Science: steps forward... through a minefield

Girding yourself for Saturday's Science March? This article - Donald Trump Should Not Appoint a Science Advisor - will steam you, offering much more detail on the White House Science Adviser office -- which Donald Trump has refused to fill -- first officially established by President Eisenhower. A partial list of responsibilities:

"Manage NASA strategy and budget. Work with the Office of Management and Budget on federal research and development investments. Deal with climate change, both in terms of mitigating it and diffusing the controversy. Testify before Congress. Oversee the National Science Foundation. Execute whatever the classified work on national security and homeland security might be. Forge science and technology cooperation agreements with nations like Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Korea. Support the State Department on other science-related initiatives. Put the president in contact with top outside experts when necessary. All in all, (Obama Science Adviser John) Holdren worked in approximately 70 different science fields at any given time." - writes Brian Palmer on Slate.

Even when the office was demoted, under George W. Bush, the WHSA - Jack Marburger - was a prestigious scientist who remained in a science-unfriendly administration because of crucial roles in the National Security Council -- roles that are now, under science-hating Donald Trump, deliberately left unfilled.

Now look again at my recent posting about the fellow who was Trump's top candidate for the Science Adviser role - David Gelernter - and see how this whole thing just gets weirder and weirder.

Seriously. Marching and chanting are among the least effective things we can do. But they are at least a bit effective and they take the least effort and can get our blood up for this fight to save civilization. Be out there on Saturday. If you can't make it to the DC March, there are over 500 marches, worldwide. Even if just alone on a streetcorner with a sign: SUPPORT A SCIENTIFIC NATION.

== The Singularity looms? ==

Ray Kurzweil, one of the principal thinkers regarding the Singularity, encourages lively debate about how to make the coming transformation a friendly one.

His popular website has published one of my essays - Preparing for Our Post-human Future - about this very matter: how we can teach "ethics" to the looming Artificial Intelligences... and whether ethics is even the right tactic to try.  While reviewing several recent books on AI, I ask whether more might be achieved using a different set of tools. 

What will happen as...Our computers learn to code themselves?

For more on how we will incorporate robots and AI into our lives, see Novum's latest podcast exploring Robots, Asimov, and... avoiding the Robot Uprising.

We need to rethink the mechanics of how we think. For a century, the neuron was thought to be the active element, turning on and off like a switch. Then the many synapses that flash between neurons seemed to resemble circuit elements in our computers.

Now we realize that dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue. Dendrites are the pickups that receive input from synapses, and they vastly outnumber the axons that deliver that input. Now it appears that dendrites engage in substantial internal information processing, far more than is done in the soma, or main body of the neuron.

“What we found indicates that such decisions are made in the dendrites far more often than in the cell body, and that such computations are not just digital, but also analog,” one researcher said.

This is an example of what some of us long expected… “intracellular computing” or multiplying manifold the processing power of each neuron. (Note, some speculate that computational or processing elements may exist within the body of the soma, too.)

This suggests that the brain has more than 100 times higher computational capacity than was previously thought! Not great news for those who expect Moore’s Law to imitate human mentation “any day now” by emulating the number of processing elements inside our skulls. (See Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secrets of Human Thought Revealed.)

On the other hand, it makes the Human Leap Forward all the more amazing.

== Altering Our Children ==

Speaking of which... are we ready for human gene editing? “An influential science advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine on Tuesday lent its support to a once-unthinkable proposition: clinical efforts to engineer humans with inheritable genetic traits.” 

This has long been a red line that worried ethicists. 

“Just over a year ago, an international group of scientists declared that it would be “irresponsible to proceed” with making heritable changes to the human genome until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change.”

Indeed, it’s why Robert Heinlein may be best remembered, a century from now, for the clever solution he recommends in his novel Beyond This Horizon, how to deal with the moral quandaries of genetic engineering — what’s now called the “Heinlein Solution” — allowing couples to select which naturally produced sperm and ova they want to combine into a child, but forbidding them to actually alter the natural human genome.

Consider the elegance of this proposed compromise. Thus, the resulting child, while “best” in many ways (free of any disease genes, etc), will still be one that the couple might have had naturally. Gradual human improvement, without any of the outrageously hubristic meddling that wise people rightfully fear. (No fashionable feathers or lizard tails, just kids who are the healthiest and smartest and strongest the parents might have had, anyway. Though I would make an exception for the flow-through lungs of birds. I want those!) 

It is a notion so insightful that biologists 40 years later have only recently started to discuss what may turn out to be Heinlein’s principal source of fame, centuries from now.

A more pragmatic concern driving the committee was the likelihood that the technology would be adopted elsewhere, in countries like China, where some pioneering research on editing human embryos — without the intent to gestate them — has already taken place.

“If we have an absolute prohibition in the United States with this technology advancing, it’s not like it won’t happen,” said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the committee’s other leader. Many European countries that have signed a treaty to refrain from human germ line editing.

== Delusion: our greatest gift and curse ==

A UCSD anthropologist has recently asserted that our ability to persist in a belief despite evidence may be the reason humanity launched to high levels of intelligence – because only denial would let us endure the obvious futility of life and the looming inevitability of death. Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower. I do not believe this theory by the way; I have my own explanations for the human launch to sapience, as I discuss in Human Neoteny and Two-way Sexual Selection.

Oh, I avow that delusion is the greatest human talent. Even here and now, in the most scientific and fact-centered civilization of all time, we are awash in subjectivity and made-up narratives. Even scientists - trained to utter the sacred phrase: "I might be wrong" and to seek their own mistakes - only catch some of them.  For the rest, we rely on the greatest of all human inventions: reciprocal accountability through criticism. In which others, who don't share your particular delusions, can point them out for you... and boy will you eagerly return the favor!

When it works, reciprocal criticism leads to the only successful human civilization that ever happened. Ah, but there are those conniving right now, to ensure that it stops working. (A perennial theme of mine, because I believe if we solve this, and restore our delusion-penetrating processes - then all our other problems will resolve.)

Meanwhile, another exploration for the evolution of human intelligence and creativity is offered in: The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional by anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, drawing upon archeological and genetic evidence to pinpoint the roots of the spark that ignited the human mind.

In both Earth and Existence I speculated about resurrecting extinct species, like mammoths and Neanderthals. Now the Mammoth project is looking closer at-hand. And I am involved in an endeavor to grow Neanderthal brain organelles and fly them… in space.

== Tech advances ==

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announces that its subsidiary Jigsaw (Google Ideas) is developing a machine learning technology - Perspective - that will promote more civil discourse on the internet and make comment sections on sites a little less awful, by helping web publishers to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas.

Ultra-thin temporary electronic tattoos can now turn body blemishes into touch-sensitive buttons, letting you control your smartphone with a stroke or a touch. 

A biofoam, laid across dirty or salty water, can use sunlight to separate out clear water.

As Earth Day approaches, you might be interested in a passionate essayist’s short piece on ideology, science, politics and sustainability.

Okay, get out there and do something to defend the only real chance at civilization against barbarians from without... and within.

Space: near and long-term plans

Back from travels and giving speeches about our risk-filled future world. And so, feeling a need to share some optimism, I'll post some cool space and science news...

...only first a reminder: do find a way to get involved in the Earth Day (April 22) Marches for Science, somewhere near you. This shouldn't be about left or right. It's about our children's survival in a civilization that pays attention to fact-centered professions, evidence and being vigorously knowing-engaged citizens.

Oh, and note a week later, Independent Bookstore Day marks its third year on Saturday, April 29, with literary parties around the country.  Mysterious Galaxy is my favorite nearby one!

Look around. Surrounding you are the marvels (and half our GDP) that we owe to science. (And to science fiction!) This know-nothing carnage-of-minds must stop. Now.

== Space looms before us! ==

I serve on the External Council of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts program — our daring venture that invests small amounts in brilliant (though maybe sometimes slightly strange) notions just this side of plausibly useful. Have a look at this year’s latest Phase One grants.

Want to play while doing science? With the EVE Online multiplayer game, you can help look for new exoplanets from your computer. In a game called Project Discovery, players can search for exoplanets while receiving real-world astronomical data.  One more example of the kind of crowd-sourced smart-mobbing I described in both EARTH and EXISTENCE.

Are humans heading to Mars? Regarding D. Trump's recently proposed NASA legislation, Elon Musk comments, "This bill changes almost nothing." No substance. No funding to back it up. Though it does appear to shift many efforts away from Earth-sensing and asteroidal resources back to putting more dusty footprints on the (for now) useless Moon. Come on. Couldn't space have been the one place where we could find consensus and do what's scientifically supported? Logical?

The use of contests to spur creative solutions has really taken off, in part thanks to the XPrize Foundation, headed by Peter Diamandis. (I'm on the board of advisers.)  During the Obama Administration, every government agency was told to set up a prize contest, aiming to draw inventive proposals for each agency’s most vexing problem, and results were promising, especially since the prizes themselves amounted to little more than petty cash.

In the latest example, NASA appears quite pleased with winners of the $15,000 Space Poop Challenge prize, for ways to collect human waste emitted by astronauts wearing spacesuits.

Only now late breaking news!  Winners have been announced for the Tricorder X Prize!  "Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That’s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics. The end result: Radical innovation in healthcare that will give individuals far greater choices in when, where, and how they receive care."  The lead medical evaluator is Dr. Erik Viirre, co-director of UCSD's new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, where the sciences and arts come together to explore humanity's most unique gift.  

== Our emissaries in the solar system ==

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spotted organic molecules on Ceres, which some believe may have a subsurface ocean. This opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on (or under) Ceres itself. Ceres shows clear signatures of pervasive hydrothermal activity and aqueous alteration. "We see compounds on the surface of Ceres like the ones detected in the plume of Enceladus," said a researcher.

Which leads us to NASA’s recently released overall plan to study Europa and then the eight other candidates for “ocean world” status. (I coined and prefer the terms “roofed ocean worlds” or “roofed worlds.)  “By this definition, bodies like Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Enceladus would all be viable targets for exploration. These worlds are all known to have subsurface oceans, and there has been compelling evidence in the past few decades that point towards the presence of organic molecules and prebiotic chemistry there as well. Triton, Pluto, Ceres and Dione are all mentioned as candidate ocean worlds based on what we know of them. (See the planned "Enceladus Life Finder" or ELF mission.)

"Titan also received special mention in the course of the presentation. In addition to having an interior water ocean, it has even been ventured that extremophile methanogenic lifeforms could exist on its surface….”  Wax beings lapping along methane rivers, high above "magma" made of liquid water?  Yipe!

NASA's Juno mission currently orbiting Jupiter.  And sending back amazing images.

What might a final approach to Mars feel like? Unbelievably gorgeous high-resolution images of the topography of Mars.

The Rosetta mission's closeups of Comet 67P showed shifting dunes on the comet.

== Back on Earth ==

In a new study, scientists say they have found evidence along the New Jersey coast that an extraterrestrial object hit the earth at the same time a mysterious release of carbon dioxide suddenly warmed the planet, some 55.6 million years ago. The warm period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), is often cited as the closest analog to today's rapid human-induced climate change. The study does not explicitly say that an impact triggered the PETM, but the implication is consistent with the authors' previous work suggesting such an abrupt trigger. By contrast, mainstream theory says that the carbon came from volcanism or some other earthly cause, over thousands of years.

Most scientists say that the carbon release at the start of the PETM took anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 years. Many suspect it came from a surge of massive volcanism. The resultant warming may have been abetted by a sudden release of frozen methane from the seafloor, due to warming from the carbon, changes in the earth's orbit or shifts in ocean circulation. Temperatures ascended 5 to 9 degrees Centigrade (about 9 to 16 Fahrenheit), during a nearly simultaneous warm period that lasted some 200,000 years. The planet was essentially ice free, and sea levels drastically higher than now. Many small, single-celled ocean-bottom creatures went extinct.

In 2013 Schaller and James Wright of Rutgers University (also a coauthor of the new paper) published a study asserting that the PETM carbon release was virtually instantaneous. Their evidence: extremely high levels of carbon isotopes that appear in a narrow band of the Marlboro clay representing just about a dozen years. This band, it turns out, is near the newly found impact ejecta layer.

Oh, but then, we're not allowed to look at the planet called Earth, anymore.

== Bold Plans ==

Image: Popular Mechanics

Might we create an artificial magnetosphere to protect Mars and its atmosphere from the solar wind? It turns out that by setting up a dipole at the Mars L1 point, it’s not as crazy-implausible as it first sounds.  

Congress told NASA to develop a Europa orbiter and lander, to dispatch on the space agency’s future rocket, the Space Launch System, sometime in the 2020s.

Footage from a Cubesat experiment shows potato plants budding in weightlessness, in Mars-like soils, suggesting that a certain movie may have been on target in its optimism about growing food on the red planet. Providing you can wash out perchlorates and all that. We’ll see. 

Okay, the latest of many informative articles about something NASA claims has never happened – sex in space. Riiiiight.

Similar to what I proposed in my novel Sundiver, a recently proposed quantum cascade laser system is powered strictly by heat, with no electrical input; it produces a cooling effect by emitting light. 

== Striking the Gaia Balance, or why humans can alter the climate ==

On Quora I was asked: Is it plausible that a true "water world" could exist (100% ocean)?

Our world skates the very inner edge of our star’s Goldilocks Zone or CHZ. Earth can only afford the barest minimum of CO2 in the atmosphere, just enough to feed plants. We have to eliminate heat, which is why even a little carbon added to the atmosphere wreaks big effects.

The CHZ extends way out past Mars! Had Mars been bigger, it would today have oceans and a very dense CO2 atmosphere as part of its Gaia Balance. That balance is struck between greenhouse gases spewed from, volcanoes and CO2 removal cause by the weathering of mountains adding calcium, silicon etc to ocean waters, which pull carbon out of the air.

Earth may be exceptionally dry for an ocean world, because we are hot (and getting hotter.) But a world without any continents to weather away would lack the ability to scrub CO2 and hence keep getting hotter as volcanoes added carbon to the air. I suppose that heat would evaporate the oceans until continents appeared that could restore the balance. Get it?

== Science is political now ==

Sorry but all this great stuff is in danger.  Have of our wealth and GDP came from science. And from the increased wisdom and fact-centered policies that science engendered.

Steep cuts to Earth science imaging: Ultimate proof of lying hypocrisy. All you denialist cultists who said "we need more data before deciding what to do about climate change!" or "The jury is still out!" At least under the Bushites, science was sabotaged less spectacularly and openly. Now the pretense is dropped.  Science is the enemy, openly declared. Your solution is that of a 3 year old: "If we don't look at it, the problem doesn't exist!"

And finally... Winston Churchill once - in 1939 as war clouds loomed -- wrote a long essay on what would later become SETI… the question of other worlds and other life in the universe. Churchill was a devoted fan of H.G. Wells and began his essay shortly after the 1938 U.S. radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which whipped up Mars fever in the media. He reasoned that Venus and Mars were the only places in the solar system other than Earth that could harbour life.”

March on April 22.  Get out there and let it be seen that microcephalic troglodytes will not be allowed to assassinate our civilization or our children.

Marching for Science... and then some tech marvels

My science postings used to be free of politics -- and this one will be, in a bit. But how can they be detached, when the central political issue of our time is whether evidence, fact-based argument and truth discovery can survive? I know that on Earth Day (named after my novel, I presume) April 22, I'll join my fellow scientists in the street. 

See more information about the March for Science, as well as satellite marches held around the world. Scientists will speak out and hold events to explain their research to the public. 

Though let me be clear. I also think that marching and protests are secondary. At a moment in history when all fact-professions are under attack, no less than survival is at stake. Marches and protests are like pushing back in a Sumo match. You might gain inches, but what's needed is judo.

How do people comprehend (and trust) science? It's complicated. A recent study has found that people place more confidence in the claims of a popular science article than they do in the claims of an academic article written for experts. They seem to be dissuaded by the academic papers' in-depth discussions of negative results, margins of error, and alternate explanations -- rather than the concise certainties of popularized articles.

 "This emboldens people to reject the ideas of experts who they see as superfluous to their understanding of an idea (which they have already grasped)," writes Scotty Hendricks in Big Think.

== The war is now explicit ==

Through resignations, firings and almost zero replacements, the Trump Administration has all but wiped out the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sending it down the path of extinction that — in 1995 — swallowed the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, when Newt Gingrich ruled OTA to be irreparably “partisan.” (As - apparently - are 'facts.') Now members of Mr. Trump’s transition team  have called for getting rid of OSTP, altogether. 

Mr. Trump, says an anonymous official, is still reviewing candidates to be his chief science adviser and he “considers the science and technology office important.” Ah but the two leading candidates for White House Science Advisor - Princeton's William Happer and Yale's David Gelernter - are notorious climate change denialists who regularly express contempt for their scientific peers on abstract and cultural grounds. (I'll be posting about the latter fellow, soon.)

“Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House,” said Vinton G. Cerf, a computer scientist, vice president of Google and one of the chief architects of the internet.  Indeed, not one person still working in the science and technology office regularly participates in Mr. Trump’s daily briefings, as they did for President Barack Obama, who more than doubled the OSTP staff, to 130, and moved the office into a building on the White House grounds. (Where I spoke - twice - in 2016 about "big perspectives on threats to civilization.") 

Obama turned to the science office during crises like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa; the 2011 nuclear spill in Fukushima, Japan; and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The staff of the science office developed the White House’s recommendations for regulation of commercial drones and driverless cars at the Transportation Department. Last year, the staff produced an attention-grabbing report that raised concerns about the threat that robots posed to employment and that advocated retraining Americans for higher-skilled jobs. (I participated in an OSTP campaign to get computer programming back into the schools.) The staff also put on the annual White House science fair.

Only now... let's go back to pointing out just how marvelous it is to be a member of a bold, open-minded and scientific civilization. 

== Marvels of research ==

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed the first stable semi-synthetic organism — a bacterium with two new synthetic bases (called X and Y) added to the four natural bases (A, T, C, and G) that every living organism possesses. Adding two more letters to expand the genetic alphabet can be used to make novel proteins.

Moreover, they found a clever way to ensure that these experimental organisms won't escape the lab. Researchers engineered them to react to a genetic sequence that doesn’t have X and Y as a foreign invader (an immune response).  So any new cell that dropped X and Y would be marked for destruction.  That enabled their semisynthetic organism to keep X and Y in its genome after dividing 60 times, leading the researchers to believe it can hold on to the new base pair indefinitely.

Helping to feed the world? Agronomists have developed a new species: a cross between wheat and its wild cousin, wheat grass - Salish Blue - that's like wheat but grows back year after year, allowing farmers to plow much less and reduce erosion. This holy grail now seems within reach.

An exciting and way overdue international consortium has been formed to develop vaccines much faster. A coalition of governments and charities has committed $460 million to speed up vaccine development for Mers, Lassa fever and Nipah virus. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) aims to have two new experimental vaccines ready for each disease within five years.

The recent discovery of metallic hydrogen could revolutionize many things, especially spaceflight.  

Theoretically predicted a few years ago, ‘time crystals’ are a notion – a new state of matter - that have a structure that repeats in time, not just in space. A time crystal will keep oscillating in its ground state without expending or needing energy, like current in a superfluid. And two teams claim to have made them. “While we're waiting for the papers to be published, we need to be skeptical about the two claims. But the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.”  

== Scientific nature? ==

According to Bruno Lemaitre, an immunologist at the EPFL research institute in Switzerland, science is filled with “narcissists.” Having read the article, I must respond that this is stunning malarkey and part of the right’s intensely bitter War on Science. And indeed, their war on every single knowledge procession that deals in fact, verification and proof. 

Are there narcissistic scientists? Plenty! They are human and I have known doozies! But scientists are also (in my opinion) the most independent-minded and competitive humans our species ever produced, going at each other with knives of experimentation and scalpels of disproof. All of it moderated by rules of grownup behavior that make us seem all friendly and polite.

No, what the Cultists of the far-far-left and today’s entire right — two wings of a monstrous anti-modernism — share is their desperate need to discredit every profession that does the unforgivable… shines light upon delusion. Science, journalism, teaching, economics, civil servants, medicine… and now the intelligence and military officer corps.

The enemies of maturity and truth use anecdotes to displace statistics. They concoct stories to counter facts. They proclaim — as did the priests and kings of old — “there is no fact! There is only whose voice is loudest!”  Or the best subsidized by today's popes and medicis -- the oligarchy.

== Tech Marvels ==

Oh but we do persevere!  For example, engineers have developed a prototype 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin. 

Other researchers have pioneered how to regrow bone and the interlaced blood system. 

Several international student hyperloop teams came to SpaceX to compete by hurling their vehicles down the 2^nd biggest vacuum chamber in the world.  

Researchers have produced a LED pixel out of nanorods capable of both emitting and detecting light. These nanorods manage to both detect and emit light. Envision Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) technology.  Screens will be able to watch you without a camera and screens could talk to each other.  And yes, we need to talk about this. Openly. Watch the video.

See these amazing photos of one of Greenland’s towns, in an article about the wrangling over the opening of a rare earth elements mine.