Re-Evaluating All We Know?

First an announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  

Our can-do, problem-solving zeal may save humanity and light up the galaxy. Yet, talk of “tech-transcendence” inspires some – and worries others. What can we learn from the past about our future? This will be a stupendous conference. Sign up to attend!

== Can Science Re-Evaluate? ==

The physics world is buzzing over the recent faster than light particle result from CERN - one of those science stories that gets a lot of public press. Apparently, some neutrinos emitted by the great accelerator in the Alps are showing up in an Italian detector a nanosecond or so earlier than relativity ought to allow.

If the result is verified it will prove a major milestone. Among possible explanations might be that super-energetic neutrinos are bumped (very briefly) out of the four dimensional "brane" we call spacetime. (Envision separated membranes like soap bubbles; one film is our universe.) Hauled back in by gravity (the only force that carries between branes), they re-enter our world a bit farther along their old trajectory. Enough (some suggest) to explain the apparent cheating of ol' Einstein. No, I ain't pulling your leg. There are brainy guys who ponder such stuff. And if this, or some other exotic explanation, pans out then we're in for interesting times!

But dig it, please -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary (and reproducible) evidence. One of the great things about our civilization is we get to see scientists constantly checking, re-checking and poking at whatever Standard Model reigns in their field.  In my life, nearly all of these re-checks have resulted in only minor re-adjustments -- with the exception of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy findings. (Even if they are disproved, it will only be by something else stunning.) Others, like Cold Fusion, caused yearlong investigations and Re-Evaluations of All We Know (REAWK!) but with negative results.

I find it all healthy and look forward to seeing this very competitive truth-finding process apply to the new CERN "FTL" results.  Still, it worries me that many in the press and public take a very unhealthy attitude - that re-appraisal in a branch of science somehow means it had been "all wrong" before.  Some take it as revelation that science is waffling or poorly based... instead of proof of the very opposite.  Others yearn for an upset apple-cart! They see any sign of a re-proved Standard Model as evidence of stodginess or oppression by Old Professors Incapable of Seeing the New (OPISN).

To be clear, I have known plenty of OPISNs! But the incredibly competitive nature of science (Adam Smith would be proud) generally makes them targets of the next wave of bright young guns.

Look, given our heritage as a superstitious species that danced to incantations by campfires, it should be no surprise that many of our neighbors are emotionally out of tune with science, or don't see how its competitive process results in ever-improving models of the world. Models that keep getting better, even when some part of them is shown to have been incomplete, or even wrong. That is how they improve. (Duh?) The ultimate market.

It is only human to perceive a process that you do not understand and judge it by the way your own mind thinks.  But racism was also deeply human. And feudalism. So come. Start by repeating this aloud: "It can be fun to re-evaluate all that I know! Heck, I might even learn something."

There. Don't you feel more scientific already?  Now to make that same spirit work in politics....

Oh... while I'm at it... here’s another paradigm-changing update: Could Dark Energy and even Guth’s “inflation” be overly contrived theories for something more easily explained? By the existence of hyper-long gravitational waves -- left over from the Big Bang?  These might elucidate the recently discovered preferential direction in the cosmos - the so-called “axis of evil.” Plus the revelation that distant-most galaxies seem to be accelerating their velocity of recession from us (thus requiring dark energy to explain the hyper expansion).  The gravitational wave concept makes such cludges unnecessary. Maybe. This paper is certainly worth a read.

== Space Updates ==

Does our solar system exist inside a bubble? Astronomers say we're in a “local bubble” in the interstellar medium – perhaps a result of stellar explosions millions of years ago. (See my cosmological short story about... "Bubbles"!)

Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, depicted in foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. (Nearly every article has compared it to Tatooine from Star Wars -- so I'll avoid that cliche! Oops too late.... dang Star Wars $%#$#$!)

Similarly cosmic! Anyone with a soul should find this breathtaking! Watch a Saturn fly-by video composed from high-resolution images from the Cassini Orbiter.

Scientists analyzing data from the Kepler spacecraft for exoplanets have encountered a problem: noisy stars! Before Kepler's launch, researchers had assumed that most Sun-like stars would be about as quiet as the Sun, with mild fluctuations in luminosity. Noise in the Kepler data is much larger - much of it variations in the stars themselves. Sunspots and magnetic activity are the most likely culprits – perhaps because about half of the sun-like stars in the Kepler field are younger than expected (Young stars spin faster, with more vigorous magnetic fields.) If this youthful bias is true of the entire Milky Way, it could alter our understanding of how stars are born and die.

Note also... if our sun is older than average, it might help explain the Fermi Paradox.

How would humans survive extended voyages in space? Five men cooped together over a year to simulate a Mars mission... apparently were going stir crazy! Yipe! (Well, look, several are Russian. Jeepers, did you ever read the book or watch the original film SOLARIS? All is explained.)

See the Solar System in action!  Stunning animation of planetary and satellite orbits – set to any date you choose.

== Life, the Universe and Everything ==


How Life arose on Earth, and How a Singularity might bring it down. This Scientific American article reporting about a recent biological conference is worth reading from top to bottom. Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll opened the meeting by commenting that “The purpose of life is ... to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” There  you go...

From another talk on the scaling of life: “An organism’s lifespan is proportional to the 1/4 power of its mass, its heart rate goes as the –1/4 power of its mass, so the total number of heart beats is independent of mass—a universal value of about a billion beats for all of us. Use them wisely.” (Except humans get three times that! We’re the Methuselahs of mammals. See my article "So You Want Immortality?")

An interesting and fair discussion of the possibility that dolphins have a sort of language and a sort of “intelligence.”  As a sort-of dolphinish guy, I actually have subtle and complex beliefs about this.  The folks I know who’ve worked with high cetaceans all tell me their impression: that the creatures seem to “wish they were smarter.” Subjective, but poignant and telling. (I’ll discuss dolphin “uplift” further in my next novel, EXISTENCE.)

== And a Few Updates ==

Being Human in the 21^st Century: Again I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  Come on, sign up!

Oh... I may announce an open fans-n-friends bar session in New York, stay tuned!

OTHER COMING EVENTS: 

I’ll be speaking at TEDx Brussells November 22: A Day in the Deep Future.

New Orleans! I'll be Author Guest of Honor at the Contraflow Science Fiction Convention the weekend of November 4-6.

Also attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego.

FANNISH ANNOUNCEMENTS:

One of my classic short stories “Bubbles” is in the latest issue of the fine online sci fi zine LIGHTSPEED!  And Harlan Ellison, my rambunctious pal, is doing an audio reading.  I’m honored.

A cool fan site showcasing my novels! Thanks to Susan O'Fearna.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous... or at least now for something completely different... David Brin playing the harmonica at the Reno World Science Fiction Convention (thanks to Lawrence Person.)

Cool Community-Interest Items...

All of the following seem worth following-up on, later, as members of the community perhaps report back later?

Dang! For the second time in as many months, archaeologists have discovered startling, anomalous discoveries of hitherto unknown, impressive civilizations. Last month, a gigantic pyramid in Bosnia, complete with passageways, that everyone had assumed to be a local mountain. (Someone alert us all when there’s more published.) And this month “Archaeologists discovered a pre-colonial astrological observatory possibly 2,000 years old in the Amazon basin near French Guiana.”

Google just announced a new service called Google Trends that I thought might be of interest... Anyone care to explore it and report back here under comments?

Fans of the singularity? Read up on the recent Singularity Summit at Stanford U... And report back here about whichever items struck you personally as new! New ideas, new approaches, etc. Help the rest of us track progress toward the apotheosis...  See also: http://www.downtheavenue.com/and: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3030and:

If you're anywhere near Stanford University on Memorial Day Weekend, you might be interested in this conference at the Stanford University Law School ($200 for registration, $150 for students).Some presentations that caught my eye include:

Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law

Christian Reflections on Radical Life Extension and Human Rights

Playing God: Theological Reflections on Genetic Enhancement

Cyborg Political Technologies: Citizenship, Democracy, Constitutions, and Bills of Rights

Feminists for Genetic Engineering

Anyone care to report on this after it happens?

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MIT Issues Call to Arms on Energy -- (Cnet -- May 3, 2006) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a preliminary report that calls for technology development and government policies to avert a "perfect storm" forming around energy. MIT's Energy Research Council report was the result of a year-long study. It concluded that industrialized nations need to accelerate a switch to cleaner and more efficient sources of fuel, a transition that could take 50 years.

The most realistic virtual reality room in the world -- More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room. That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with...

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online....

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The world is safer by Carl Robichaud Mother JonesMay 15, 2006 Commentary: Over the past dozen years, virtually every trend in global security has been positive -- dramatically so. Article created by the Century Foundation

Since 9/11 and the global war on terror, the world is a much more dangerous place. Right? Dead wrong, according to a recent in-depth study, which found that virtually every trend in global security in the past dozen years has been positive, and dramatically so. The world is today a safer place, according to the Human Security Report, a project funded by five nations and published by Oxford University Press. The study, which is the culmination of three years of research, offers a comprehensive look at the data on political violence from 1988–2005, and reaches some arresting conclusions:

Fewer armed conflicts. Armed conflicts declined by more than 40 percent since the early 1990s. During this period, fifteen more armed struggles for self-determination ended than started. Today there are fewer armed secessionist conflicts than at any point since 1976.

Less genocide. Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda , Bosnia , and Sudan, the number of genocides and “politicides” fell by 80 percent between the high point in 1988 and 2001.

Fewer international crises. The number of “international crises” declined by more than 70 percent between 1981 and 2001.

Fewer arms deals. International arms transfers, in real dollar values, fell by 33 percent between 1990 and 2003. This accompanied a sharp decline in total military expenditure and troop numbers as well.

Fewer refugees. The number of refugees dropped by some 45 percent between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end.

The longest peace between major powers. The period from World War II to today is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between great powers for hundreds of years.

The article goes on to discuss why these facts are ignored and who benefits from an ongoing state of drummed-up fear. But NONE of the explanations given by the authors seem at all as likely as the one I choose...

...that fear serves the purposes not only of political and protective and press castes, but of ALL ROMANTICS, who cannot cope with recognition that modernism and the enlightenment are working. In their loathing of the modernist agenda’s hubristic goal -- of gradual and relentlessly successful human self-improvement -- they engage in relentless acts of ritualistic re definition.

e.g. one guy wrote to me offline, recently, barging into my space to hector me about his “definition of left-right and the enlightenment.” It seems, that the left AND the enlightenment are both about “rigid predetermination” while the right (and presumably a comfy Protestant version of aristocratic feudalism) are all about freedom and self-determination. A speck of self-awareness, about how tendentious definitions that make one feel good ought to rouse skepticism? Nah. That kind of defining is the very core and essence of romanticism.

And do not believe for a moment that the “left” doesn’t do it too! Forever redefining things like racism and sexism and poverty, so that no array of accomplishments will ever be enough to warrant giving the people a brief pat on the back, an “attaboy” and “attagirl”... For having taken bigger (though still incomplete) strides toward equality and justice than all other generations put together.

THIS is why I rail against romantic dogmatists of all sides, even though only one group of fanatics presently holds all the power and is doing all the harm and poses the vastly greater threat to all of our lives and hopes... For the moment. Because I do not want us to EVER let this fall back down into that insipid horror of a linear “political metaphor,” ever again. To be a modernist is to be optimistic about the project for self-improvement. It means taking good news as encouragement, rather than something to be angrily rejected. (The finest way to tell a liberal from a lefty flake.)

It is time to spurn the canard that “moderate pragmatist reformers” who openly negotiate the full range of human solutions are therefor somehow bloodless, tepid sellouts! We need to be militantly moderate and angrily optimistic! Because we don’t have much time to get these big jobs finished, before a million kinds of awful shit hit the fan.

And yes, the neo-feudalists are the worst threat right now. They have wasted every single minute of the 21st Century (so far). But their allies abound, and in unexpected places.

Stand up. Be happy warriors. And fight.