Science advances for a new year - We are (or can be) amazing!

Looking back at 2022: a roundup of scientific achievements... from asteroids to AI and (possibly) fusion. Science journal calls the initial data and images from the James Webb Space Telescope the 2022 Breakthrough of the year.

In light of my many past discussions of citizen science and the rising Age of Amateurs, here’s a list of existing citizen science programs and platforms. 

I was honored to participate in the 50th anniversary volume following up on Alvin Toffler's classic futurist work Future Shock, with the release of: After Shock—“Future Shock at 50” project. You can view the full list of essay contributors here. 

 

"The brilliant and insight-filled Closer to Truth TV series features David Brin in a few episodes on consciousness, on alien life, new parameters constraining religion... and whether we live in a simulation."

== Physics wow…==

Investigating the insides of a proton: Okay I may have my union card as a physicist. But the folks doing this stuff are way, way other-species-level smarter than me!  In large clouds of collaboration – and in isolated singular brilliance – particle physicists have been mapping the intricate inner complexity of the proton.

Yeah, the proton isn’t just made of three quarks (two ‘up’ and one ‘down’) but also a fantastic cloud of temporary ones popping out of and back int a gluon ‘sea.’ Plus two ephemeral ‘charmed’ quarks that each weigh more than the proton, itself.

The key concept is pair production out of stressed space from the background Dirac Sea. Almost all such pairs re-annihilate back into the sea, repaying the borrowed mass before the debt is called-in. This kind of thing is also the cause of Hawking radiation next to a black hole AND the 'strange' pair that flickers in and out, within the proton.

And there are those (including me in a pair of older SF stories) who claim that the entire Big Bang may have erupted when one such borrowing was never paid back (so to speak.)   Mind blown yet? See more if you dare. 

Meanwhile... Scientists simulate a black hole in the lab: Not quite the cavitron creation of actual massive micro singularities that forms the underlying premise of my novel Earth. Nor is this quite what the headline implies. This is not a ‘black hole’ but an ‘analog’ that replicates a few of the boundary conditions. Still, kinda cool results.

And... 

"A one-dimensional chain of atoms served as a path for electrons to 'hop' from one position to another. By tuning the ease with which this hopping can occur, the physicists could cause certain properties to vanish, effectively creating a kind of event horizon that interfered with the wave-like nature of the electrons," reports Science Alert.

 This in turn created an analog to Hawking Radiation… sort of. The model offers a way to study the emergence of Hawking radiation in an environment that isn't influenced by the wild dynamics of the formation of a black hole.

Well, well. Ain't we something.

== Bio World! ==

Okay let’s start (woof!) with uplift! One team of scientists examines prospects for how humans could artificially select for canine intelligence to such a degree as to produce canines with human levels of intelligence within a relatively short amount of time—600 years.  In other words, the ‘neo-dogs’ I speak of in my Uplift Novels. Um.

Then there’s the hippo who recently half swallowed a small boy!  Reminds me of one of the dumbest (of many) parts of Jurassic Park (a movie I overall love!) It is the insane scene of the kids feeding tree branches to a harmless "veggie" apatosaurus. Dig it, herbivores will snap up meat when they can! Cows who find a wounded cricket, heck even recent roadkill. Those kids woulda been a quick snack!  

Of course Spielberg is not above using some of the tricks I expose in Vivid Tomorrows. Like in the movie "Minority Report" punishing 'woulda' crimes far more harshly than 'did it' ones! In Jurassic Park, maybe some one could suggest they create only herbivores till the security system is tested? Pay for only the elegiacal half of John Williams's score!

A growing body of research suggesting that acetaminophen's (Tylenol’s) effects on pain reduction also extend to various psychological processes, lowering people's receptivity to hurt feelings, experiencing reduced empathy, and even blunting cognitive functions. And leading to increased acceptance of risky activity. While the effects might be slight, they add up, with nearly 25 percent of the population in the U.S. taking acetaminophen each week.

The latest CARTA (Center for Anthropogeny - or Human Origins) symposium was filled with incredible new insights, such as full results from comparing human to non-human primates, genome and effects.  One fascinating revelation, that certain mutations and duplication effects very clearly increased human density and distance-reach of dendrites and synapses, which (one assumes) had strong effects upon mental processing advantages.

But nothing is free! Some of those same changes are correlated or associated with developmental delay, irritability, epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism in human children.  The symposium can now be viewed by recording.

Do folks in Papua New Guinea benefit from immune system tricks in the 5% of their genomes inherited from Denisovans? “These findings dovetail with earlier work on the role of Neanderthal variants in living Europeans. Studies of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in different populations are showing how mating with archaic humans—long-adapted to their regions—provided a rapid way for incoming modern humans to pick up beneficial genes.”

There's so much more (for another time).

What an age! As Zaphod put it... we're not just amazing. We're amazingly amazing!

Except when (as Marvin put it) we're just awful.

Democracy and the Future

Before diving into some conceptual aspects of democracy, may I offer a quick political note or two about the Clinton Foundation imbroglio? First, nothing better shows how diametrically opposite in personality are democratic and republican presidents, than their behavior upon leaving office. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore scurry around the globe, armtwisting moguls into donating to extinguish diseases like Guinea Worm and River Blindness, or else fight climate change. Ronald Reagan and both Bushes raised money for their presidential libraries, then vanished, along with Dick Cheney, doing little but holding court. 

This supports my longstanding theory that the true difference between democrats and republicans is not about "left vs. right" in any classic sense. (Every metric of competitive capitalism does better across DP administrations.) Rather they are the manic and depressive sides of American personality. In further evidence, witness how stunningly lazy have been ten of the last twelve US Congress sessions - those run by the GOP. While the other two were frenzies of activity.

But no. There is one way Bill and Hillary Clinton can get their Foundation out of the news cycle. Give it to Jimmy Carter. Lock, stock and barrel. The same way that Warren Buffett made Bill Gates his top heir. Because the Gates Foundation is the best-run charity, getting the most done. Likewise, one thing all Americans agree about Jimmy Carter is that he's utterly honorable. So hand it all over to JC and be done with it. Carter will give Chelsea a job. Just do it.

Now... to the Big Picture.

== A Defense of Democracy ==

A fellow wrote to me asking what my fundamental defense of democracy would be and what good are ‘leaders’ anyway?  I pondered this and answered:

For thousands of years, nearly all societies that had metals and agriculture also were ruled by feudal government. Power was inherited by the sons of lords and priests. This actually made sense at the beginning, when any harvest surplus was small and unreliable. Society was well-served if at least a few boys got enough protein and fully-myelinated brains.

Unfortunately, this led to a sense that the king and lords "owned" the state and everyone in it.  And to stay on top they crushed any potential competitors and critics. (Only fools think fair markets happen 'naturally.')  So we lost the benefits of competition and criticism.  And hence one can see why all those other eras and nations were so very, very badly governed. It's a thing called history.

Things only got better when we tried several enlightenment innovations.

1- the state and its officials are not the same! This conflation - summarized by "L'etat, c'est moi," did more harm to human progress than any other. Officials should have to answer vigorous criticism, which is the only means to discover error. Incompetent officials can and should be replaced.  

2- The best way to ensure this is by dispersing power so that officials and aristocrats have rivals who can prevent them from re-creating feudal rule. 

3- The best way to achieve that is democracy, since it has a pattern of cyclically subjecting officials to scrutiny and replacement by a mass of inspectors who are too numerous to bribe.  Or if you bribe a majority of the voters, then perhaps that can be called good government.

You can see that my case for democracy is not based on goodness or rights. Those supporting catechisms are surprisingly weak. Witness how many nations, large and small, are awash in propaganda calling democracy "decadent." Those ruling oligarchies call out "rights fetishism" nothing more than another religion.

No, the more fundamental reason to support democracy is based upon the pragmatic fact that it is the only known way to prevent horrifically bad governance, of the kind seen in feudal (pyramid-shaped) power structures. All of those self-serving oligarchies - together and combined - never across 6000 years accomplished 1% as much as our democracies have, in one human lifespan.  That is one helluva strong argument!  Much stronger - at a basic level - than moralizing about rights.

(Though don't get me wrong!  Rights is good! In fact, passion for them makes us stronger. But I was talking in basic, philosophical terms.)

BTW. There are many types of democracy of course. And there are always officials and aristocrats who scheme to bring back feudal-type power structures. We are seeing this attempted oligarchic putsch right now, and I depict its potential (and surprising) ramifications, in EXISTENCE.  If they succeed, then we'll return to terrible governance by self-deluding lords... who now have nuclear weapons.

== Future Shock ==

Alvin Toffler, the celebrated author of Future Shock, died on 27 June 2016 at age 87. In 1970, Toffler’s book was hailed as ‘brilliant’ and ‘explosive’. Half a century and dozens of major technological paradigm shifts later, his accuracy and predictive power is still without equal. Toffler largely defined ‘futurism.’

His core concept was to coin future shock as “a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease”- a potentially debilitating effect upon citizens and leaders resulting from disruptive force of technological change. Technology, Toffler deduced, is both humankind’s most liberating gift and its most powerful source of mass disorientation.

In this work and those to follow, Toffler offered the earliest and most empirically sound acceleration theory in modern history, suggesting that the rate of change may have the greatest implications. Toffler also foresaw – along with McLuhan, Lakoff and a few others – that the most significant challenges and opportunities would arise from the knowledge economy. Information would become the most valuable commodity and the primary source of capital.

Let me add that I believe we are just now climbing out of the disastrous "shock" of the shift in century and millennium. Those double-oughts or twin zeroes were, I believe, more traumatic for most people than anyone imagined, helping to explain why the first decade of the 21st Century was so utterly, utterly lame-o.

See elsewhere my essay on how the last three centuries appear to have started on their 14th or 15th year. In fact, the cycle seems to fit best at 101 years, not 100.  In which case it is 2016 when we face the critical choices that will define us to history.  Um... look around you, at the news.  Choose well.

== The Origins of the Property Tax ==

Finally, from The Atlantic, an interesting article about the origins of the Property Tax. Although this author calls it the "most hated" tax… and I'm sure it is, having lived in California during the Proposition 13 rebellion, and in Britain when Maggie Thatcher talked Parliament into banishing the "Rates" as they called property tax… let me go contrarian on you.  

It is an absolutely necessary tax! Along with the maligned Inheritance Tax, it is inveighed against by.. guess who?  Aristocrats! The richer you are and more parasitic, and the more you are lounging around on what Adam Smith denounced as "rent-seeking," the more you hate these taxes because they put a pressure on the wealthy to put their wealth to work! They are primary ways to ensure against the inevitable and totally natural drift back toward feudalism. 

(Mind you, not all the wealthy are parasites!  A large minority, featuring most tech billionaires, eschew rent-seeking in favor of active investment in new techs, new products and services.  Exactly what Supply Side "economics" predicted all  the rich would do.  Irony? The few who acted as SSE predicted despise SSE for its horrid effects upon the middle class. Most of these billionaires are... democrats. But back to the property tax.)

Did Parliament and California legislators crank up the property tax too high, triggering rebellion? You bet! Using this tax to oppress and anger the middle class was totally stupid! Indeed, I would bet that aristocrats helped to push up rates with this end in mind.

Read the article.  Then remember that the American founders - right after the Revolution - seized up to a third of the land in the former colonies and redistributed it!  Far more redistribution than done by all 20th Century democrats (including FDR) combined. So much for Tea Party narratives.

The downer interpretation of anti-modernism... a symptom of mass future shock

CITOKATE (Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error) means being willing to admit that you were wrong. And, despite many anomalously on-target predictive “hits,” I can also be way off target, sometimes. Here’s an area in which I must have been influenced by wishful thinking.

I am growing ever-more convinced that we were all wrong about the psychological impact of the turn of the century and millennium. Surface features have blinded us to the undercurrents. We should have noticed earlier that modernity and confident modernism were in way-deep trouble.

But who knew? Back in 2000, it looked as if we had dodged the “Y2K” bullet and shrugged off almost any trace of “millennial madness”. There were no cults seen burning their homes and chanting on hilltops, awaiting the Rapture. In fact, people seemed almost jaded toward the whole thing. True, Al Gore’s fizzy arch-uber-modernism had failed to win him the presidency. Still, he did win the non-fluke electoral majority, despite a cosmic boredom and geek quotient. There did not seem to be a crisis of confidence.

Even when the future struck us like a hammer, nine months into the newborn Millennium, your average citizen took the events of September 11, 2001 with far more aplomb than almost any pundit seemed willing to credit. Far from “panicking,” they displayed remarkable agility and resiliency - or, at least, that is what we saw from the New Yorkers and Bostonians who were mostly affected, that day.

In any event, that is how I chose to interpret events. Given my penchant for finding a contrarian viewpoint (if one seems legitimately tenable), it seemed obvious to take an optimistic perspective, at a time when only officials and members of the “chattering classes” were the ones verging on panic. Just call me Mr. Sunshine.

It took some time - years, in fact - for me to come around to a much more pessimistic interpretation of the mood in our country and our civilization. A mood that appears to have swung away from the main theme of the post-WWII era. Even during the Cold War, and under Nixon and Reagan, modernism and apolitically pragmatic problem solving were often at the fore.

In contrast today, even as the spectacular success of modernist society is evident everywhere -- e.g. while the Cassini Spacecraft is transmitting home bona fide miracles, on a par with almost anything in the bible -- our confidence and pride in our accomplishments appear to have plunged to an all time low. (Do you even hear or see Cassini mentioned in mainstream news media?)

Even liberals, who used to fizz with can-do enthusiasm, can only oppose now, projecting surly, sourpuss negativity. Yes, the thing they oppose is monstrous - a version of antimodernism that would shove us back toward feudalism. But while opposing this reactionary madness,are liberals offering anything that remotely resembles a positive, assertive and joyful - even (yes) - entertaining - plan? One that keeps faith with the problem-solving spirit of George Marshall and Vannevar Bush and Martin Luther King? One that is for something, beyond simply opposing what is monstrous?

At least Bill Clinton believed in all these things (especially being entertaining). Moreover, he made us believe that he believed. (How ironic that he and Hillary completely blew their one ambitious, can-do endeavor - National Health Care - and never seemed to offer any others. You can blame the Gingrich Congress, I suppose... or else perhaps re-examine that word “seemed.” For, what other word than “ambition” can explain the weird shift in Bill’s attention, transforming his goal from trying to achieve something from the standard liberal shopping list to solving the one problem nobody expected him to take on... the budget deficit? An accomplishment of staggering scale. Yes, I agree with Michael Mandel that any surplus should have gone to scientific research. Still Is anybody else willing to see it for what it was?)

Well, Clinton was a 20th Century man, and those days are slipping away. However you put it, the national mood is weird, and weirdly downer. It is as if the very appearance of the "2" at the head of every date has driven huge numbers of otherwise bright people into a mental condition that festers and stews just below a surface of normality. A mood that manifests in frantic romanticism, oversimplification and devotion to downright insipid political dogmas.

All right. I can only maintain high grouch levels for brief intervals.

 Next time, back to problem solving.