Gravitational waves, Snowball Earth ... and more science!

Let's pause in our civil war ructions to glance yet again at so many reasons for confidence. On to revelations pouring daily from the labs of apprentice Creators!

== How cool is this? ==

Kip Thorne and his colleagues already achieved wonders with LIGO, detecting gravitational waves, so well that it’s now a valuable astronomical telescope studying black holes and neutron stars. But during down time (for upgrades) scientists took advantage of the laser+mirrors combo to ‘chill’. “They cooled the collective motion of all four mirrors down to 77 nanokelvins, or 77-billionths of a kelvin, just above absolute zero.” Making it “ a fantastic system to study decoherence effects on super-massive objects in the quantum regime.”

“…the next step for the team would be to test gravity’s effect on the system. Gravity has not been observed directly in the quantum realm; it could be that gravity is a force that only acts on the classical world. But if it does exist in quantum scales, a cooled system in LIGO—already an extremely sensitive instrument—is a fantastic place to look,” reports Isaac Schultz in Gizmodo. 

And while we're talking quantum, a recent experiment in Korea made very interesting discoveries re: wave/particle duality in double slit experiments that quantifies the “degree” of duality, depending on the source. 

All right, that's bit intense, but something for you quantum geeks. 

== And… cooler? ==

700 million years ago, Australia was located close to the equator. Samples, newly studied, show evidence that ice sheets extended that far into the tropics at this time, providing compelling evidence that Earth was completely covered in an icy shell, during the biggest Iceball Earth phase, also called (by some) the “Kirschvink Epoch.” So how did life survive?

The origins of complex life: Certain non-oxidized, iron rich layers appear to retain evidence for the Earth’s orbital fluctuations from that time.  Changes in Earth's orbit allowed the waxing and waning of ice sheets, enabling periodic ice-free regions to develop on snowball Earth. Complex multicellular life is now known to have originated during this period of climate crisis."Our study points to the existence of ice-free 'oases' in the snowball ocean that provided a sanctuary for animal life to survive arguably the most extreme climate event in Earth history", according to Dr. Gernon of the University of Southampton, co-author of the study.

== Okay it doesn’t get cooler… Jet suits! == 

Those Ironman style jet suits are getting better and better!  Watch some fun videos showcasing the possibilities - from Gravity Industries.  The story behind these innovative jet suits is told in a new book, Taking On Gravity: A Guide to Inventing the Impossible, by Richard Browning, a real-life Tony Stark.

== Exploring the Earth ==

A fascinating paper dives into the SFnal question of “what-if” – specifically if we had been as stupid about the Ozone Layer as we are re climate change. The paper paints a dramatic vision of a scorched planet Earth without the Montreal Protocol, what they call the "World Avoided". This study draws a new stark link between two major environmental concerns - the hole in the ozone layer and global warming – and how the Montreal Accords seem very likely to have saved us from a ruined Earth.

Going way, way back, the Mother of Modern Gaia Thought – after whom I modeled a major character in Earth – the late Lynn Margulis, has a reprinted riff in The Edge – “Gaia is a Tough Bitch" - offering insights into the kinds of rough negotiations between individuals and between species that must have led to us. Did eukaryotes arise when a large cell tried and failed to eat a bacterium? Or when a bacterium entering a large cell to be a parasite settled down instead to tend our ancestor like a milk cow? The latter seems slightly more likely!

Not long after that, (in galactic years) some eukaryotes joined to form the first animals – sponges – and now there are signs this may have happened 250M years earlier that previously thought, about 890 Mya, before the Earth’s atmosphere was oxygenated and surviving through the Great Glaciation “Snowball Earth” events of the Kirschvink Epoch.

Even earlier!  Day length on Earth has not always been 24 hours. “When the Earth-Moon system formed, days were much shorter, possibly even as short as six hours. Then the rotation of our planet slowed due to the tug of the moon’s gravity and tidal friction, and days grew longer. Some researchers also suggest that Earth’s rotational deceleration was interrupted for about one billion years, coinciding with a long period of low global oxygen levels. After that interruption, when Earth’s rotation started to slow down again about 600 million years ago, another major transition in global oxygen concentrations occurred.” 

This article ties it in to oxygenization of the atmosphere, because cyanobacteria need several hours of daylight before they can really get to work, making oxygen, which puts them at a disadvantage when days are short. Hence, when days got longer, they were able to really dig in and pour out the stuff. Hence our big moon may have helped oxygenate the atmosphere.

I have never been as big fan of the Rare Earth hypotheses for the Fermi Paradox and especially the Big Moon versions, which speculate some kinda lame mechanisms. But this one sorta begins to persuade. It suggests the galaxy may be rife with planets filled with microbes, teetering on the edge of the rich oxygen breakout we had a billion years ago.

A Brief Welcome to the Universe: A Pocket Sized Tour: a new book from Neil deGrasse Tyson and astrophysicists J. Richard Gott and Michael Strauss - an enthusiastic exploration of the marvels of the cosmos, from our solar system to the outer frontiers of the universe and beyond.

Uchuu (outer space in Japanese) is the largest simulation of the cosmos to date - a virtual universe, which can be explored in space and time, zooming in and out to view galaxies and clusters, as well as forward and backward in time, like a time machine.

== On to Physics ==

A gushy and not always accurate article nevertheless is worth skimming, about Google Research finding “time crystals,” which can flip states without using energy or generating entropy, and hence possible useful in quantum computing. 

Are We Giving Birth to ...well... "Gaia"?

I want to refer you to the latest paper -"On the Promise of Noopolitik" - by two of the most brilliant social thinkers around, today, David Ronfedlt and John Arquilla, of the Rand Corporation. Unlike many utopian or extropian wish fantasies, they are talking about a simple extrapolation of today's positive trends, via what I have called the :"Age of Amateurs" toward a near era when leveraged individual and "smart mob" and coalescing critical skills will make our sum intelligence something truly and fantastically greater than the parts.

See how they relate all this to the ruminations in 1925 of Teilhard de Chardin, in The Phenomenon of Man. One might also have hearkened to J.D. Bernal's THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL: An enquiry into the future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, from the same period. (Available online).

A great paper. It is, of course, a topic that we can start talking about, over beers, one day after work... and wake up amid a sea of bottle, wondering what day it is, without even having touched half of the ramifications. Still let me touch on a few very lightly.

1) Of course, what they discuss is something that I described, pretty thoroughly, in the last dozen or so chapters of EARTH. Wherein I am VERY critical of the typical "Childhood's End" notion of how humanity might become part of some future macro intelligence. Whether it is clanking assimilation - as in the Borg - or floating above tatami mats while birds hover - as in Asimov's "Gaia" - or clone based telepathy a la Joe Haldeman - it is still almost always depicted as an either-or dichotomy... a surrender of individuality, in order to gain the benefits of mass intelligence..

In EARTH I portray this coalescence and elevation as something quite different. As a reification, a fulfillment, a celebration of human individuality,


2) This makes sense when you ponder that the noosphere will have to partake in the most successful aspects of its immediate predecessor... the Western Enlightenment.

Indeed, the very success of the Enlightenment is what has brought us to the verge of this new birth. And a very dangerous birthing process it will be. (Look back at the last time this was tried - prematurely, precociously, disastrously - in the great experiment of Pericles.)

Crucial to remember is that none of these possibilities - this condition that is p[regnant with a new kind of humanity - arose out of the mothodologies used by standard,or traditional, hierarchical societies. Priests, preaching rigid rules of good thinking. Nobles punishing any deviations from right-behavior. We reflexively turn to these twin methods, and have for countless millennia. Heck, George Lucas is still preaching them, today! But they have a PERFECT track record of never, ever working.

In stark contrast, the Enlightenment trick - invented by Locke and Smith - is to use rule-based arenas of FAIR COMPETITION (science, markets, courts, and democracy) to elicit the plus-side benefits of joyful creativity out of people, while preventing the brutally repressive, secretive, cheating side of human nature from spoiling competition. Locke and Smith, innovating out of instinct and a sense of pragmatic "fairness", could not have known that they were emulating the very same fecund synergies that we see in evolution, in nature! But the effect is exact and fantastically productive.

In complexity theory, experts call this sort of thing an "emergent property." What is COMPETITIVE at one level becomes visibly and powerfully COOPERATIVE, when viewed at the next higher level. Take healthy ecosystems, for example. "The circle of life." Ecosystems - like markets - will tend to stay balanced until someone gets a huge edge, enough to "cheat." In which case, watch out....are you listening, humanity? (Well, we're the smart ones, trying to TELL OURSELVES to stop cheating. Quite a demand, for folks recently out of the caves.)

3) Since Enlightenment systems rely utterly on RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY... and thus (viz Hayek) upon open information flows...this means that the Enlightenment - and its offspring the Noosphere -- are fundamentally in conflict with basic drives of human nature. Above all, two human traits: self-delusion and a longing for feudalism. (We inherit the latter because we all are descended from the harems of countless kings.)


4) Hence my key point. The transformation that John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt describe is obvious to society's smartest men and women. Those with vision can see it coming. But their reactions differ greatly.

Some respond to the approaching birth with excitement, by funding research to help it along. Elon Musk, for example. Others look with dread on the pain and potential dangers of the birthing process -- take Bill Joy. In this matter, Arthur Clarke may have had it right.

Finally, there are many, many amid the elites who desperately do not want this new era to happen! They realize that the noosphere is an inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment Experiment, if current trends of citizen uplift and citizen-empowerment continue. And even if the newborn is healthy, they see themselves as losers, because their privileged positions will no longer be assured. Better to reign over a grinding, insipid pyramid than to tumble into mere citizenship in a fecund, spectacular "emergent property."

There is a lot of momentum toward this birth. Thus, the opposition's counter-push cannot merely be obstructionist. It must be actively and radically reactionary. The clock must not simply be frozen. It must be wound backwards. To earlier modes of hierarchical control.

5) The Ronfeldt &Arquilla paper shows awareness of this resistance, but a certain naivete about exactly what's happening. It is not nationalism, per se, that is blocking progress toward a massively synergistic reification of worldwide human discourse. Indeed, some nation states - if left alone - have been friendly midwives to the process. The best example - after state-supported universities - was when the United States of America simply LET GO OF THE INTERNET and gave it to the world. Proof of midwifery. Period. (Today's Libertarianism is both right and horrifically simplistic.)

No, it is NOT nationalism, per se, that is driving the frantic resistance that we are currently witnessing vs. mass-human empowerment and reification. Rather, I see the Enlightenment nation state being hijacked at two levels:

(1) by those alienated against the future on emotional-romantic terms and

(2) by clades of very smart men who see their very last chance to re-institute traditional human social hierarchies, before it is too late.

Ponder, if this is the agenda, then elites in all parts of the world - purportedly divided by language, nationality, religion and official dogma - might see common cause against the thing that frightens them most. The birth of multi-layered, "metazoan" humanity. In that case, they might USE their apparent national and ideological differences to pit citizens against each other and raise fear levels. The surest way to prevent confident embrace of a new way of thinking.

Have I just made myself a target of this lurid-seeming cabal of super-smart but super troglodytic elites?

Fortunately, I have too little influence in this world to be considered a threat.

In fact, I keep waiting for them to offer me a buyout! But then, I may be too small even for that.

Wish me a good trip and keep using comments to keep the community alive.

Visit kos.

db

Finally, I may be putting this journal; on hiatus for a few weeks. If you see nothing from me till early September, never fear. I will leave the comments section, below, as a general forum. There is even a chance that I might ask Stefan to post a "comment-relayed-from-Brin"... from time to time! (He has one of the choicest email addresses ever.)

Also, please drop in at my final "Ostrich Papers"  Also posted on my website. Yes, it is vastly too long (4000 words!) for the scatterbrained...um... multiprocessing generation. Still, I felt that SOMEWHERE there needed to be a "guidebook" for ostrich hunters.

Happy hunting.