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.
137 comments:
Of course, there is a catch with extraterestrial drones: they could serve as a "trap" for humanity, a first-strike-early-warning system.
Let'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.
Der Oger you might find interesting the last 1/3 of EXISTENCE.
Or an old episode of Babylon 5
That'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.
"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"
I'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.
The Dark Forest and Berserker Hypotheses all rolled into one.
I'm surprised we haven't heard more of this from multi-planetary-civ peeps. Natural disasters may not be the only dangers out there.
A 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.
So 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.
Ian 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.
"I'm sure bacterial, viral and prion life forms permeate the universe..." The deeper, underlying topic of EXISTENCE...
Der Oger you might find interesting the last 1/3 of EXISTENCE.
That 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.
Thank you, Dr. Brin.
I'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.
"* You are not easy to find over here. "
I 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.
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.
The 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!
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'.
The 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.)
You are assuming and end state like our Earth. That's going to bias your numbers downward.
Intelligence 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.
That's the key difference between supernova types, Alfred.
There is a point to this...
Back 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!"
As 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.
AND 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.
I like this one so much I plan to post it as something said under my blog, by a member.
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.
Celt @ 4:46,
Isaac 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.
reason 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?
Dr. Brin,
Is 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
It might be best to ask a local bookseller to order it in for you.
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.
"plan to post it as something said under my blog, by a member."
With my blessing. That goes for anything I post here.
ozajh:
"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.
"the coincidences and occurrences we see are too wild to be believed. A ficton would have more logical parameters."
There'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!"
That'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.
Stonekettle totally gets MAGA:
https://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.
There are levels.
1. Former Republicans who are disgusted but cannot gather the guts to step up and back the Coalition of Salvation.
2. Republicans who are disgusted with Trump but suckle Fox etc in order to recite the mantra "Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, Democrats are worse, !!"
#1 folks are beneath contempt. George F. Will, for example. The entire Romney mob. May they roast.
#2 is very slightly approachable with wager demands. Scads of them, like whether Democratic administrations ALWAYS have better outcomes across the board. Or wager the veracity of ANY hour of Maddow vs any hour of Hannity. They do not wager and they do not convert. But the bald confrontation of their weenie, un-manly wunwillingness to ante-up... makes them miserable. They deserve their misery and shame.
#3 Committed MAGAs. The wager challenge stuff does make some of them uncomfortable, and that's good. They expect to be the sneering taunters and do not like being taunted. But look at what makes their eyes widen in realization when you say it:
- Most new gun owners are liberals and minorities.
- Cops are noticing that the right does nearly all of the violence. Jan.6ers killed four cops. ICE breaks every code of honor or law or accountability that regular cops willingly follow. They notice.
- Red states except Utah wallow in every turpitude that they have spent 80 years howling at city folks. Every turpoitude from gambling, STDs, domestic violence, teen sex and murder to parasitism on blue taxpayers.
- The 1850s are over. You have awakened a sleeping giant and filled us with a terrible resolve, We are the ones who know law, cyber, chem, bio, nuclear, robotics and history and all the rest. And you will not like us, when we're mad.
It doesn't change their minds. But the looks on their faces resemble what we saw on the middle school playground when we stood before the bully and said - "No more of my lunch money. You take the first shot. I'll take your punch... then it's my turn."
There are levels.
Yes. But the more interesting aspect is that the auth-right everywhere has captured the workers, and many voters in areas consistently abandoned by central government.
Of course we are barbarians!
Larry Hart @ 5:10,
Indeed. That's also the format that comes up when I click 'post a comment' after looking at the comments in chronological order.
As you say, there are advantages and disadvantages.
"advantages and disadvantages."
I like the not-nested format for reading everything that came in since the last time I checked. But then for some comments, I have to switch over to the nested version to follow a conversation.
Another thought on Surveillance/Trigger drones: What if those of multiple civilizations detect each other? Cold War, or some sort of intergalactic chess/poker game?
Again, see the last 1/3 of Existence (or 'Lungfish', the short story it is based on. Found in 'The River of Time')
Indeed. I wound up staying with physics in grad school, but came in with an astrophysics intent. Several late nights at a small telescope in Flagstaff in January with my advisor followed by a week on a playa in So Cal at an MW radio telescope essentially cured me of that. I still love the field as an amateur, but the profession is really lonely.
That I got to do that as an undergrad was amazing. Hands-on beats book learning every time!
TASAT.
Several I'm sure.
Point. You might like to add the idea to the TASAT site, Oger
https://www.threads.com/@stonekettle
He might have lost the war with Iran, made gas and groceries and rent unaffordable, destroyed our economy, Doged our government, fracked our national parks, took school lunches from poor kids, had Americans shot down in the street by government goons, called our veterans losers, paid his insurrectionists with our money, bulldozed the White House, and went golfing every weekend on the taxpayer dime, sure, but let's not forget he also managed to get a popular late night TV show host cancelled.
Kinda like the equal and opposite of that "Life of Brian" bit about what the Romans have done for us lately.
Loved this interview of Trump by Barbara Walters back in the day when journalists had integrity and balls.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=barbara+walters+inteview+withtrump
The Prion-er of Zenda
Reserve that title now before somebody else takes it.
Of course we read Contrary Brin. We have to read Contrary Brin. If it did not exist, it would have to be invented.
So why would they be interested in us.
Reply:
Aliens are observing us. But they are not using a lab coat and a stethoscope.
They're using a Lazy Boy and a six pack of beer.
Were too damn funny.
We're.....
Talk about self fulfilling prophecy.
The Pope and OGH both consider the Tower of Babel to be foundational.
So do I, but (as usual) my argument is deeply rooted in FORTH, and this isn't my blog, so I'll zip it.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html
scidata give an excerpt about that?
Ah I see it's the first sentence. Needless to say, I agree on the pertinence and disagree over an interpretation.
I certainly wasn't implying that you and Leo agree on the interpretation, only that the Tower is an important allegory. His encyclical is a run-of-the-mill anti-tech spiel. Yours (I think) is a more 'put a pin in that' take wherein the real story is not close to finished. My own is a plea for pervasive technical (computational) awareness. Existential questions should not be the exclusive purview of another type of tower, made of ivory.
As for excerpts, I'm just getting into the Vatican-Anthropic alliance, and am thus hesitant to post links, especially to Forbes (which vexes me terribly):
"The Vatican Picked Anthropic As The AI Industry's Moral Interlocutor"
His encyclical is a run-of-the-mill anti-tech spiel
I challenge that perception. As I understand it, he
a) wants us to use it responsibly;
b) makes a statement about the Epstein class;
c) condemns wars of aggression and use of AI in war;
d) says it should serve humanity, not a select group of techbroligarchs
e) preaches that workers deserve dignity.
etc.
It is not against technology, but makes a very Vernian statement about it.
In my play THE ESCAPE one character points out the Creator was NOT ANGRY over the Tower of Babel. He is in the Koran and Book of Mormon by NOT in the source material. He had drowned the world a page erarlier and would smite Sodom a page later. But for the Tower he says "Nothing might be beyond them... but not yet.. Let them learn by becoming scattered and diverse. Only then..." Only then, someday.
I'd agree whole heartedly, if this was 1526. Too little, far too late.
We watched the incredible new film NUREMBERG. Very dramatic, fascinating and informative, A fine partner to JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, the old Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster classic. Amazing to see Goering portrayed as brilliant (and hugely evil) rather than the fat buffoon depicted by Chaplin and the Stooges and in all those WWII songs.
I would have written in some mention about how his Luftwaffe never kept a single promise that he made to Hitler. (That would've hurt.) And how Adolf would never let anyone truly respected get that high in the hierarchy. Still, Russell Crowe's portayal was chillingly convincing. Michael Shannon conveyed things so well an era when American leaders were of the highest caliber. And Rami Malek's dire warning at the very end is what we need to bear in mind as we fight similar demons today.
https://www.netflix.com/title/82700085
It is not that you can be picky in the choice of allies, currently. Besides, the Vatican can reach people your ilk never will.
Oh, and 1526 was a year they still Had scholars debating instead of armies slaughtering each other.
Oger,
I've been rereading Tuchman's 'March of Folly' and need to point out that the Papal States were at war in 1526. France and Spain were having a spirited discussion in Italy involving Rome, Venice, and just about every Italian two-florin power who could afford a condotierre, with Rome itself being sacked in 1527. (There's a Sabaton song about that).
Your point stands, though: the Vatican still had scholars and there'd been a Lateran Council only a few lustra earlier (1521). Perhaps you could write "...they still had scholars debating as well as armies slaughtering each other."
Pappenheimer
I ran into a bit of history many years ago that puts me 4 degrees of separation from Goering. I met a young airman on an AFB whose nametag tugged on my memory. The next time I met him I asked about his last name, and he mentioned that his father had been a pilot in the USAF. The nametag read Galland. I asked if a relative had flown in another air force.
The young man's face froze. "Oh. You mean Grandfather."
Adolph Galland had been a commander in the Luftwaffe and had become a bitter enemy and critic of Goering's person and competence. He'd also been credited with 104 aerial victories on the Western Front. (Wiki also says he struck up postwar friendships with British pilots, including Douglas Bader).
Pappenheimer.
Galland invited Bader to his airfield shortly after he was shot down over France and captured, and even let him sit in the cockpit of an Me 109. Bader cheekily asked if he could 'take it up for a circuit', but it was regretfully pointed out he would need to be rated for that to happen (plus one of his guards had a gun trained on him throughout)
Judging by all the explosions, we were never close to an agreement with Iran.
Now why would Trump lie about such a thing?
Maybe so he could put out false statements that let him manipulate the oil and stock markets, and place short and buy orders just before theses announcements.
So this is capitalism in its final purified form.
People are literally being killed to generate profits.
Be that as it may, a spiking price of oil is now a good thing as it destroys the value of oil by forcing people to switch to cheap synthetic alternatives, such as EVs and balcony solar panels.
Something similar happened to rubber prior to WW2. The British, whose empire controlled the Malaysian rubber plantations, raised the price of rubber because they had at the time an effective monopoly on rubber.
The rest of the world replaced it with synthetic rubber made in the lab.
The Saudis, who absorbed this lesson, will do anything to prevent oil going north of $150 a barrel. Back in the early 70s, Saudi Arabia prevented OPEC from raising the price of oil too much, flooding the market by increasing their production from 8 mbls to 11 mbls overnight. The Shah of Iran, who was massively in debt due to his modernization programs paid for by oil revenues, saw his economy collapse and was overthrown 3 years later.
Unfortunately for the Saudis, thanks to Trumps idiotic war crime of attacking Iran, pricing decisions are now out of their hands.
The entire fascinating story can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L5buspfCNY
The Rubber Lesson: They Can't Let Oil Hit $200
So what does a post-oil world look like?
Geopolitically, it's a world where EVs charged by cheap balcony solar panels have replaced traditional internal combustion engines and Texas is the new West Virginia..
(Cheap balcony solar will radically transform the energy industry for the same reason cheap drones have radically transformed warfare - they decentralize power from a few big corporations and government to millions of ordinary ordinary people. The mighty American nuclear aircraft carriers have had to redeploy from the Straits of Hormuz to the gulf of Oman to be out of range for cheap drones made in some Iranian's garage, otherwise they'd be sitting sucks. Putin's massed tank columns, Black Sea fleet and air force have been decimated by cheap drones launched from Iranian pick up trucks. Putin has had to fill the ranks of the Russian army with North Koreans sent to him by his buddy Kim.)
Also, the Persian Gulf and OPEC won't mean shit. Neither will the Russian oil oligarchs and Putin's regime. These heavily in debt regimes will fall like the Shah's.
All of those oil and gas fields, pipelines and takers, storage tanks and refineries become worthless "stranded assets".
"Replacing oil with electric vehicles (EVs) could strand an estimated $1.4 trillion to over $3 trillion in global upstream oil and gas assets, including infrastructure like pipelines and refineries. This massive devaluation stems from projected drops in demand that render existing reserves and facilities unprofitable before their expected economic life. The transition causes rapid devaluation of high-depreciation assets like refineries (estimated depreciation of \(\delta = 9.47\%\) per year) and oil extraction infrastructure (\(\delta = 8.23\%\))" - London School of Economics
So in about ten years after the switch to electrics and renewables, the oil industry collapses like the original whale oil industry.
Now here is the fun part.
Roughly 40% of all bulk shipping by ton (and over 50% by the dollar) globally is dedicated to transporting fossil fuels. This significant portion of maritime trade involves moving fossil fuels across the ocean. No other commodity or product matters, nothing else comes close.
Navies exist to protect shipping lanes from threats to commerce, be they the Ottomans at Lepanto, the Spanish Armada, the Dutch East India company, Barbary slavers, the Japanese imperial navy, German U-boats or Somali pirates.
It's why the US Navy, the greatest military force in history, exists in the first place. It's the linchpin of the American Empire. As Peter Zeihan points out, America basically bribed an alliance together after WW2 by offering to police the world's oceans. Before that, each colonial empire was its own economic and trade system. America replaced that system with globalization protected by the USN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT33ITqCziQ
We're Witnessing Soviet-Scale Collapse of National Power
But as the bankrupted British found out after they lost there colonies, there isn't much point in having a mighty navy if you don't have an overseas empire.
And without oil, there is no American empire to defend.
Without oil shipping to defend and protect, why do we need a global navy?
And without oil money, how can you poison democracy with bribery made legal by Citizens United?
So you see, there are a lot of vested interests who need to keep the current oil based economic system.
Which is why oil companies pump out anti-renewable propaganda and climate change denial using the same tactics perfected by the tobacco companies back in the 60s when they denied that smoking caused cancer.
And gullible idiots continue to believe this crap, stupidly believing that Al Gore has more skin in the game than an Exxon CEO.
As far as I'm concerned, the death of oil can't come soon enough.
So thank you, President Trump.
Oh, and a post-oil world won't be dying from global warming.
That's a good thing too.
Yes, to be fair, there were times when the Vatican actually incubated science in a very barbaric world.
If not for the moon acting like an anchor, the gravitational pull of other planets (especially Jupiter) would cause the earth to wobble extremely leading to rapid climate changes and making the evolution of advanced life on Earth difficult or impossible.
The moon is so large relative to Earth that we are basically a double planet system and incredibly rare configuration caused by the impact of a Mars sized proto planet (nick named Theia) early in Earth's formation that hit at just the right angle and force to spew massive amounts of material into orbit and eventually forming the moon.
Its one of those "Rare Earth" characteristics that indicate that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fermit+paradox+rare+earth+theia+
I'm sure the real reason MAGAs love Trump is because he has brought a new level of dignity to the office.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ufc-white-house-trump-summer-construction-b2983302.html
Construction work has started at the White House for the UFC ring to celebrate Trump’s birthday
A massive stage is being built on the White House South Lawn for UFC fighters to compete in six bouts on June 14
Blood sports on the White House lawn.
We now have Caligula as president.
Their love of Trump tells you all you need to know about MAGA's character.
Or lack thereof.
Sarah Paine is one of the most sensible humans alive, when it comes to geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpElUf-A4Xc
When Trump said he'd runt he government like a business, this is what he was thinking of.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/26/federal-workers-ndas
The White House is starting a program to make every Federal employee sign an NDA, ostensibly to cut down on leaking to media.
Trump does not want even his captive media to be able to report on what he is doing outside of stenography of his press releases.
Among my 35 Newer Deal proposals is a gradual banning of NDAs that last for more than 5 years and/or would stifle whistle-blowing.
Can the government even legally require NDAs? First Amendment and all.
Granted, Trump's gonna Trump, but there may be ways to push back.
Trump is deliberately enshittifying the place.
That thunderdome structure where aliens shall do hunger gaming for green cards? It will be repurposed as another Arc de Trump.
Afterward, the lawn will probably be replaced by astroturf
Speaking of push back, I know the Virginia Court moved quickly to conspicuously nix the only Democrat attempt to redo electoral boundaries after the VRA take-down.
Well... now both Alabama *and* South Carolina have done the same thing.
Larry,
There is some wiggle room. Demanding them from the civilian staff is problematic unless the protected information has to be controlled for the proper functioning of government, but they don't have to get them to sign anything. Just impose a CUI type of label on everything so it has to go through a public release process. That collides with FOIA laws, though, which have VERY tight rules (on paper) about what may be kept from the public.
For contractors (like me) there is a bit more wiggle room for the feds. Not only does government have to function, but the contracting process must also be fair. (Yah, yah... on paper). If I go blab exactly how things work to certain people I give them an unfair advantage on future bids. If I'm doing the work and my own employer knows the details (how could they not), it isn't unfair in that sense and I didn't cause it by talking.
The main use for NDA's among DoD contractors is so we don't talk about each OTHER and to each OTHER as that risks proprietary information, trade secrets, and fair bidding processes. Some of that applies to the civilian staff, but they are already covered by other things... like their oaths.
I love the distinction she makes elsewhere between a Maritime Order and a Continental Power. She's got material out there on the Naval War College channel that lays out what constitutes sound strategic thinking for each type. It's long content, but it and some other bits from her employer lay out where the island hopping strategy used by the US in WWII came from and WHY the plans were already (mostly) drawn up before we entered the war.
We have that over here the other way round- violation of business secrets is a crimes that can bring you up to five years in prison in some cases.
There are exemptions for matters of public interest, and in cases of abuses, the abusing party looses the protective status and must pay for the legal expenses of the opposing side.
The violation of public service secrets is persecuted separately.
The REH needs to die. It is a bunch of fallacies wrapped in one big overlying fallacy. Some good ideas / points, but mostly not.
Trump is deliberately enshittifying the place.
It is as if he had a list of things, symbols that gave American democracy meaning and dignity and purposefully destroys them.
If the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution goes missing in the near future and used as toilet paper in the White House, transferred to Mar a Lago or sold at an auction to the highest bidder, I would not be surprised
REH --???
REH = Rare Earth Hypothesis
GenAI, the REH (and SETI in general), war games, and economic models could all learn from the turkey lesson:
The turkey infers ever more strongly that the farmer loves it.
It's absolutely certain of this on Thanksgiving Eve.
Bayesian thinkers (like myself) must always keep Cromwell's Rule in mind.
Care to explain?
scidata,
And also, sort of like that saying, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy," I'd like to add something like, "No strongly held mass of interdependent speculations survives contact with reality." Especially when it is fallacy-ridden speculations based on a sample size of one and essentially no ability to search the relevant sample space.
And double especially when iffy predictions are used to stoke fear and preemptive obedience as AI bros do all day every day.
Wildly off topic but very funny to me - a CIA officer is being investigated for his $40+ million collection of gold bars he had stashed at his house.
Apparently the gent had been in charge of bribing some foreign nationals, a perfectly normal CIA activity, but stored AT HIS HOUSE?.
I'm sure he fits in well with the current administration and that his pardon will be forthcoming as soon as a few gold bars change hands.
Pappenheimer
"No strongly held mass of interdependent speculations survives contact with reality."
That's what Orwell meant about running into hard reality, often on a battlefield.
Darrell E
There aretwo parts to the Rare Earth Hypothesis
(1) How "special" is our planet?
The more we study the earth's history the more we can see just how very many singular events had to take place to produce our earth
Our Earth is almost certainly very very rare
(2) How "like" Earth does a planet have to be to support "complex life"?
The book is more open on that question but the fact that while simple life appeared very early it took an entire planet of life evolving away for 2 Billion years to produce "complex life" suggests that it was not an easy or inevitable step
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/May28-4.html
There is no state governor who hates Trump more than Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). And between that hatred and his 2028 presidential ambitions, Newsom has been looking for a way to fight back . Now, he has come up with an idea (which he actually stole from a legislator in New York). That idea is that any state resident who receives a payout from the [Trump's $1.776 Billion slush] fund will be taxed at a very high rate on that money. That rate will be... 100%. A bill proposing this plan is likely to secure passage in both California and New York, and the legislature in New Jersey is teeing up a vote as well. Expect other blue states to follow suit.
Heh.
Can anyone tell me why sometimes I can up-flick-away an app on my iPhone and other times the dam window-thing just bounces and stays and refuses to leave until I up-flick it maybe TEN times?
WHY that torment? And no, the app isn't doing anything when it happens. Agh.
I really hate these slab of $$%##! glass. Go read a book!
And, speaking of speculations that do not survive contact with reality, I'm unsurprised that no one here noticed our fine host's humble-brag about being equal parts MAGICIAN who creates INCANTATIONS that unreel in readers' heads to create vast, subjective thought experiments and an objective & historically cogent scientific observer, the problem being that the two roles are largely antithetical, as the so-called 'magician' creates wordspells that deliberately distort the subject's perception of reality & the objective scientist strives to clarify reality by observation.
This distinction between the deliberate distortion of perceptual reality & the objective scientist's attempt to perceive undistorted reality is simultaneously Science Fiction's greatest strength & greatest weakness, as this is a net strength when SciFi is used to address objectively unpleasant reality via a fictional setting, but a net weakness when the same genre is used to distort objective reality via deliberate perceptual manipulation.
In Samual R Delany's "Dhalgren", the author plays to SciFi's greatest strength by exploring the unpleasant immutable realities of identity, race, gender & sexual aberrancy in a post-apocalyptic fictional setting, all in order to reveal important truths in an enlightened & non-threatening manner.
Notice also how the above author resisted the urge to propagate lies & falsehoods about the immutable reality of the above topics. At no time, did he attempt to alter his (our) underlying reality by redefining identity as 'mutable', race as 'arbitrary', gender as 'fictional' & sexual aberrancy as 'normal'.
Even with the best of intentions, the use of Word Magic is a slippery slope that can easily degenerate into outright delusion, especially when certain hopeful individuals mistake an alteration of one's perceptions for an alteration of objective reality which (by definition) is inalterable & immutable.
Despite our perceptual filters, Reality Abides, in the same way that chanting 'I am a fish' will not save a drowning man.
Best
Well, setting aside his usual tendentious idiocy, L does ask a good question whether one can be both a scientist and an artist without each polluting the other. Answer: I have known some of the greatest modern scientists and almost all had artistic sidelines. They can tell the difference. So can I.
CALL to past readers of EARTH! I am working with others to concoct a video trailer for this Hugo runner-up that's called one of top ten predictive novels on almost every list. And that is a love-ode to our world, may she thrive. See the gorgeous video trailer for EXISTENCE! Except this one needs to be 'optimistic.'
What I need is to choose a bunch of 5 second or so snippets that might weave together into a trailer that's both enticing and suspenseful and a bit of a stopry in itself. So if any particular scene or bit of dialogue sticks in your memory, do speak up! Thanks.
"...any particular scene or bit of dialogue ...
Maybe the obvious one for a dramatic trailer moment--Alex fending off the grazer attacks from the rouge oligarch sites.
A quick hit of the Mississippi River breaking through (quick enough to avoid being a spoiler)
Dialogue--something from the scene where the old gremper regales the three Indiana youths with tales of the Helvetian War ("Even if it was bull semen, it was great bull semen!")
duncan cairncross said...
"Darrell E
There are two parts to the Rare Earth Hypothesis
(1) How "special" is our planet?
The more we study the earth's history the more we can see just how very many singular events had to take place to produce our earth
Our Earth is almost certainly very very rare"
I think that is trivially true and unimportant. Everything that exists has a unique history with singular events that shaped it. Saying that Earth's history was necessary for it to be what it is today? True, but no great insight. Speculating from there that Earth's history, or something very much like it, is necessary for life, even just for intelligent life? That makes no sense, at all. Add that as our knowledge has increased so to has evidence that life happens quite readily. That's not a sure conclusion, but that is definitely the way the evidence leans.
"(2) How "like" Earth does a planet have to be to support "complex life"?
The book is more open on that question but the fact that while simple life appeared very early it took an entire planet of life evolving away for 2 Billion years to produce "complex life" suggests that it was not an easy or inevitable step."
Why? What's 2 billion years in the life of the Universe and uncountable stars? With a mere sample of one how do you know that how it happened on Earth took an average amount of time, took a long time, or happened quickly, or never happened anywhere else in the entire universe? To date there is no good reason to have any assurance about speculations on any of those questions, because we have only one example that we have been able to study and we don't even have the capability of studying planets of even our closest stellar neighbors. Yet.
If Earth were where Epsilon Eridani b is, we would likely not be able to detect that there is a life covered Earth like planet around Sol. Perhaps in another decade or three we will be able to get some useful data from nearby systems. But the search space that needs to be searched, and to a certain degree of fidelity, in order to give any serious weight to any such speculations is huge.
The Ra-Sun worshipping young punks explaining why they worship through tanning.
A weak Rare Earth Hypothesis seems very likely, in that complex life took a while to start here and Sapience just once, after 4.5 billion. But the latter is a different factor in the Drake equation.
The Strong REH is likely bull. I am a Life (TM) extremist in that I promote a theory of which I am the last living developer, that no one else anywhere seems to mention. That 100 billion COMETS in the early solar system had molten interiors offering more energized liquid water in the early solar system than 100 earths. Life is probably more common in the universe than actual dirt.
Complex life I'd'a thought would come faster than the 3 billionth year and that's a truly worrisome implied bottleneck though it pre-forgives us, if we expand into a galaxy of algae worlds.
PRE sapience is so common right now -elephants, chimps, crows etc - that I have to think Spielberg was right about veloceraptors and that level did them no good when the universe smacked em. (as perhaps ours is useless vs. the aliens' STOOPID-RAY shining down on Trumpists and so many others bent on human extinction.)
My #1 Fermi is the rarity of sapience capable of space travel and AI and complex abstractions. My #2 is the pervasive toxicity of male reproductive strategies which in our case led to feudal darkness for 6000 years. And Thiel and Trump etc.
I'll see your rarity of sapience and raise you water worlds, worlds within sufficient oxygen, lacking in industrial metals or fossil fuels.
Intelligent life in the galaxy may exist on water worlds in the forms of philosopher cephalopods and and poet cetaceans.
None of which can develop industry or technology because they can never have fire.
Neither can those land based intelligent species whose oxygen levels are too low for fire or lack the fossil fuels needed to start an industrial stage of development.
We truly hit the lottery.
"How "like" Earth does a planet have to be to support "complex life"?
Here is a great example of a hypothetical planet named Hestia which is far superior to Earth in the development of life and has the potential for a world with multiple sapient species.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qQW4LTWgtc&t=166s
The strong REH is likely the kind of BS that comes out of minds who want to think themselves special or unique. Not really science as far as I'm concerned.
The weak REH seems possible, but I'm not as bothered by the delay as I once was. A snowball Earth would favor life with slower metabolic rates which as a side effect would slow the rate of evolution. Our Sun WAS dimmer back then... by quite a bit. Lots of CO2 in the atmosphere was needed to hedge against that and what came to be... but a surface life form that consumed that hedge.
I suspect if the Earth were a little closer we'd have produced eukaryotic life sooner... but that we'd all be dead by now because the sun became more luminous. I suspect roofed worlds will eventually be understood as something akin to stasis chambers. Life doesn't stop, though. It slows instead.
My #1 Fermi suspicion involved social phase changes. We won't be what we are now for long. Maybe we wind up extinct. Maybe not. Change is happening fast, though, and what it means to be what we are now might change too.
The trouble with "roofed worlds" is that life would exist at vulcanic vents - but not across most of the planet
That would potentially increase the 2 Billion years to complex life as there would be less life busy evolving
In our solar system the sun would then become the limiting factor
Something in the South African habitat. Maybe the confrontation with the baboon tribe?
If it could be done without spoiling too much, then either the Atlantis or the habitat taking off into space, or the Atlantis rescuing the habitat.
"My #1 Fermi is the rarity of sapience capable of space travel and AI and complex abstractions. "
Maybe interstellar travel is just too complicated and pointless for a planet-bound species to bother with. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut points out the absurdity of big bags of water believing we are suited for space travel. If any life forms are so suited, it would be germs and single-cell organisms.
Now if there were giant intelligent gas clouds in space to begin with, like your (I think they were called) Zang...
If the roof is thick, I think you are mostly right.
Snowball Earth might not have had a solid roof let alone a thick one.
The underlying point I'm making is that the 'boring billion' years in our history might not have been boring to the locals. They might have faced a constraint we don't face today leaving us thinking that little happened.
My suspicion is that eukaryotic life is highly likely over sufficiently long time spans. What 'sufficient' means, though, depends on the metabolic rates of those involved. By the time our Cambrian era started, many precursor events had already happened.
Heh. Big bags of water make better macro-engineers than do microbes.
The better observation (I think) is that big bags of water do particular well where the energy gradients are in a particular range. We can engineer for other gradients, but we will likely do so in order to bridge gaps between refugia. Human migrations across Terra can be viewed this way up until we've got enough people at.a location to engineer that space to change the gradients.
Hmm... tricky.
While there's certainly plenty of spectacular scenes, and the end message is optimistic, the actual content is decidedly less so.
I have mused on trailers for this over the years, wondering how you could effectively convey flavour of the VR people are using (something better than the current AI slop could be considered optimistic!?)As a theme, you might consider sticking with the book's 'layers' with snippets involving each.
some possible shots:
- A long zoom back over the increasingly flooded streets of a coastal city that merges into a flotilla of Sea Nation (not unlike this 2004 trailer for Troy)
- That underwater scene where divers and various sea life watch, bemused, as a strange glow emanates from the sea bed.
- a cut shot punctuating other scenes, showing what looks like a virtual planet spiralling helplessly off into the void. Coming into focus behind it, the jaws of a huge reptilean creature slowly open to receive it. Just as they are about to close, a blur of orange, black and white body slam them sideways (cut to title).
A suggested tag line (from Alex, I think you'll know what scene it refers to) "What happened wasn't our fault: but what happens next may be."
"With deep time, the improbable becomes probable; even inevitable", or so the libretto from 'Origins' goes.
Even so, I agree that the time taken for the emergence of eukaryotic life has flashing neon 'filter' signs on it.
I don't believe it, but the discovery of a mechanism similar to the one that shuts out sperm cells from the ovum once one has got in would make for a very interesting thought experiment.
"The strong REH is likely the kind of BS that comes out of minds who want to think themselves special or unique. Not really science as far as I'm concerned."
Sorry, but I have to disagree. If the strong REH was not true there would be no Fermi Paradox n the first place.
If even one alien civilization capable of traveling to the stars existed, they would already be here.
It's remarkably easy to explore and colonize a galaxy.
Even at sub-light speed, mankind could spread across the galaxy like a virus in a relatively short period of time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WtgmT5CYU8
Each probe settles a colony at the next star and builds 2 (or 10 or 100) copies of itself and sends them to the next nearest stars, and so on and so on, expanding exponentially. Each probe being a life bearing package of frozen embryos and seed of every animal and plant on Earth, modified as needed for the local system.
Armed with advanced AI and terraforming techniques, each probe colony can terraform all the planets of the system, build Dyson swarms for energy, create vast artificial Bishop Ring worlds with surface areas the size of continents, etc.
It takes only 38 doublings to send a colony probe to every star in the galaxy. Granted this is complicated by the geography of the galaxy with its spiral arms and vast voids between the spiral arms.
But even traveling below the speed of light (10% of c maybe) its would not take much longer than 10,000 years on average to travel to a nearby star system, colonize/terraform/construct a new colony, construct two more probes with embryos, and send them on their way.
That's less than 500,000 years to completely colonize the galaxy.
A blink of eye.
So to quote Fermi, "Where are they?"
That’s the wonderful thing about doubling. Take one probe and double it only 19 times and you have over a million probes spreading throughout the galaxy. Once established, a system of colonies can create a communication network exchanging the only commodities that can be transported economically over interstellar distances: information and knowledge.
By using this hybrid embryo/machine Von Neumann self replicating probe (SRP) approach our species could colonize the entire galaxy in a very short period of time:
http://io9.com/it-s-easier-for...
"And based on the sophistication or purpose of the probe, it could establish colonies on suitable planets (either by spawning biological organisms or robots imbued with either AI or uploaded minds). More simply, an SRP could spawn Bracewell communication probes, which could make contact with a resident (or future) alien civilization."
Once its mission is complete, it would spawn daughter versions of itself, which would be sent towards the nearest star systems. Lather, rinse, repeat.
"And indeed, the power of the SRP lies in its ability to replicate at an exponential rate. The initial rate of exploration would be slow, but after producing potentially millions upon millions of offspring, the rate of expansion would increase by an order of magnitude. So even at a speed of about a tenth the speed of light, these probes could cover a huge amount of territory in a relatively short amount of time from a cosmological perspective.... The researchers put this model to test by using a computer simulation. What they discovered was that, by using this technique, an alien civilization could send probes traveling no faster than 10% the speed of light to every single solar system in the galaxy in only 10 million years. Which is incredible — that’s an amount of time that’s significantly less than the age of the Earth."
" Each probe being a life bearing package of frozen embryos and seed of every animal and plant on Earth"
That's assuming that terran lifeforms can thrive in a different ecosystem. For example, don't at least some birds and butterflies rely on the earth's magnetic field for navigation? And how would pollinating plants be handled? How to grow the plants and bees from embryos so as to mature them at exactly the time they need each other?
I'm not arguing that each and every individual roadblock might not have a solution available. But am I the only one asking why any intelligent civilization would want to commit itself to such an endeavor over a period of tens or hundreds of millennia? Has the one sapient race we know about--ourselves--ever committed ourselves to a particular project for 10,000 years--which would only be the initial phase of the project you describe?
Again, I'm not saying it's impossible that a particular species might try such a thing. I'm saying it's not nearly as inevitable a consequence of intelligence as everyone here seems to think.
100,000 bacteria are chatting in a petri dish. They reach the consensus that they are alone in their universe because they are unable to detect any others.
"100,000 bacteria are chatting in a petri dish. ..."
Dave Sim once used the metaphor of an ant climbing to the top of one of California's giant redwoods, believing he had traversed "the known universe".
BTW, we also seem to assume that any intelligent species would develop radio and computers. Would planets conducive to the evolution of humanoid life also have metals, semiconductors, and proper insulators available?
"Big bags of water make better macro-engineers than do microbes."
Yes, there's a kind of perverse Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work. A species (apparently) can't be good at both enduring space travel and inventing space travel. Except, maybe AI-driven robots.
"Has the one sapient race we know about--ourselves--ever committed ourselves to a particular project for 10,000 years--which would only be the initial phase of the project you describe?"
The pyramids, great Wall and the Gothic cathedrals all took multiple lifetimes to complete. And they were just working in stone.
Frozen embryos have no consensus. Is that unfair? Yep. But then none of us gets to choose where we are born.
"The pyramids, great Wall and the Gothic cathedrals all took multiple lifetimes to complete."
Hundreds of years, sure. Still, all part of the same civilization that began them.
We don't even have an advanced society that has lasted 10,000 years yet. The Bible isn't even 10,000 years old.
"Frozen embryos have no consensus."
I still wonder what an advanced species would see as the point of sending embryos across the galaxy when there would hardly be any communication or commerce with those far-flung explorers. Again, not saying it can't happen, but it hardly seems to me to be a thing which every advanced civilization would eventually engage in. Where "We don't see galaxy-wide colonization" implies "No other intelligence."
"Where "We don't see galaxy-wide colonization" implies "No other intelligence.""
Given a relatively short period of time (less than a million years), we only need one species with the technical ability and the motivation to colonize the entire galaxy.
As Fermi asked, "Where are they?"
In his "House of Suns", Alastair Reynolds' described a galaxy wide civilization without FTL. Three technologies made this possible: near immortality via advanced medical techniques, ships that travelled at near light speed to provide time dilation, and long term stasis hibernation allowing a crew to await late arrivals who may have been delayed a century or two.
If you can't go faster, the next best thing is to modify your sense of time.
In discussing galactic colonization remember: "It's the exceptions that matter." If in the year 2345 an eccentric trillionaire says "WTF I think I'll send embryos with robot caretakers who will get the new civilization to worship my memory!" then the question shift from 'who would do that?' to "who will stop him?"
Larry,
I don't know how much you would think this qualifies, but the humans who left Africa did kind of commit themselves to a colonization path that spanned far more than 10Ky. I'd argue that our inclination to leave one place and populate another is built into us in such a way that most people stay home and a fraction depart. Many species do this, so its not unique to humans.
If you can't imagine embarking on a colony ship or sending frozen future offspring, you might be among the large fraction who would choose to stay.
Celt,
Yes. I know how to do that math. I used to teach it to my astronomy students when we got to the subject of Fermi's paradox. I liked to contrast the probe strategy with Drake's equation to show just how much we did NOT know even about the range of what is possible.
Heh. Well... not in their native form anyway. There is no reason we couldn't build artificial humans, raise them as children, and then wave from the pier as they go wherever their 'hearts' take them.
Energy gradient magnitudes matter a lot in saying which chemistry methods work as parasitic catalyzing agents. We feed on a gradient, so any 'children' we send to other gradients must adapt to it.
The galaxy is a big place. Far bigger than most Terrans can grasp. If a thing can happen out there... there is a good chance it has.
One of the things I loved about our host's Uplift series is that he answered questions like "how did that happen" with "every way possible".
One possibility is that we are late comers.
Another possibility is that we are early.
I don't really care which is true... because my biology urges me to expand our biosphere. That means lifting Gaia... not some minuscule piece of her.
"but the humans who left Africa did kind of commit themselves to a colonization path that spanned far more than 10Ky."
Maybe, but they didn't do so with intent. They just moved, with the feet God gave them and with tools like boats that they were able to build from raw materials. The colonization of the world eventually happened as a consequence, but no one back then said, "Lets spread our seed to other continents," and then designed and built a whole system dedicated to bringing that about.
"If you can't imagine embarking on a colony ship or sending frozen future offspring, ..."
Y'all misunderstand my point. It's not that I can't imagine it. I even concede the possibility that eventually some species may try it--even our species. What I don't understand is how y'all think it so inevitable that you're dumfounded by the fact that you see no evidence of it having happened already. Or maybe that you conclude from the fact that you see no such evidence that we are alone in the universe. That logic dictates that if we're NOT alone in the universe, then such a thing would have happened already.
To me, the fact that we see no such evidence simply meets my expectation. I don't claim to know whether we're alone in the universe or not, any more than I claim to know whether God exists or not. But I can imagine that we're not alone but the others are so few and far between that we are space-wise separated from them. Or that their forms and technology are so different from our expectations that we wouldn't recognize them if they slapped us on the ass. Or just that they evolved without metal, or without silicone, or without eyes, and so never invented electronics or radio or never saw the sky. I can come up with zillions of ways another intelligence might exist without us ever encountering each other.
"As Fermi asked, "Where are they?""
You tell me. Because you're the one who feels cognitive dissonance at the fact that there's been no answer to that question. I can sleep well at night ("on satin sheets with many beautiful ladies" ).
Larry,
I'm more likely on your side of this than Celt's. I suspect a number of the elements in Drake's equation are of probability ~100%, but since no one is knocking on the door announcing themselves to us, I turn back to Drake's terms and ask what we missed.
Stars with habitable planets seems near certain... but that says nothing about the availability of phosphorus or how long those worlds remain hospitable. There are scads of other terms for which we can ponder probabilities, so the available evidence doesn't bother me.
In our host's journal papers on this topic, he looked at a range of possible explanations and also addressed other terms that could be included in our estimates. It's an interesting subject area for which we now have better estimates of constraints. For example, our models for neutron star collisions have improved and those events have a lot to say about the abundance of heavy metals.
No one should be thinking we have it figured out yet. I suspect strong REH is wrong mostly because it's too convenient as a just-so story. Those haven't faired well as science progresses through the centuries. Eliminating it doesn't say much, though, about all the other possibilities.
Ultimately, I think we've barely begun to collect evidence. If any probes have been to the solar system for any reason at all, Earth is a terrible place to look for evidence. It might be here, but the signal is likely difficult to distinguish from other notions. So... I'd search the asteroid belt where a proto-planet managed to differentiate a lot of material before being broken up again. Probes designed to self-propagate would mine the fragments. That should be a no-brainer.
He knows he can't wait till November and that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. No matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Putin has on John Roberts, Roberts knows supporting martial law on such a slim excuse would be the end of him, unless...
... unless there truly IS an 'emergency.' One that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. A super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. No matter who they blame for it -- (see DESIGNATED SURVIVOR) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting "Reichstag Fire!" And we'll have recourses.*
When? The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater. But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can purge the 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. https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2022/02/ukraine-is-iceberg-tip-and-deeper.html
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."
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.
"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."
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 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. And check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October! And make sure that MAGAs understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.
"I fear that we have roused a sleeping giant... and filled them with a terrible resolve."
The difference between xenobiology and theology is that xenobiology has an observable sample size of one (Earth) and theology has an observable sample size of zero.
Are we certain that simple life on Earth originated from a single biogenesis (eg panspermia) or abiogenesis (eg pond of goo) event and then spread out across the entire planet? Or did life spring up in multiple unconnected events? Same question for complex life (with possibly a different answer).
Earth may offer a sample size > 1.
"... unless there truly IS an 'emergency.' One that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. A super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. No matter who they blame for it"
At this point, I don't think most Americans would believe that any "convenient" emergency--even if it was actually real--was Von Schitzenpantz's doing. Remember, even MAGA is beginning to suspect that the "assassination" attempt in Butler was staged. The Iran war was supposed to rally the population, and it's not doing that. I doubt a suspiciously-timed disaster on American soil would do so either.
The more likely result, which does also suck, is that the Jews would somehow be blamed.
" -- (see DESIGNATED SURVIVOR)"
I know this isn't what you meant, but a true Designated Survivor scenario might work in our favor as well as the Rapture would.
The downsides--and they are indeed significant--would be the collateral loss of Democratic congresspeople and liberal justices in attendance, plus the fact that the survivor would necessarily be a member of the DJT cabinet.
scidata, this is one of the smartest things I've heard you say. Thank you for it.
Theology arose from many things but certainly from seeing the well-fed sons of warlords and chiefs whose height/strength and training made them certainly demigods. And whose achievements were then exaggerated after death into legends.
Scidata: I don't buy it. I said an observable sample size of one. I observe one planet. You speculate several origin events. I am doing observational science; you are doing theoretical science at best, and maybe it's theology. If there were 10 attempts to start life on this planet, then I count each one as one-tenth.
Brin: I don't buy that either. The chief's strongman son couldn't fly, or throw lightning, or see the far future. The legends were never observations, just reports of reports. Besides, you and I can fly; we've ridden airplanes; are we demigods?
Given that xenobiology is at best fringe science, due to its observational poverty, then recondite paradoxes such as Fermi's lack support. What evidence do you have that our kind of life is the only one possible, let alone common? Ditto with our kind of technology. I know of no space-flight fantasies older than the 20th century; why consider it inevitable, or even likely?
One comment on this thread said that colonizing far star systems is easy. Oh really? Have you done so? This doesn't have even one data point. It's as pseudo-scientific as revivification after cold-sleep, or mummification.
Let's say your ship is flying at 99.9% lightspeed, to reduce travel times by a factor of 7. Then you hit a gain of dust of mass one microgram. E=Mc^2, with that factor of 7, gives you an explosion of about 150 tons of TNT.
Well.. there was Kepler... and Dante... and Lucian. But I count these as interplanetary flight. What early interstellar flight tales? Any ancient legends?
Someone please check my figures about the 150-ton-TNT blast. Directed down the axis of the ship. How many microgram dust particles per cubic meter are there in interstellar space? Divided into the ship's cross-section, times the distance to destination, equals how many collisions? Nanogram and picogram dust particles will do proportionately less damage, but there are more of them.
Do individual hydrogen atoms at near-light speed count as radiation?
Paradoctor: I am doing observational science
Yes, point taken. But observational science isn't as pure and objective as one might think. All those biases and assumptions pile up. Most stars are not single. Photons look like particles until you double slit them. Jumping spiders' intelligence is jarring. In frequentist statistics, hidden assumptions (eg randomness) can be confounding. LLMs look an awful lot like true intelligence (sometimes with tragic consequences). One can never be sure that they're observing what they think they're observing. Theology lurks in the weeds.
Re: microgram interstellar dust blasts
I've made this same point before. Going fast enough isn't the problem - surviving the trip intact is. I can't check the math (I'm a programmer, not a physicist).
..."but that says nothing about the availability of phosphorus or how long those worlds remain hospitable."
Another thing such world might be missing is sufficient previous life to make fossil fuels.
Ok, until very recently, gas here in the Chicago area has been going for over $5 a gallon, which is low compared to L.A., but historically high.
Yesterday, my wife filled her tank for $3.99, and while that was an outlier, I haven't seen a single station nearby that is charging over $4.80, and many considerably less.
Either someone setting these prices knows something about the Strait of Hormuz opening up soon, or they think they do. Am I wrong?
"Brin: I don't buy that either. The chief's strongman son couldn't fly, or throw lightning, or see the far future. The legends were never observations, just reports of reports. "
You've read 1984. Who controls the present controls the past. The inner party member (no spoiler) could float to the ceiling like a soap bubble as long as Winston believed it and no one else was around to say otherwise.
In if the post-mortem tales have the demigod exhibiting super-powers, as with Goliath or Samson of old, then that's the legend that survives. Especially if the audience wants to believe.
"Besides, you and I can fly; we've ridden airplanes; are we demigods?"
We can do it in a prosaic manner that anyone else who can afford a ticket is able to do as well. Flying in an airplane doesn't make you special. Flying the way Superman does is a different thing.
onward
onward
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