Voyager's proud lesson. Our skill proves we're better than this mishegas.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions. PBS last month released a documentary to commemorate this human milestone: The Farthest: Voyager In Space, which can be streamed online.

I can't shout loudly enough how epic this was, and is, in every possible way. Not only because of the spectacular scientific advances or the stunning beauty of images from Jupiter, Io, Callisto, Saturn and so on, so beautiful they might have been painted by Van God. Nor is it even the dramatic theological implications of this feat and those that followed, as we proceeded to perform so incredibly well the very first task that was assigned to Adam -- to 'name all the beasts' -- seeking and studying and describing and naming new moons, craters, asteroids, phenomena and ever more wonders of creation.

No, what strikes me most about these fantastic accomplishments is how good at it we are! How skilled, when we focus and combine our talents and knowledge and teamwork, even with primitive 21st or near-neolithic 20th Century technologies. We are good!  Or we can be, as a people, nation, civilization, species. And those who would have us retreat from such challenges -- hunkering down in dumbass old feudalism, or studying only the myths of bronze-age herdsmen -- insult the potential that was given to us -- by God or by Nature -- to be so much more.

As it is said in Genesis itself: "... nothing will be beyond them."

== I get to talk to fascinating innovators ==

At “Science Foo Camp” – hosted on the Google Campus by O’Reilly Media – I got to chat with some truly epic folks. George Church talked about using DNA as an information storage medium with far higher bit density than anything electronic. He is also a pioneer of efforts to fully understand genomes of lost species, like mammoths. And leading the open de-extinction effort as director of Revive & Restore was Ryan Phelan (along with her co-director and arm-candy, the inimitable Stewart Brand) one of whose projects is to resurrect the passenger pigeon.

The controversy surrounding the possibility of de-extinction is presented in How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction, by Beth Shapiro. An article from The Atlantic, Welcome to Pleistocene Park, by Ross Anderson, discusses how restoring herds of mammoths might help save the world from human ecological stupidity: "In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.”

Other luminaries at Science Foo included Google Chief of Research Peter Norvig and computer science pioneer Danny Hillis (who designed the 10,000 year timepiece being built for Stewart Brand’s Clock of the Long Now.) Science journalist George Dyson was there, and philosopher of attention Linda Stone plus sci-tech publisher Tim O’Reilly and Pete Worden, who as director of NASA Ames shepherded the great planet-finding Kepler Mission, before taking over Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives (aiming to both do SETI and pioneer the kind of laser-driven light sail ships I describe in Existence.) Pete and I argued amiably during an open-discussion panel about how to ensure that mature processes take place, before zealots shout “messages” into the cosmos. There were so many fascinating people, I came away convinced that humans must be capable of finding ways past our problems, right?

I then hurried to Monterey for the Starship Congress, having dinner with Miguel Alcubierre, the renowned Mexican cosmologist whose concept for an FTL drive seems the “least implausible” of those calculated so far. The next day, after my starship talk, I delivered another at the nearby Naval Postgraduate School on the vast panoply of worrisome “threats” our civilization must confront, before we make it to the semi-mythological other side -- a mature civilization.

 Oh, on the same trip I addressed about a hundred alumni of my alma mater, Caltech, on the “Art of Prediction.”

Hey, it’s rough work, but someone has to do it.

== Problems and progress ==

Is it time for one of our science roundups!

Can a cancer cure lead to bioweapons? Intel executive John Sotos argues that the eventual success of Joe Biden’s “cancer moonshot”, a U.S. government-funded program that’s aimed at finding vaccine-based treatments for cancer, would necessarily open up the potential for bioweapons of unimaginable destructive potential.

Every year, a "dead zone" appears in the Gulf of Mexico. This year's dead zone is the biggest one ever measured. It covers 8,776 square miles — the size of New Jersey.  The Black Sea is already effectively dead.  The Mediterranean and Caribbean are dying.  We live in a science fictional world of severe danger… and a denialist cult proclaims that all worries are “hoaxes.” These folks need to know: the angry world that ensues will look for obstructionists to blame, who prevented civilization from using science to act in time.  That’s not a threat. It’s just cause and effect.

Oh, a couple of notes on the recent calamity in Texas. First, that Hurricane Harvey gained its "1000 year event" power while lingering above that very human-caused dead zone I just mentioned. Just sayin'.

Second, while we cheer the pluck, stamina and resilience displayed by Texans -- aided by their Louisiana neighbors -- let's keep in mind that they elect the worst politicians in the nation. (Far more was done for them by the "federal bureaucrats" they despise.)

(See my earlier posting of a chapter from my 1989 novel EARTH, portraying a future (2038) Houston that's resilient and thriving after yet another hurricane flooding.)

== More signs of being misled ==

As told by SCOUT: “Last week New Scientist reported on an important signal of Russia's increasingly sophisticated cyberwar capabilities. It's a signal that would be easy to miss if you weren't paying attention, so I'm highlighting it here for your attention.  Back in June, 20 vessels in the Black Sea experienced likely GPS spoofing -- essentially their GPS units suddenly thought they were somewhere they weren't. (In this case, on land at a Russian airport more than 30 km away.) This is different than GPS jamming, which causes the GPS receiver to die, sounding an alarm.”

Care to connect the dots to the two U.S. Navy destroyers that suffered weird navigation errors in the same crowded waterways, leading to deadly and expensive collisions? Read Frederik Pohl’s chilling novel The Cool War. To see where this might take us. We need leaders.

A quirky look at the notion that we might go beyond tsunami warning systems and go to tsunami remediation.  

== Our evolutionary past ==

Let's get back to that notion of possibly reviving old-timey species.... There are enough Neanderthal skeletons in the birth to adolescent range to make some interesting comparisons to Homo Sapiens of the same age. The Neanderthal baby at birth has the same size and shape as a human baby but afterwards there is an important divergence. The Neanderthal baby brain follows that of a chimpanzee with regular increase of brain size until adult but the human baby brain grows 250% in the first year vastly outstripping the growth of Neanderthal babies and most of that is in the prefrontal cortex. It is asserted that our specific type of intelligence comes from this crucial first year of life. 

(I portray Neanderthal revival in EXISTENCE.)

Oh, but there were earlier calamities that opened opportunities. The current theory for how multi-cell animals got their start is pretty amazing.  A couple of decades ago my old Caltech housemate Joe Kirschvink stitched together evidence that our world had gone through an “Iceball Earth” phase, a bit less than a billion years ago, when the Sun was cooler and the boundary of its Continually Habitable (‘Goldilocks’) Zone (CHZ) was farther in. Which meant that if too much greenhouse gas was removed by the photosynthetic microbes – especially algae, then swarming the oceans -- a deep cooling was possible. In The Atlantic, Ed Yong writes: 

“Around 717 million years ago, the Earth turned into a snowball. Most of the ocean, if not all of it, was frozen at its surface. The land, which was aggregated into one big supercontinent, was also covered in mile-thick ice.” This giga ice age would have lasted till volcanoes replenished (and overshot) the atmosphere’s CO2, causing a melt of incredible speed. Joe thinks it might have happened more than once.

“The ice melted, and the surface of the sea reached temperatures of 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. By 659 million years ago, the world had transformed from snowball to greenhouse. And just 14 million years later, the ice returned and the planet became a snowball for the second time.” This fascinating (recommended) article cleverly calls the cycle (as did my longtime colleague George Martin) “a song of ice and fire.”

Bearing some similarities in appearance to modern flying squirrels, the earliest examples of gliding mammals yet discovered are dated to the Jurassic period about 160 million years ago.

And finally....

Growing up with Alexa: Researchers looked at how children ages three to 10 interacted with Alexa, Google Home, a tiny game-playing robot called Cozmo, and a smartphone app called Julie Chatbot. The kids in the study determined that the devices were generally friendly and trustworthy, and they asked a range of questions to get to know the technologies (“Hey Alexa, how old are you?”) and figure out how they worked (“Do you have a phone inside you?”). This article explores some of the pros and cons. But it leaves out the obvious, that certain children always had this, in the family servants. It is one more case of middle class humans wanting and getting the chance to live in ways once restricted to lords. (Like having a clean change of clothes; what luxury.)

Okay. Cool stuff.  Ponder Voyager a bit, today!  Watch that PBS special.  Then fight for this glorious, scientific civilization. 

Start by pinning your crazy uncle down and getting him to admit he's been trained to hate scientists! (And every other fact profession.) He'll deny it. Don't let him get away with that.  Take him to the nearest university and introduce him to some. (Yes! Just walk down a hallway and knock on doors. You'll have a great time and learn tons of things you never knew.)

 Sure, you won't change Uncle's mind by much, though every little bit helps. The one who really matters -- your quiet but sane aunt -- will be listening.