Facing the future post covid? Dangers and resilence

The dark cloud of the past year may have silver linings sych as: A recent field trial demonstrated a 77% effective malaria vaccine. Good news! In addition, consider: Three spectacular advances in biological/medical science that either accelerated because of Covid-19 or came to the rescue and may change the future.

Alas, though. This is what I feared. A third of COVID survivors may suffer neurological or mental disorders, according to a recent study.

Of course the most incredible news – scientific or otherwise – from 2020 was the way that the covid emergency hastened introduction of mRNA vaccines and other therapeutics, which were ready for testing within a month of decipherment of the virus’s genetics. You can be sure that old-fashioned, 20^th Century testing and vetting procedures will change after this and miracles will start to flow. There are many more good things on the near horizon.

And worries as well...“Viruses that infect bacteria – fittingly called bacteriophages - and their prey have been at war for eons, each side evolving more devilish tactics to infect or destroy each other. Eventually, some bacteriophages took this arms race to a new level by changing the way they code their DNA.” Some have replaced the “A” in that standard GATC coding with a “Z” nucleobase. Z for zounds.

Moving on. As climate change dries up or destroys arable land all over the globe, science rushes to find solutions to both feed a hungry world and lessen the environmental effects of agriculture. For example, the meat-substitute industry has taken off way earlier than I expected (I thought we’d reach the current level around 2028!) I know some folks in the rising algae industry who are working to combine over-fertilized agricultural runoff (of the sort that killed the Caspian and Black Seas and is harming the Mediterranean and Caribbean) with CO2 from local big-emitters, like cement plants, blending them to grow algae as both animal feed and bioreactors for industrial oils. 

Now comes a joint venture between US and Chinese companies making a new “single-cell protein” substance called FeedKind that is manufactured by fermenting natural gas with naturally occurring bacteria. The resulting pellets are used to feed fish. Used instead of soy, it will free up huge quantities of land and fresh water.

Side note, when you shop at Costco, tilapia and catfish are the farm-raised fish with the lowest environmental footprint. One is vegetarian, feeding on grain, and the other eats… well, catfish recycle. Ocean caught fish should be an exception and the farmed salmon industry needs to continue making big adjustments.

== Dangers and Resilience ==

Pre-Covid I would give speeches annually in DC abut topics like near-future threats and overlooked, needed actions to foster resilience. Some of you have seen my interview on that topic, following my mini-course at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

One of many areas where our civilization could have been far more robust, by now, had earlier small measures been taken, is that of EMP or the potential for crippling damage wrought by either natural or intentional ElectroMagnetic Pulses. This article is not very cheering about the current situation. 

But we can still begin the long haul of securing the future! I would start by imposing a micro-tax… say 0.001%... on every chip set or piece of electronics that doesn’t meet voluntary industry standards for EMP resistance, tested by Underwriters’ Labs. A tiny tax will cause very little resistance, but a small, steady pressure for industry itself to just do it. Just solve it. (Even if our devices had old-fashioned replaceable fuses!)

Okay, this will sound familiar. Is it noteworthy that the state of Louisiana is planning to divert the mighty Mississippi River into new paths, to rebuild protective wetlands and to counter mistakes of the past… an event that I portrayed happening all at once, by terrible accident, in my 1990 novel EARTH? Of course it is better that such things happen in stages, by sapient care, than waiting for nature to have Her revenge on the unsapient.  Still, I think many of you will agree that my depiction of the Father of Waters freed, rampant and un-vexed -- unleashed by an uber-feminist-eco-warrior -- was kinda cool?

== back to origins ==

In an earlier posting about Uplift, I remarked on how a good case is made that the most-rare event or fluke in Earth’s life story was the one-time joining of two separate genetic trees. “It’s the scientific consensus that a primordial eukaryote emerged 1.5 billion years ago when a less complex cell tried to ingest an anaerobic bacterium but was unable to digest it. The stalemate turned into a symbiotic relationship in which the bacterium became the power supply to the host cell, which provided a safe environment for it to thrive in return. Today we refer to the powerhouse of the cell as the Mitochondria.” The resulting eukaryotes proliferated and experimented with multi-cellulatity for 800 million years before suddenly getting the hang of it and bursting forth with the Cambrian explosion of complex forms, including us.  Moreover, if that combination fluke truly was both necessary and hugely rare, well, when we descendants of that marriage forge across the galaxy, we may just find…  life in the form of soup.

Let’s dive into this a little deeper. Comments a member of my communities, Peter Hug: “I think a pretty good case can be made that such an endosymbiotic event happened at least three times on Earth - the first being a merger of eubacteria with sulfidogenic archaebacteria to create amitochondriate mastigotes; these then engulfed some proteobacteria which turned into mitochondria and then evolved into the animals and fungi; one of these organisms then endosymbiosed (is that a word?) a cyanobacterium to create a plant lineage containing chloroplasts.

“Additionally, it's certainly possible that such an event could have occurred multiple times deep in the past and have been lost due to competition and eventual loss by the other candidates. I found an interesting article that discusses some aspects of this (linked below); nevertheless, I think it's clear that it's not a common event, at any rate. Endosymbiosis to create a eukaryote that then evolves into multicellular life that develops civilization certainly might not be the only path to a technological culture, if we posit a large number of candidate worlds upon which to test possibilities...” according to this research article.

And finally...

A thought of the day: In a series of experiments published in Science in 2011, Sparrow, Liu and Wegner conclude:

“When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

Um what were we talking about, again?

Toward sapience: A science of Uplift? But first... classic "uplifting" novels!

Before we get to the science of uplift.... Announcing the re-release this week of all of my Uplift novels from Open Road publications - all of them recently re-edited, with fresh cover artwork and newly written introductions! 

It all starts with my first uplift novel - my first published work of any kind - Sundiver, a murder mystery largely set right at (on?) the sun! And yes, the whodunnit part works... as do the characters and the physics!

That's followed by my second novel, Hugo Award winner Startide Rising, and Hugo-winner The Uplift War.  

Then my second uplift trilogy - (two Hugo nominees) - Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore and Heaven's Reach. Wherein the epic adventure of the dolphin-crewed Streaker resumes on a planet settled by illegal immigrants and refugees (a metaphor for our times?), then continues pellmell through white dwarf habitats, a dozen layers of spacetime and ructions tearing at five galaxies!

Read: the inspiration behind the Uplift novels. And sure, dolphins & neo-chimps rule! But so do Alvin and Huck and a band of alien kid-adventurers!

Oh, those of you lucky enough to be on my newsletter mailing list will find out about a lot more of my recent projects, too!

== Does Uplift have a scientific basis? ==

Researchers have recently identified a key molecular switch that can make ape brain organoids grow more like human organoids, and vice versa, and may help explain why  human brains grow much larger, with three times as many neurons, compared with chimpanzee and gorilla brains. (And you don't think secret labs are already doing this? Transparency!)

“A study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, looked at 134 male and female bottlenose dolphins from eight facilities across the world, with each dolphin’s personality being assessed by staff at the facilities. The results of the study found a convergence of certain personality traits, especially curiosity and sociability....  The most widely accepted model of human personality is defined by five traits -- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.” 

It sounds to me like there’s a lot of overlap there, but comparison to apes and dolphins remains interesting. And yes, Startide Rising, remains a favorite among dolphin researchers!

As for humans… I find it odd that bad forms of addiction are seldom correlated with positive behavior-reinforcement mechanisms - e.g. “addicted to love” of family, children, and skill - that use identical neural and chemical pathways! That is doubtless the reason why addictive pathways exist in the first place! 

   Arguably, these “dark sides of addiction” are hijackings of those wholesome reinforcement processes. 

   Perhaps the worst - certainly the most harmful to this civilization, crippling our ability to negotiate like adults - is addiction to pleasurable-but-negative mental states, like self-righteous indignation.

   I spoke on this at the Centers for Drugs and Addiction. See: “The addictive plague of getting mad as hell."   (And the scientific background is on my website. )

== Is sapience a galactic imperative, driven by evolution? ==

 

In “Terrestrial biological evolution and its implication for SETI,” Jean-Pierre Rospars theorizes that human and super-human intelligence are natural and expected outcomes under Darwinian evolution. 

“A frequent opinion among biologists upholds that biological evolution is contingent and, consequently, that man's apparition is a random event of very small probability. We present various arguments against this view, based on chemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary convergences, the existence of physical constraints on the structure of living beings, and the evidence of acceleration in the evolution of many features, e.g. brain size, over geological times. 

"Taken together they suggest that “laws” of evolution exist and may have a universal validity. We extend this view to the evolution of “intelligence”. We show that it is an essential aspect of biological evolution and that human cultural evolution is just another aspect of it. Finally, we argue that brains more complex than the human brain are conceivable, endowed not merely with quantitatively better functions but with qualitatively higher cognitive abilities, of the kind found in the transition from, say, dog to man. 

"This thesis predicts that the usual concept of advanced civilizations merely separated by huge distances is too restrictive. It favours a different concept, in which the separation results predominantly from cognitive, i.e. temporal factors. This idea, far from being discouraging, offers a stimulating solution to Fermi's paradox and opens new ways to SETI.”

 

I have four reasons to doubt this.

 

1- Ernst Mayr's observation that it took Earth 4 billion years to make one - just one - sapient race out of billions of actual species, and that one almost vanished several times.

 

2- A certain baseline level of intelligence - simple semantic skill and basic manipulative tool use - appears to erupt quite often in nature... dolphins, 

apes some monkeys, sea lions, elephants, corvids/crows, parrots, even octopi, all seem to crowd under pretty much the same glass ceiling, implying that such levels truly are common emergent properties, as proposed in the paper. Perhaps velociraptors did reach that same level. 

Alas, that didn't ultimately help them. The significant lesson from this commonality of threshold sentience is that Nature and Darwin are generous up to that point and extremely stingy about going beyond.

 

3- Yes, we humans shattered that glass ceiling by orders of magnitude, especially in the Great Reprogramming Revolution that I speak of, in EXISTENCE. And yet, despite that incredible leap -- I deem that rarity of ceiling-smashing at the top of my list of "fermi" explanations for the Great Silence across the galaxy!

Oh, sure. We still crest at a level that averages just below what it may take to solve our obstinate cultural stupidities - like feudalism, the dour, lobotomizing system that dominated 99% of our ancestors.  Worse, evidence suggests that it is very hard to get smarter than our current smartest. Elite intellectual families like the Huxleys show what happens when brilliant people marry brilliant people. All too often, mental and neurological instabilities are rife as offspring dance along a razor's edge.

4. A good case is made that the most-rare event or fluke in Earth’s life story was the one-time joining of two separate genetic trees. “It’s the scientific consensus that a primordial eukaryote emerged 1.5 billion years ago when a less complex cell tried to ingest an anaerobic bacterium but was unable to digest it. The stalemate turned into a symbiotic relationship in which the bacterium became the power supply to the host cell, which provided a safe environment for it to thrive in return. Today we refer to the powerhouse of the cell as the Mitochondria.” 

       The resulting eukaryotes proliferated and experimented with multicellulatity for 800 million years before suddenly getting the hang of it and bursting forth with the Cambrian explosion of complex forms, including us.  Moreover, if that combination fluke truly was both necessary and hugely rare, well, when we descendants of that marriage forge across the galaxy, we may just find… soup.

5. Of all possible theories for the Fermi Paradox, just five satisfy my requirement for plausibility. As I said just above, number one (in my book) would be the notion that human levels of ambitious, constantly-reprogramming intelligence is likely extremely rare, which implies we may be this galaxy’s one chance for an “elder race” to go rescue everyone else. (Also alluded-to in both my serious future-projection novel Existence and in my sci fi comedy The Ancient Ones.)

Another of those Five Plausibles? Well, I alluded to this one, as well. The sick, lobotomizing trap of feudalism sucked in 99% of human post agricultural societies, rewarding those males who took such power, ruining their civilizations while winning Darwinian reproductive advantages for themselves.  The evolutionary imperative is so clear -- you see it throughout nature, from stallions to elephant seals -- that the amazing thing is that ANY sapient race found an alternative path, as we have done. A narrow, rarely tried path of Periclean-egalitarian enlightenment. 

If this periclean experiment fails... if dullard-stoopid oligarchy succeeds at re-establishing its tedious/boring/lobotomizing pyramid of privilege again, then we may have our Fermi Paradox answer. And the galaxy may have to wait for someone else to break through that trap.

== Going to the dogs! ==

Interesting advances in the origin story of dogs, perhaps domesticated by isolated Siberian human communities around 25,000 years ago, before migrating together to the Americas.

And they may not be anywhere near at full potential, being our best friends! Much is made – of late – about how dogs are being used to sniff out early signs of disease in people. See, for example, Doctor Dogs: How Our Best Friends Are Becoming our Best Medicine, by Maria Goodavage. Today, dogs have been trained and proven useful in detecting breast cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, melanoma, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, malaria, Covid-19, and the onset of epileptic seizures, narcolepsy, and migraines. They can do this by sniffing breath, blood, urine, sweat, or even tissue swabs or socks / clothing from the subject. 

As explained by Strategic News Service’s Mark Anderson: “It would appear that the canine nose, with its 200-300 million stereoscopic sensors (vs. 5 million in humans), aerated at up to 300 pants per minute and processed by 35% of the brain (vs. 5% in humans), is exquisitely sensitive, and eminently trainable, to detect whatever the dog, or you, are interested in.” Alas, dogs tire easily and there is an inability to apply metrics to their performance. So the search is on for artificial nose technology. (Which would have many other uses.)

== To uplift... cats? Or not? ==

Why did I "uplift" dolphins and chimps in the main uplift novels... and parrots elsewhere and allude to dogs... but not cats?

Well, not to neglect the felines...  here's an image that's cute! prrrr. David Larks's lovely cat-uplift painting takes this idea in directions that are simultaneously way-cute and just a little worrisome! I am prompted to ponder Cordwainer Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell"!  See the artist's gallery page.

Still, the trait of neoteny is one that dogs share with dolphins and humans... but cats not so much. Just saying. And anyway, you think I'm suicidal? No. Just no.

And finally....Neanderthal footprints exposed on a beach in Spain were fascinating enough. Only now it seems we can trace signs of young children at play!

See the range of great renewed Uplift Books to enjoy! ... and so much more!