More (high) Science weirdness... and more...

Before going into some science-y quirks, a couple of quick items?

1) In Britain guess what Brexit-opposers have chosen as their catchword? Yep, it's "Brin." See a fun and funny video of "Brin-ers" crossing Abbey Road. Always knew I'd get there! (Not the only "Brin-appropriation!" here's another!) “Come on without, come on within, you’ve not seen nuthin’ like the mighty…”

2) Again, if you want weapons to help you fight for civilization -- (and no less is at stake) -- across the coming 370 days, then fetch (cheap!) an e-copy of Polemical Judo, with 100+ tactics to counter the would-be destroyers of our Great Experiment. Arm yourselves! And ponder some fresh perspectives. (Oh, and arm-twist others!)

== Modern Problems ==

What about those supposed “sonic attacks” on US and Canadian diplomats in Havana and Beijing? Studies show that it’s very likely something traumatic did happen. And we need to resurrect Frederik Poh’ls prophetic novel about scurrilous, state-sponsored sabotage: The Cool War.

Speaking of threats… have you heard of warshipping? They attack a target network by shipping a cellular-enabled wifi cracker to a company's mail-room.

A phenomenon called “hikikomori” is defined by the Japanese Health Ministry as people who haven’t left their homes or interacted with others for at least six months. Of 541,000 people between 15 and 39 who fit that description, 34% have spent seven years or more in self-isolation. Another 29% have lived in reclusion for three to five years. As many as one million people, mostly young men in their 20s, were spending their days locked up in their bedrooms, reading manga (comic books), watching TV, or playing video games. They refused to work or go to school and often didn’t communicate with family members, let alone friends.

I wonder if this will wind up being connected somehow to (1) the male excess in some populations and (2) addiction.

Cautious optimism drawn from a piece of news that might – possibly – help us stave off water wars across the next five decades, and buy us time to get our act together. Scientists have discovered an enormous low-salinity aquifer off the U.S. East Coast. The researchers say it could indicate other such aquifers trapped beneath the salty seas in ocean sediments across the planet. Whether the ice age conditions that made this vast trove were repeated elsewhere, is unknown. But it could matter.

== Changing climate - and attitudes ==

Lending support to what I have proclaimed should be a top issue for the Resistance! "In a time of climate change denial and vaccine resistance, scientists worry they are losing public trust. But it's just the opposite, a survey released Friday finds. Public trust of scientists is growing. It's on a par with our trust of the military and far above trust of clergy, politicians and journalists . . . " The survey by the Pew Research Center finds 86% of those surveyed say they have a fair amount or a great deal of faith that scientists act in our best interests. And that's been trending higher."

I am not asking that we emphasize the mad right's war on science - and all fact professions - instead of their blatant tumble into racism, sexism and intolerance. I'm saying we can benefit by proclaiming the obvious, that the Putin Party has it in for minorities and science! Women and civil servants! Gays and journalists and teachers, doctors and the intelligence community and... yes... the US military officer corps. Get enough RASR republicans to face all these bigotries at once could jostle many of them into turning back toward the light.

And yes, meanwhile... roughly 197 billion tons of ice from Greenland melted into the Atlantic Ocean in July. That's about 36 percent more than scientists expect in an average year. Maintaining climate denialism requires war on science. Don't refuse allies. Embrace them.

Amid the politicization of science, we’ve seen sins on all sides. One controversial study – published in the flagship journal Science – asserted that there were systematic differences in the ways that conservatives and liberals respond to fear or threats or disgust. I’ve always deemed these conclusions to be premature. While yes, conservatives tend to exhibit much closer-in boundaries or horizons of in-group inclusion, I’ve found that many on the left are just as intensely judgmental and wrathful and/or disgusted. They just aim these emotions are different horizons.

Here is an article that casts doubt on both the earlier, simplistic conservative-liberal psychological difference study and the process by which a refutation article might be denied publication in the same journal. I don’t deem this to be a broad indictment of science. Just a very tentative cautionary tale.

== Steps toward Uplift ==

Steps toward uplift? “Transgenic rhesus monkeys carrying the human MCPH1 gene copies show human-like neoteny of brain development.” The transgenic monkeys exhibited better short-term memory and shorter reaction time compared with the wild-type controls. (And yes, it’s done in China. And that's just what's happening in public view.) 

A top researcher dives into the fascinating topic of elephant intelligence and communications: “A database of elephant recordings increasingly captures acoustic, visual and tactile signals, matched to behavioural observations. But elephants inhabit deeply different lifeworlds from humans, have different hierarchies of motivation, and make different perceptual discriminations. And, except in the crudest terms, we don’t know much about what elephants might want to say to one another.

The fascinating story of traumatized young male elephants killing rhinos - til a wise older male was brought in to teach them proper behavior - has vast implications for us, as well as pachyderms.

Late in this interesting survey, Prof. Ross suggests that the biggest obstacle to effective sapience on the part of elephants, corvids and toothed whales might be their inability to store information outside themselves. To build upon a lifetime of experience (say in a herd matriarch or some of our cave ancestors) in a critically expanding and accumulating way. We began doing this by extending human lifespans so elders might carry oral traditions even into their sixties. Then came writing and so on.

This leads to an intriguing possibility… that “uplift” of the smartest animal (“pre-sapient”) species might begin not with genetic meddling, but by simply offering sites for external memory storage. Say obelisks - perched along an elephant migratory path or in some shallow, dolphin-friendly bay - that record and playback correlated inputs from any who come to purposely engage. “If our deep-learning algorithms can crack the elephant communication code, and enable us to engage in conversation with them, perhaps we could create this means of storage, such that elephants are motivated to attend to it.”

A final note: Elephant-uplift was portrayed in fascinating ways in Lawrence Schoen’s novel Barsk - and its sequel, The Moons of Barsk. I portray modified/armored ‘elepents’ and mammuts working in space in my novella “The Logs” found in INSISTENCE OF VISION.

And there's this.... a seal learns to sing "Star Wars" theme song. And another does twinkle little star. Okay aliens, NOW are we worthy?

Final notes:

Not only is eating fewer animal products good for the planet, but it is also good for your health. A  recent study found that eating more plant based foods slashes the risk of heart failure by 40%, while another one found that a vegetarian diet cuts the risk of heart disease death by the same percentage. Let’s be clear, I am not a vegetarian. I still indulge. But I view terrestrial meat as a condiment and red meat as a rare, guilty pleasure. Perhaps that leaves me in karmic jeopardy, but it does help lower my planetary footprint and carrots won’t ever be uplifted. Nuts? Well, maybe. Avocados are alien spies.

A fascinating illustrated cosmo-historical timeline since the big bang is far from comprehensive, but beautifully rendered and laced with interesting facts I never knew.

  

Science Fiction & Prediction

Let's take a breath and look longer term.  I am inspired after we watched the (mostly) very good "Bladerunner 2049" flick, last night.  More on that, below.

== Probing the territory in front of us ==

How does Science Fiction do at prediction? From Star Trek to 2001 and The Matrix, this article from The Guardian takes a look at how well -- or poorly -- science fiction films predicted and portrayed the next generation of computers, robots and technological innovation. 

In this essay - Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet, Lawrence Krauss (author of the recently released The Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far: Why Are We Here?) presents game-changing real world technologies that defied prediction -- and contemplates what science fiction is good at, and how it seldom actually forecasts the truly unexpected. Well, sure. Though it’s also important to be aware of anomalies...

Like E. E. Hale's The Brick Moon, published in 1866 which foretold navigation and communication satellites as well as humans living in orbit, or Bernal’s “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” in the 1920s scanning ahead at rotating cylinder space colonies, or Aldous Huxley’s genetic augmentation of humans, or H.G. Wells predicting nuclear weapons and war. 

American short story writer Edward Page Mitchell in the 1880s foresaw instant news transmission, pneumatic tube transport and equal rights for women, along with a steady decline of racism, till a Chinese-American is a major presidential candidate in the 1960s. 

San Francisco author Robert Duncan Milne had a run of fantastic tales from 1877-1899 about radio communications, image-based surveillance, photographic forensics, and surviving solar flares.  (More Brin news about Milne, in the course of time, I promise.)

Krauss kindly credits me with predicting some aspects of the World Wide Web, in my 1989 novel EARTH, along with William Gibson’s cyberpunk versions of the Internet, earlier. But he stops there, claiming that SF missed the super-linked world, for the most part. And, for the most part, he’s right! Still, other exceptions stand out. Take Frederik  Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, which in 1967 or so portrayed not only a vast world-array of linked computers, but citizens carrying personal assistants in their pockets (“Joymakers”) that advised, got information, took pictures and – oh yes – made calls. 

John Brunner’s 1960s novels Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider anticipated not just the internet but computer worms and viruses, as did Gregory Benford’s even-earlier story "The Scarred Man."  Even before that, Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” had fun with what could go wrong, if we all got semi-intelligent personal AI helpers.

While we are on brilliant prescience, have another look at a Fred Pohl book that I have touted for 20 years, urging members of our intelligence, law and military communities to read, and be scared! Pohl’s The Cool War is mentioned in this article that openly adopts his terminology for a struggle between powers that has warmed up to a desperately dangerous kind of bitter peace. In that novel, nations wage a cryptic campaign of tit-for-tat sabotage, undermining each others’ infrastructure, banking systems and power, a ‘war’ that is never declared and never goes nuclear, but leaves us all spiraling ever downward into failure and poverty.

Cool War... The term has been updated and promulgated by David Rothkopf, editor at large at Foreign Affairs and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and I am glad it is getting wider play, since a Cool War is clearly what we’re in. (A little credit then, for my having pushed Pohl’s book -especially to the Protector Caste- for two decades? ;-)

The new anti-democratic axis that has been forged by Vladimir Putin -- now stretching from Ankara all the way to Manila and supported by another rising power – discusses openly its motive and intent to bring down the “decadent west” with its “fictitious” notions of freedom of citizen-rule.  The sabotage of our political processes has come far and probing feints have measured vulnerabilities in every area that Fred predicted, from the power grid to transport. 

And did you really think that North Korea’s nukes have no part in the overall plan? They allow for a possible EMP strike on North America aimed at knocking us down a bunch, while the larger powers retain “It wasn’t us!” plausible deniability. Read that again. And again while actually thinking about who really controls things, in North Korea.)

I’ve railed about this in both fiction and nonfiction (e.g. The Transparent Society) as well as many talks and consultations. 

Though it can be important to grasp the justifications of the other side! Let’s remember that Putin feels vexed that Obama and Hillary Clinton oversaw (he claims instigated) the revolution that removed the Ukraine from Russia’s orbit, sending that people racing toward union with the West. Putin did not want the masterminds of this setback to remain in power, and he brought out every gun to ensure they’d be replaced by his own favored man.

Yes, we live in a world that seems almost written as a science fiction tale!  Who on Earth would have imagined that Americans might be prodded and propagandized into turning away from our genius at pragmatic negotiation? That we’d let ourselves be talked into abandoning the high art of politics? That a third of our citizens could be distracted into waging all-out war on … science? On every single profession of fact-users who know stuff? And now the “deep state” officers of the FBI and intel agencies and military?

No, no. Let this be a cheap novel.

== The future is better than the past ==

Few of my postings have elicited as much fervent argument – and even hate-mail – as my recent blog about Robert A. Heinlein, an author log categorized as a right-winger by oversimplifying fools. That post reprinted directly from Heinlein’s afterword to Revolt in 2100, in which he expressed desperate worry about a merging of the American right with racism and the nastier tendencies in fundamentalism.

Yes, RAH was definitely a “libertarian” in the older sense that hearkens to Adam Smith and self-reliant individualism, though I doubt he’d find much in common with the version that has hijacked that movement, nowadays. On the other hand, he was vigorously pro-science and intellect and diversity/tolerance, and… well, read his own words, and see how chillingly close they came to predicting our awful, pre-theocracy politics, today. 

Here’s another passage, this time from the penultimate page of his finest time travel novel, The Door Into Summer:

"…the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.

     

“Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail nor use a slide rule, I'd like to invite them into Dr. Twitchell's cage and ship them back to the twelfth century--then let them enjoy it.”

Yeah, sure. There are lefty flakes who qualify as “romantics” and “long hairs!” But look around at who is screaming hatred of science and every other fact profession. (Name one exception.) Look at the revival of fascism and confederatism, two of the most romantic movements ever seen. And… aw, heck.  Let me paste back in here the pivotal paragraphs of Heinlein’s afterword to Revolt in 2100:

“Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. 

"Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."

Oh, yes. Science fiction authors can be off target.  But there can also be prescient.

== Bladrunner 2049 ==

Forgot to do this so I'll be brief.  It's a great flick. Very enjoyable. Grade A for Ambiance, music and acting. A bit lower for plot logic, but I'll get to that another time. Seriously, the fact that I'm not used as a plot consultant more often than I am is ... well... a tragedy for you film lovers!  ;-)