Sci Tech update! But first a few non-science items:
* In sci fi news: today and (I'm told) for a week, the newly edited and refreshed edition of GLORY SEASON - with a lovely new cover - is available for $2.99 (e-version) from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the rest. One of my favorites.
* Political snippet alert: I'm told Stephanie Miller's radio show is comparing Donald Trump to Howard Beale of the classic flick NETWORK... as I have been doing for more than a year. No doubt because his followers seem entranced by his ongoing, raving breakdown. But will the comparison go farther? I still take bets - if offered odds - that certain oligarchs are watching the last ten minutes of that flick over and over again...== Onward to great SCIENCE!! ==
How sad that so many of our fellow citizens derive so little joy from this amazing scientific age. Even if you aren't in the adventure directly, we citizens pay for it and boy are we getting our money’s worth!
Van-sized robots lowered by parachute--> rocket --> crane to roam Mars with tiny helicopter companions. Giant telescopes that unfold like origami, perfectly, to reveal basic patterns of Creation. Using DNA from millions of living humans to reveal the ebb and flow of migrations and populations and even behaviors, from tens of thousands of years ago. Feathered dinosaurs? Trickster octopuses and grateful elephants and boat toppling orcas? Who'd a thunk it?
Moreover, unlike every other priesthood across time, our sages hurry enthusiastically to share it all with us, on PBS or YouTube or social media. And the theological implications... as we rapidly unroll the blueprints of Creation... are stunning, as I describe in my play The Escape.
The rapid sagacity of the fact professions spurs a reaction. So many of the oligarchs who want a return of feudalism now dig lavish prepper compounds and spread hatred of nerds, hoping for the scenario of A Canticle for Liebowitz. But if an "Event" happens, nerds will save everyone. And every prepper hideaway will become a luscious nut to crack.
Folks know, deep down, who their friends are.
So, let’s dive into our latest updates! Like…
Fascinating that we are learning the cerebellum – at the back of the brain – appears to be about a lot more than control of movement.
Want to live longer with replacement organs? Never underestimate Peter Diamandis, whose XPrize work was world-changing and whose book (Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think) and blog are badly needed tonics against the modern, masturbatory fetish of gloom and sanctimony-pessimism. (Only a people with confidence can take on today’s challenges!)
So, here’s Peter’s latest prediction that we’ll grow complete replacement organs by 2030! (I deem it quite plausible. Especially since this piece of news involves another of my heroes, Dean Kamen!)
== Straight outta SciFi ==
This news item about varied forms of life blending together has some folks writing to me: "It reminded me of Heaven's Reach." Well-well, here’s what the article in Popular Science (popsci.com) says: “For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms truly merged into one organism!” Ahem… well… "For the first time" means during the last 100M years. Not great journalism. (That's not an 'eyeblink"!)
Still it’s very interesting. And pertinent to my novel! In Heaven's Reach the blending is violent and mooshes together all forms of life – combining them at the edges of black holes!
Even weirder…
First broached in Stanley Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey … and later in Star Trek… is the notion that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds—something only chemists had done before. Now, scientists at Caltech claim to have "bred" a bacterial protein to have the ability to make the man-made bonds, a finding that has applications in several industries. We now know that nature can adapt to incorporate silicon into carbon-based molecules, the building blocks of life.
Tardigrades! Resilient and a bit like the Trisolarians in The Three Body Problem, they can survive heat, cold, radiation and desiccation in space. Now scientists have injected human cells with the factor that lets tardigrade cells go gel-like when under stress… and it worked! On the single cell level, that is. But with implications that are rife for sci fi…
Is the Y Chromosome disappearing? Or is it essential in some of the ways I speculated, in Glory Season? (As I post this, the e-version is on sale for a week for $2.99!)
== More notions outta sci fi that just might… ==
Laser excitation of Th-229: “Physicists have been hoping for this moment for a long time: For many years, scientists all around the world have been searching for a very specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that promises revolutionary technological applications. It could be used, for example, to build a nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics”.
Now that experimentalists can provoke long lived oscillations in nuclei with lasers. Might a NUCLEAR CLOCK be possible, vastly more precise than today’s mere atomic clocks? Miles Palmer asks: “Is the accuracy of a nuclear clock relative to an atomic clock relatable to the ratio of the strong force to the EM force? Would this technology also impact gravitational wave sensing? Measuring changes in fundamental “constants” of nature?”
(The accuracy might be increased much more than the ratio of the force strengths (137). The frequency of the transition is more that 200K times that of the Cs clock.)
== More science! ==
The tachyon cosmological model is unlikely to pass rigorous experimental tests, given the unlikely nature of tachyons - particles that (in a weird aspect of relativity) might (notionally) move only faster than light. And if they interacted with regular matter could hence (as in Greg Benford's novel Timescape) conceivably violate causality. Now this study suggests that a background flood of tachyons could explain both dark matter and dark energy effects. Well, it has survived a first-order, very preliminary check. One of many more before the idea is taken as more than a quirky side thought.
As for AI and causality and quantum… one of you opined: "Of course, quantum computers may make a mockery of any encryption schemes we have currently. I also have a sneaking suspicion they may make a mockery of causality, if they work as predicted... but I get ahead of myself."
Is biology already applying this? The first half of Penrose/Hameroff 's notion of quantum effects in neurons is blatantly correct... it's likely there are bits inside neurons that use quantum, just like chloroplasts do, during photosynthesis. Moreover, shutting off those bits with anesthetic does correlate with loss of consciousness! I am further convinced by one subjective fact, how vividly we dream. Jeepers, that spectacular, cinemascope nightly drama must require prodigious computational power to spare.
The other half of the Penrose/Hameroff theory is a bit woo-woo... that consciousness happens when we connect with some cosmic quantum order that mere machines will never be able to reach? Hm, well. I've played with that in Sci Fi. But yeah, we're getting way ahead of ourselves.
My friend - and 25-year host of the Closer to Truth sci-philos TV series - Robert Lawrence Kuhn - has just published a comprehensive article on theories of consciousness — A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications — in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. A most-enlightening and balanced survey of the core philosophical issue of our time, especially at a moment of potentially emerging AI.
== Physics is the weirdest science ==
Schrödinger’s Cat illustrates the problem of superposed quantum states that collapse into a single ‘real’ state when observed. Is the observer (which can be you) some kind of all powerful being with reality-enforcing powers, as in Greg Egan’s great novel Quarantine? I’ve long suspected that’s kinda mystical and that systems of particles (e.g. that famous cat) do it all by themselves by interacting with each other, collapsing the state all the time. New models on quantum theory suggest it, as said in this article: “For large systems, spontaneous collapse occurs frequently, rendering them classical in appearance. Subatomic objects interacting with these systems become part of them, leading to rapid collapse of their state and the acquisition of definite coordinates, akin to measurement.”
Want some more gosh-wow? Here’s Sabine with one of her mind-blowing riffs on ‘coincidences in physics.’
== Earth in balance ==
“Natural iron fertilization of the Southern Ocean by windblown dust has been suggested to enhance biological productivity and modulate the climate.” Now comes strong evidence for this.
In fact it seems that around a third of the fecundity and life productivity of the Southern Ocean comes from iron deposited by dust. Supporting this separately, a hugely indicative single event was the clouds of soot a couple of years ago, from Australian wild fires, that was followed immediately by huge plankton blooms and surges of fish populations. And then... whales!
Hm. Well I heard a large part of this cycle is whale poop! Saving the whales may have helped to keep the oceans thriving.
You'll recall in EARTH I had tide powered bottom stirrers sending plumes of silt into fast ocean streams, fertilizing them. What is clear is that the fanatics who have sued and prevented simple experiments in ocean fertilization have been harmful to the good of the world. This needs carefully graduated experimentation now!
== On and on about poor Tesla… ==
A terrific science explainer goes into Nikola Tesla's wonderful induction motor, one of many mighty inventions by a creative genius... though one who is betrayed, daily, by the insipid/raving cult that now surrounds his name. A cult that's desperate to transform a modern, successful, appreciated, collaborative - and psychologically troubled - corporate scientist into some kind of archetype of a persecuted, isolated wizard in his tower, hoarding mighty secrets and powers that were never-since replicated, even today. Nikola Saruman!
What utter, romantic hogwash. What a silly cult. Dig this. Tesla got tons of backing, was moderately rich most of the time, and even his crazier notions - the disproved fantasies - got heaps of $ invested into them. Did he have ups-and-downs? Sure, and it's quite a story with genuine lessons. But some kind of magical seer? Oy, what a load.
Above all, today's tens of millions of bright science minds - yes, standing on the shoulders of such giants - are even more brilliant, possessing instrumentalities roughly a quadrillion times more sensitive than anything Nikola had.
They... are... not... missing any magical wizard-wonders that he supposedly, cryptically hinted at.
Even the underlying reason for this cult - our western-enlightenment notions of romantically boosting underdogs and authority-questioners - that I talk about in Vivid Tomorrows - is so obsolete when it comes to Tesla, who now is *the* establishment cult figure on everyone's lips, like Edison used to be.
Geez I could name dozens of other, far more under-appreciated geniuses, ripe n' ready and deserving of the next cult-revival, instead of this silly and ultimately bo-ring herd-lemming mob that's chanting hosannahs around Nikola Tesla...
...who would have been appalled.
