally locked, which would be whole other ball game, environmentally speaking.
DeleteI'm surprised we haven't heard more of this from multi-planetary-civ peeps. Natural disasters may not be the only dangers out there.
ReplyDeleteA distributed, mobile, and fast civ is much more difficult to conquer, especially by stealth. Historically, castles were losing their effectiveness even before the cannon.
Off topic, but I know Dr Brin appreciates Alan Sherman songs.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm humming in the shower as I am wont to do, and this time it's Alan Sherman's parody of "Down By The Riverside", which is "Don't Buy The Liverwurst" And I get to:
So buy the corned beef if you must,
The pickled herring, you can trust,
And the lox puts you in orbit a-ok.
But that big hunk of liverwurst
Has been there since October first,
And today is the twenty-third of May!
And it hits me. Today really IS the twenty-third of May.
What are the odds?
It's hard to argue against calling LLMs "AI". I try, but I'm not good at it. What it comes down to is this: Is something lost when life is copied (transformed) by a machine? Is sheet music equivalent to live Jazz? A strawman of course, but bear with me for a sec.
ReplyDeleteIan Malcolm explained this quite well in JURASSIC PARK (1993), and Seth Brundle demonstrated it perfectly in THE FLY (1986). Both roles were played by Jeff Goldblum, and both being among his favourite roles.
A few years ago, trying to make a similar point here in CB, I posted a link to Herbie Hancock's rendition of "Cantaloupe Island". I recently found another example: Jeff Goldblum's rendition!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_6RQKoCTVY&list=RD1_6RQKoCTVY
I'm also not good at Jazz. I can explain this lossy AI fairly well using FORTH, but that's even more exotic. I use the term 'syntonicity' in that realm.
Popper's extention to the Mind/Body duality would have live music be in world one, the sensations of live music in world two, and sheet music in world three. He tacked on extra 'worlds' not to define explicit structure but to point out the open ended nature of knowledge.* Does Beethoven's Ninth Symphony exist if no one is playing it at the moment? No world one or two instantiations, but it is written down, recorded, and memorized in countless other instances suggesting quite a bit more than three 'worlds'.
DeleteThe Open Universe - An Argument for Indeterminism
- Karl Popper
(Not one of his better known works, but it was available to me in my library so I read it cover to cover.)
"I'm sure bacterial, viral and prion life forms permeate the universe..." The deeper, underlying topic of EXISTENCE...
ReplyDeleteDer Oger you might find interesting the last 1/3 of EXISTENCE.
ReplyDeleteThat one, alongside Earth is on my hunting list*, but the queue of books-to-be-read is already long and my private and professional duties constantly conspire to block me from ever reading it down. Sigh.
* You are not easy to find over here. I staunchly refuse to order things in the net, as a comittment to keep brick and mortar stores, especially the small local ones, alive. And I like the thrill of the hunt, scanning through book titles in shops, flea markets and give-away stands.
"* You are not easy to find over here. "
DeleteI can't speak for today or whatever city you are in, but my family and I were in Berlin in 2016, and we happened across a bookstore that had several Brin books, including hardcover compilations of the second Uplift trilogy, both in German and English.
It might be best to ask a local bookseller to order it in for you.
DeleteThank you, Dr. Brin.
ReplyDeleteI've shared the two "Deeeeep Space marvels!" articles with a (non-practicing) physicist friend of mine for their reaction. 'Twas fun to see his excitement.
I know just enough to recognize an earthquake when I see one.
Deep thanks for sharing these.
(also, with life-long friends at the VLA and VLBA, it's fun to see my homies laboring and doing great works)
Even in the horrible, we are capable of wonders.
The only version of a supernova that I thought would offer a precise standard candle is the one where a white dwarf tips past the limit. Predictable mass. Mostly predictable state for all that mass. Complicating factors would include material nearby feeding it past the limit.
ReplyDeleteThe type you get with core collapse in massive stars really should come out on a continuum of initial states.
Astronomy works with approximations, though. Lots of them. Being able to delineate the types must have become easier since I left academia. Hallelujah!
That's the key difference between supernova types, Alfred.
DeleteThere is a point to this...
ReplyDeleteBack before Frank Miller essentially redefined the concept of Batman with the 1986 "Dark Knight" books, there had been many different iterations of the character--the scary creature of the night, the jolly adventurer, the camp parody, the Sherlock Holmes avatar, and others. Yet, there was one truth about the character that was always essential--Batman hated criminals. His parents' murder drove him to protect the world from criminals.
So in one of the Dark Knight books, Superman is flashing back on a time when the heroes all voluntarily retired in order to avert the fear and loathing that the envious human population was beginning to direct toward them. In the flashback, the heroes were discussing their options, when (he recalls) Batman laughted "that laugh of yours" and then spoke one of the most discordant lines I recall from any comic book:
"Of course we're criminals! We've always been criminals! We have to be criminals!"
That that particular character would assert such a thing, let alone embrace it, was disconcerting.
I say that to say this. When I hear today's broligarchs and their disdain for democracy and for the really-free, competitive market, I imagine these staunch defenders of capitalism to laugh that laugh of theirs and go:
"Of course we're Bolsheviks! We've always been Bolsheviks! We have to be Bolsheviks!"
I like this one so much I plan to post it as something said under my blog, by a member.
Delete"plan to post it as something said under my blog, by a member."
DeleteWith my blessing. That goes for anything I post here.
ReplyDeleteAs plot devices go, it's recycled panspermia theory in this thread and 'gravity beams interacting with superconducting planetary mantle' in the last one, along with the baseless assertion that imaginary extraterrestrial drones are hiding in our asteroid belt.
Of course, it's all in good fun, up to & including Der_Oger's cautions about the imaginary threat imposed by those imaginary extraterrestrial drones, as first put forward in Murray Leinster's 1954 novel 'The Black Galaxy', still available for your reading pleasure at the free link below:
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_Science_Fiction_Novel_20_Murray_Leinster_The_Black_Galaxy_1954
That said, I feel more & more bewildered with each passing day, mostly by this strange desire for scientific validation, especially when acclaim for good storytelling should be more than enough validation for any professional writer.
Best
While less raving lunatic this time, locum's posting still assumes dichotomies that don't exist. The best fiction writers are the best MAGICIANS the world ever saw, creating INCANTATIONS that unreel in readers' heads to create vast, subjective thought experiments.
DeleteAND THAT does not have to mean I can't also be a scientist or cogent historical observer. Sure, we're likely living in a simulation. (One where Trump took over dropping quarters into the Holodeck?) But there's still an objective reality that science corners & pins down a little more, each day. And that COLLABORATIVE and competitive projects is something I am far more proud-of than merely weaving magical spells.
One simple question - why isn't distance the defining question in all this speculation. An average human lifespan is 80 years. Why is any object further away than 80 light years of any possible interest not just to us, but to other species. Communication becomes impossibly cumbersome well before that even. And colonizing a remote body runs into the same problem - they can't ask for help or guidance. So why would they be interested in us.
ReplyDeletereason Fred Hoyle said 100,000 humans should be the max population since that's all you could ever know. He admitted a million would let you be choosy. See a resemblance to your view?
DeleteDr. Brin,
ReplyDeleteIs that Hoyle quote from 'October the 1st is too late"?
Also, it's highly doubtful that we are living in a simulation, because the coincidences and occurrences we see are too wild to be believed. A ficton would have more logical parameters.
Pappenheimer
"the coincidences and occurrences we see are too wild to be believed. A ficton would have more logical parameters."
DeleteThere's only one way I can imagine that a simulation would have given us Donald Trump's America.
If the point is to keep throwing situations at which we think, "Okay, we've reached rock bottom. It can't get any more effed up than this." And then it does. And it's trying to determine at what point we just rebel against the simulation itself, because it can't possibly be reality.
What I mean above is something analogous to writer Alan Moore imagining as a child that, while hugging his mother, it would have been possible to grab a scissors from behind her and stab her to death. Not because of any enmity against his mother, but simply to create a reality so egregious that the "director" would be forced to run out from behind the scenery shouting "Cut!"
DeleteThat's what the Trump era feels like it's leading up to. The gleeful anticipation of nuking Iran might be driven by such a desire. "Let's force God to un-do the reality we've been enduring by doing something that just can't stand."
It wouldn't work, of course, any more than young Alan's idea would have worked. But I suspect that not only many in Trump's political orbit, but also many who thought voting for Trump was a good idea had a goal like this in mind.
ozajh:
ReplyDelete"Am I the only reader who doesn't see the structure of the comments unless I'm posting myself."
I didn't discover this, but I'll pass along wisdom from an earlier poster.
There are two different ways to get to the comments here.
If you click on the blog post title itself and then go to the bottom, the comments appear after the post itself. And those comments are not nested, but simply appear in chronological order.
OTOH, on the main page, if you go to the end of the post and click on the "29 comments" (or whatever the number happens to be), then you get the comments in a nested format, where replies can be made to individual comments and appear below those comments.
Switching back and forth between views is confusing, but there are advantages to both.
Stonekettle totally gets MAGA:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.threads.com/@stonekettle
I'd like to believe this [that high gas prices doom Republicans in the midterms] . But I live in Florida District 1, Matt Gaetz Country. Poverty. Poor education. A Southern Baptist church on every corner. Yes, they're furious about the price of gas and groceries, and they're sure it's somehow Obama's fault. They'll pay it or do without just so long as it screws all the people they hate too. They'll squat in the dark of their bunkers, clutching their guns, shit on their own feet and call it freedom -- just so long as no one else gets any light. MAGA
Also this...
Swing voters in North Carolina say they are frustrated with President Trump and the state of the economy but aren't ready to abandon him or his party as the midterms inch closer.
That last one reposted from NPR.