Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast Show, Plus Selected Discography Review

Bruce Dickinson with flamethrowers. From Rolling Stone.

I went to see Maiden in September in Sacramento (and thanks to Mr. Black for inviting me.) It was one of the best shows I've been to; I saw them in 2003 and don't remember them being this good, and I've seen the Iron Maidens tribute band and sad before that they actually put on a better show. (Still a good show, still worth seeing.) But before I saw them I was forced to confront an uncomfortable fact. I consider myself a pretty big Maiden fan. Yet, my knowledge of them is really four of their (far more numerous) albums - Number of the Beast, Powerslave, Somewhat in Time, and Seventh Son. Yet I didn't realize until recently that Powerslave was after Number. I didn't realize that Nicko didn't join until after Number. And I had never listened to Piece of Mind at all! (Except for the Trooper, and somehow I never thought too much about where Trooper came from when it wasn't on the other four albums.) And I had never heard Paul Di'Anno or any of the post First Dickinson Era songs. When I like things, I like to be able to organize the information and parse those things linearly. So finding out there were such holes in my Maiden knowledge made me feel as if I'd been lying to people for years about being a fan. So before I saw them, I set out to listen to all of Iron Maiden's catalog, so I would appreciate anything they played at the show.

In this endeavor I failed spectacularly, realizing the morning of the show I still had 9 albums to go. But let's be honest: Iron Maiden has a lot of goddamn albums, and some of those albums suck hard. For example, I couldn't get all the way through even the first Blaze Bailey record, because every time he sings I cringe. (He sounds afraid to be captured in a recording, and with good reason.) I saw no reason why the second one with him would be any better. And in point of fact, my interest in this project was spurred by Maiden being an awesome band whose early albums I thought I knew but realized I had missed some - so not only did I avoid Blaze Bailey, this doesn't even include anything after the first Bruce Dickinson era. Yes I know that's about half their albums. If you're a Maiden fan and you think I'm missing some good Second Dickinson Era work, please comment below.

I did this once before when I filled in a gap in my metal history by binge-listening to Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, but this project differs from my Zeppelin binge-listen in many ways. First, I was already a Maiden fan (or at least of their core work), whereas I was almost completely ignorant of Zeppelin. So with Zeppelin, it was worth trying as closely as possible to replicate the experience a Zeppelin fan might have had at the time when the record came out, and I would avoid reading anything about the album album until after I'd listened to it. No such restrictions in this post.


FIRST: THE SHOW, AND MAIDEN

I would only spend this much time writing about Maiden if I loved them, but of course the stuff that comes to mind when we sit down to write is often criticism. This is not a Maiden hit piece, because they're one of my favorites. But my number one band has always been Metallica. That said, Maiden makes for an interesting comparison and clearly out-competes Metallica in certain regards, namely, stage show and output. Maiden pre-dates Metallica by 6 years and they're in a category all their own. Are they NWOBHM? No, too early for that, plus they're still here. Do you group them in with Sabbath and Deep Purple? No, too much like modern thrash for that. And who else decides, when one guitarist leaves and they recruit another one and then the original guitarist comes back, to just have three guitarists and six people total? And who else uses keyboards to this extent without distracting from the rest of the music and shifting uncomfortably toward pop a la mid-80s Rush? (More on this later.)

Metallica thinks of itself as predominantly a live band, who obtains and solidifies fans this way. This is wrong, period. Their concert movie Through the Never attempted to capitalize on this false belief with predictable failure. And here's the comparison - 9 months before I saw Maiden at GoldenOne in Sacramento, I saw Metallica at the same venue. (Talk about controlled conditions.) And I literally left the Metallica show early because I was bored. I hadn't seen them in over 10 years so maybe that's why it struck me, but - Metallica basically just stands there and plays. Do you know what Iron Maiden had? The show opened with a life-sized P-51 Mustang hanging over the stage with propellers turning. Eddy comes out literally larger than life, and Bruce has a saber duel with him, and of course Bruce actually knows how to fight with a saber. There are costume changes. There are backdrops. And (and this cannot be emphasized enough) at one point Dickinson comes out with not one, but two flamethrowers and he's shooting out fire while he's singing. And the band's energy is unassailable, for guys in their sixties or otherwise. It was clear to me five minutes in that I would not have been able to physically keep up with Dickinson's running and climbing. I should add that Lars Ulrich admitted the reason they started putting up stage props (ie collapsing Lady Justice) was to compete with Iron Maiden. Conclusion: Iron Maiden puts on a much better show than Metallica.

My studies also gave me a chance to read up on the personnel. I'd always thought that Harris was probably the core of the band, which sets up a conflict with the vocalist.

On Bruce Dickinson: after this show it's obvious he's the best front-man in the history of metal, period. As much as I love him, I do have to temper the adulation a bit: he's not as brilliant a vocalist as he's made out to be - he doesn't hold a candle to Chris Cornell - but his confidence in his delivery, staying power during a show, and (obviously) breath control are outstanding. He also demonstrates that music is on one side about performing and on the other composing, and (like Dave Lombardo) shows that you can be a great performer with being a great composer. His solo work isn't spectacular, and the songs he contributed to tend to stick out. Can I Play With Madness especially comes to mind as my least favorite on Seventh Son. He doesn't seem to have too bad a case of LSD but it did always strike me as odd that at some points he has tended to talk about the other band members in third person (rather than first person) plural, which obviously suggests distance, but they seem to be having a lot more fun together now that at any point before.

On Steve Harris: the bass player actually has to know how music is constructed. And people talk a lot about the galloping bass - Maiden does use crunch guitar a bit, but the gallop takes the place of crunchy riffs in driving songs, yet another unique aspect of Maiden. I think Maiden's progressive cred is not as strong as is usually suggested, and some songs have very jarring verse-to-chorus differences in the vocal melodies which might work in a slower tempo prog song but driving as fast as they do, with Dickinson's voice delivering that in the front, is unique but not a positive for me. As I learned more about Maiden's history, Harris came across as kind of an introverted super-focused music savant and this interview suggests to me that is the case, and no it's not his barely penetrable (for this Yank) accent. (Not a put-down. I subscribe to the theory that greatest-ever rock climber Alex Honnolt is on the spectrum as well, and I love that guy too, and if I didn't, why should either of them care, given what they've accomplished.) Finally, Harris (like the other blokes) is an unapologetic patriotic Englishman, which is real. (What was it George III said to John Adams about national attachments?)

On Paul Di'Anno: both due to his unreliability and low skill level, they made one of the best decisions in rock history to dump him and bring in Dickinson. Reading about him, he strikes me as someone with a personality disorder and associated substance habits which have resulted in repeated legal difficulties and now, very bad chronic health problems. Kurt Cobain was similar except he actually had some talent, though that's independent of the substance problem. (Character pathology is not.)




I'm...not sure how to feel about this. From imgur.
THE ALBUMS

On the plus side, Maiden has been incredibly productive. On the down-side, you can tell that there are very few riffs which are left on the cutting room floor. Dickinson has alluded to this by saying that Rod Smallwood* packages everything for sale (advisable as a commercial strategy, not to keep median quality of art high) and Harris commented on one album (I believe Fear of the Dark) that it was unusual that they had actually cut material.

Iron Maiden - Not bad for a first offering in that era, both in performance and recording quality. Phantom of the Opera sticks out. A lot of the riffs on this album would be right at home in early Bad Religion, so when Harris denies a punk influence (if only starting out; listen to Running Free, please) I have to laugh, and honestly metal has a tendency to get too ponderous and slow and self-important, and punk has saved metal from itself on at least two occasions (NWOBHM, and the early 2000s as outlined here.)

Killers - Nothing really stuck out to me about this one except they were starting to sound like Iron Maiden. (Hear also the Kill Em All to Ride the Lightning transition with Metallica. The most Metallica-sounding song is the Diamondhead cover.) I always thought all the history topics were from Dickinson but here's an instrumental about Genghis Khan before Dickinson set foot in the studio with them. By the way, I used to like Rollins, but his routine about Iron Maiden is pretty long-winded an un-funny. He's turning into loud music's William Shatner, and I was saying that before I knew he was friends with William Shatner. But I digress.)

Number of the Beast - Classic album, with far more strong than weak songs and moments (those being Invaders and Gangland.) Run to the Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name, obviously. 22 Acacia Avenue is a greater song than anyone gives it credit for. Back in the Village two albums later is a better "The Prisoner" homage than the song here. Incidentally, note the themes on Metallica's Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets, two to four years later: someone waiting to be executed. Organized crime/gangs. Horror (Cthulhu vs Children of the Damned.) Being trapped in a place where people control your mind. This is inadequately addressed in the Maiden vs Metallica rivalry, which has grown over the long term among fans, as opposed to the Megadeth rivalry.) You know that weird outro on Garage Days Re-Revisited after Green Hell? Yeah, that's Run to the Hills - maybe Maiden wouldn't give them permission. Has Maiden ever covered a Metallica song, even obliquely like this?

Piece of Mind - this is the album I had entirely missed except for the Trooper. I'm not 100% sad; this is definitely the weakest of the 1982-88 era. The Trooper is indisputably great but Flight of Icarus and Where Eagles Dare sort of drag on, and this is one of the moments where Dickinson's vibrato is too much.

Powerslave - Little need be said about this. Aces High, Two Minutes Till Midnight, Back in the Village, and the under-rated Flash of the Blade. In the chorus of Powerslave is the first hint of the band's use of more ambient atmospherics (a very under-exploited part of music in metal; see Tool for much more of this.)

Somewhere In Time - and here are the keyboards - not Geddy Lee, I'm tired of playing bass so let's do something poppy kind of keyboards, but supporting the overall mission. This is also really where Maiden's famous thirds make their first really prominent appearance (title track, Deja Vu, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.) I have to say: I was exposed to the "Hellenization facilitated later Christianization" by the song Alexander the Great. I also reasoned that Loneliness was actually about the Sillitoe short story by that name, but realized when I read the story it wasn't really. Also, in Venice when I was 18 I bought a giant silkscreen banner of the cover of Somewhere in Time for like US$12 that was on my ceiling all through college and for a few years thereafter. Goddammit I wish I know what I did with that thing.

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son - a masterpiece un-improved by further adulation. One of the greatest metal albums of all time. This is a true unified concept album, to the point where playing a single song in isolation at a concern seems somehow wrong. Where Seventh Son breaks out into the guitar solo is specifically one of the greatest moments in metal, from there right to the end. If you listen to anything for the first time as a result of this blog post, listen to this record, all of it, in one go.

No Prayer for the Dying - it's a tragedy that this album followed Seventh Son. How, how could such a masterwork be followed by such a lackluster offering? After listening I actually thought in terms of alternate history how metal would have been different (and better) if Maiden followed up Seventh Son with a more worthy recording. I never got this in high school because the other Maiden fans I knew felt the same as I now do after I listened to it. Everyone, including the band, beat up on the sound on this record; it was made in a barn that Harris had converted (or by some descriptions, was still converting) to a studio. (It seems consistent with what I know of Harris that once he gets an idea in his head - like recording in a barn - he would carry it to conclusion.) Compositionally, overall this sounds like Seventh Son or Somewhat in Time tracks left on the cutting room floor, and without keyboards. That's the first problem. The second is not so much the recording. To my ear, sure, the drums sound mushy, the mixing is not great (which is not the recording) but what really kills it is Dickinson's performance. It's a combination of "caricature of himself" and "banged it out in one take and let's go get a pint", and these flaws are all the more apparent for the extreme prominence he's given in the final mix. Harris has in the past suggested Dickinson was performing live half-assed or otherwise phoning it in, which Dickinson has always denied, but listening to this album I can see why that might cross someone's mind. There's really no standout moment for me on this one. Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter seems almost like a joke song, more worthy of Motley Crue or some glam rock band trying to sound just scary enough to boost sales, and of course was brought in as one of Dickinson's solo projects.

Fear of the Dark - Fear of the Dark is a great song and sounds very similar to Seventh Son material (Harris has four modes: nice melodic minor melodies like this, Celtic-sounding bits in 3, galloping parts, or filler.) I like one of the Charlotte songs and From Here to Eternity is fun, but it sounds like a hard rock song, and I was shocked to learn it's a Harris number and not from Dickinson.

Aside from getting douche-chills from Blaze Bailey for a few songs, and the first song on Brave New World, that's where my project ended. What else should I listen to?


*If the manager in Spinal Tap had been named "Rod Smallwood," you would think it was too ridiculous. Yet here we are.

Profits From Asteroid Mining

After the very cool news showing pretty solid evidence that an asteroid breakup and bolide shower was likely responsible for the mid-Ordovician ice age (Schmitz et al 2019), I read about one candidate parent body (or what's left of it) for the L-type chondrites, 433 Eros. This article states that 433 Eros contains "...20 billion tonnes of aluminum and similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum."

So I set out to calculate the mineral value, based on current prices. For aluminum, I see bauxite cheapest at $50/ton. For gold and platinum, I couldn’t find values per ton of ore so I looked up the current prices (US$1533 and $955/oz resp. as of this writing) then look up average richness of the ores (1 oz/ton and 0.1 oz per ton resp.). Assuming similar richness in asteroid ores to deposits on Earth, would be over thirty-three trillion dollars, which is about 41% of the annual GDP of Earth. And that’s assuming an average 2% growth rate. (The article I linked to calculated twenty trillion, which it may have been closer to in 2014.) Granted, obviously the value will drop when there is suddenly an influx of valuable metals, but I'm assuming you're smart enough to leak the ore slowly and somehow get it to the surface with causing any repeat Chicxulubs.


A question and an observation:

1) How to get down to the surface? Gliders? Can you make gliders out of the (maybe partly processed) material that are disassembled at the surface? There are a number of established concerns that have gathered investors for this enterprise, but that I found, none of them has described how they would get material to the Earth's surface.

2) Most proposals involve mining the asteroids where they are, rather than bringing them nearer to Earth. There's actually a Wikipedia article with a good roundup and list of the companies, but that also points out that Osiris Rex will bring back 60g at a cost of 1 billion dollars.

3) At 2900 cubic kilometers, even if 433 Eros were a perfect sphere (which it's not) it would be just under 9 km to the farthest point from the surface. The deepest operating mine on Earth is South Africa's Ashanti Mponeng at 3.84 km deep. But on Eros, there would not be the same increase in heat and all the attendant problems of real gravity - so the proper comparison is to distance to the pit face. El Teniente in Chile is digging out a single (underground) road that is 17 km, and there are overall in that one mine 3,000 km of tunnels. Compare to Earth, which may have mineral deposits more than 4km below the crust, but we may never got to them - and past the crust, the inside of the planet is a waste because the mantle is molten and mixed. Of course the lay conception of asteroids as solid rocks is usually not correct, as most of them we've interacted with have been rubble piles barely held together by gravity.

4) I selfishly want asteroids to be mined in my lifetime because I believe that's where we'll find evidence of alien life - in the form of small mutant von Neumann probes made from organic chemicals.

CNS Damage in Mice Experiencing Mars-Voyage-Like Radiation for Six Months

This is not good news. We should expect that humans undergoing a Mars trip, with selectively vulnerable hippocampi and dependent on complex behaviors for survival, will fare even worse per unit time, and worse still over the closer to twenty-four months for the out and back that such a trip would take. Regardless of air, water and food requirements, this is yet another barrier to even colonizing the rest of our own solar system, much less getting to another star, and another reason why we might never see interstellar civilizations composed of planetary-surface-evolved organisms rather than machines. Paper here, summary here.

An Existential Risk Comparable to the Singularity

Imagine that due to some breakthrough in computer science, we can determine (with certainty) that for a certain architecture, there are some designs that will "work"; that is, when activated, become a successful recursively self-improving general AI. Now assume that 13 such designs have already been tried. A tiny fraction to be sure; and yet in no case has there been any discussion before the research team turned each of them on, no input from other researchers, no public comment, and certainly no attention from policy makers of any sort.

The catch is that this architecture is highly iterative, and it has to run for a long time before you find out if it's going to "wake up" - consequently the researchers load the software and hardware into satellites, because the earliest any of them would "wake up" would be 2036. (For our purposes, assume once launched, these satellites are out of reach - like Elon Musk's car.)

I assume the AI safety community would have something to say about this; about people unilaterally turning on instances of this architecture, and placing it out of reach. Unlikely though it is, any one of those could wake up and we could find the Solar System transformed overnight, and not necessarily to humanity's benefit.

Why such an esoteric thought experiment? It's not really a thought experiment. There have already been 13 active attempts so far (that we know about) to signal nearby star systems. Given the constraint of the speed of light, the earliest we could hear back (or meet someone/something) from any of them would be 2036. Much like the satellite-launched AIs, once you send the message, you can't delete it from their inbox. The 1-in-29 million comes from the original Drake equation estimate of 3,500 civilizations in the galaxy, and one hundred billion star systems. Note that this thought experiment assumes every species is confined to one solar system, but if they have interstellar travel (and follow the signal back to the source) then that 1-in-29 million probability would be much higher.

AIs are at least designed by humans, with possible ethical constraints. Aliens able to visit our solar system would not in any way have our interests at heart. If you're in the rationalist community and you're concerned about a technological singularity, you should be very concerned about existential-risk-level-dangerous wildcat attempts to reveal our presence to other solar systems. This is called METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) instead of SETI, and you can read more about stopping it here.

If You Like to Gamble, I Tell You I'm Your Man

Wrll, it made me think of Motorhead, for a second, but no actual connection. The same cannot be said for this.

Things That Might Bother You About Avengers Movies

I noted before that the "20 Things Wrong With [Amazingly Successful Franchise Film]" articles are sad, then wrote just such an article. This is a very short one for a very few of the things about MCU movies that are most bothersome. To me.

Complete inconsistency in relative strength: the battles are what's actually important here, and even so, there's no rhyme or reason. Yes that keeps the audience interested and serve to advance the plot but come on, most powerful guy in the universe hits a mortal with no special armor or anything and they just get the wind knocked out of them - but he can knock down Thor or the Hulk? And he constantly doesn't take obvious shots?

Zero sum thinking: I get that Thanos is a bad guy, so his message - that there are only so many resources, and more and more mouths to feed - is not the one the good guys agree with. Yet the franchise appears to endorse it. The disappearance of half the life on Earth would be first, economically catastrophic. Guess what? Smartphones and corn don't just grow themselves out of the ground. Plus, the specialized knowledge required means that the disruption in productivity would actually be more than a 50% drop. Imagine your company's level of functioning if 50% of people called in sick tomorrow - it would be much less than 50%. And of course, the disappearance of the Earth's oxygen-producing organisms, plankton, etc. would be much worse.

Profound scientific incuriosity, including by career scientists: "Hey, I'm on Asgard! Should I maybe try to pocket a few pens or take a few pictures, ask people how things work? Nah, I'll just hang out and get all wrapped up in my personal issues." Incontrovertible proof of aliens on Earth by their repeated attacks, but no mention of a second Copernican revolution in decentralizing mankind's image of itself, or trying to get the alien tech for more than for the Avengers to make better guns. No attempts to start trading or at least communicating with aliens. Also, Thanos's snap would answer a bunch of questions - for example, which things are alive or not (did half of prions disappear? Viroids? Kind of weird that no wombats disintegrated, I was always suspicious of those things. However, Galaxy S5 phones disintegrated but not S4's, so that must be the sentience boundary.)


If these things start to bother you, though you can never really return to your previous innocence once you've noticed them, you can over-intellectualize and get partway back. Rather than criticize these gross inconsistencies, you can think of these movies as modern action-expressionism. The original expressionist film movement is often described as portraying the (actually more important to the viewer) inner emotional reality of the narrative, rather than the superficial matter of the characters' physical world. This coincides with the hyper-reality discussed by Umberto Eco (i.e., where for example artificial lemonade is more lemonadish than any real lemonade ever was; the California Adventure section at Disneyland is more like the Sierras because it purifies and concentrates all the salient aspects of the Sierras, etc.) Alternatively, you could think of the MCU movies as magical realism, where the magic is focused on violence rather than relationships. Or, that MCU is modern-world fantasy in the same way that Star Wars is fantasy; though it takes place in space, exploration of the science is absent, and there are wizards and sword-fighting.

Finally: THERE WILL BE A STAR WARS-MCU CROSSOVER BY 31 DECEMBER 2028. Anyone willing to bet? And the way things are going, it will be Disney trying to use MCU to salvage Star Wars rather than the other way around.

Asia, Don't Cry (Alpha, 1983)

Hey, I don't want to hear your whining about me posting this song. Why am I making you listen to this? You know what you did. And now you're paying the price. Yeah, keep complaining and see how much good it does.

The best part is at 2:55 when he freaks out in the most stupid way I've ever seen.

If Threonine and Aspartate are Detected on Europa, They Must Have Been Recently Generated

Important paper for detecting biosignatures elsewhere in the solar system. Truong et al measure the decomposition rate of amino acids in conditions mimicking the under-ice oceans of Europa or Enceladus. Using that data, they infer whether any amino acids detected there are leftovers from early abiotic chemistry, or must have resulted from a more recent process. In particular threonine and aspartate are unstable over time and if detected at concentrations greater than 1 nM, they must have been generated recently. Click through to the paper below.

Truong N, Monroe AA, Glein CR, Anbar AD, Lunine JI. Decomposition of Amino Acids in Water with Application to In-Situ Measurements of Enceladus, Europa and Other Hydrothermally Active Icy Ocean Worlds. arXiv:1904.04407 [astro-ph.EP]

Warm Spot on Europa Produces Plume

Image credit space.com

Current explanations for this warm plume (in fact, authors refer to it as a hotspot) are thermal inertia (basically, having higher specific heat than surrounding areas and so retaining heat longer than surrounding areas) or more excitingly, subsurface geologic activity - which would have implications for the evolution of life. Blog post here, paper here.

Trumbo SK, Brown ME, Butler BJ. ALMA Thermal Observations of a Proposed Plume Source Region on Europa. The Astronomical Journal, Volume 154, Number 4.

The Evidence - 2013 Metal Versions of Synchronicity II (The Police, Synchronicity, 1983) and Pressure (Billy Joel, The Nylon Curtain, 1982)

I've always thought that both of these uncharacteristically intense (for eighties "adult contemporary") and well-written songs would hold up well to a metal or hard rock treatment. Synchronicity II has that great phrygian progression at the end and with the perfect fifth intervals anticipates later-eighties metal. Apparently I'm not the only one who has thought this, because They do, in the capable hands of The Evidence. Side note: The Evidence hails from Calgary, Alberta, and this fact will not surprise you if you've been through there. The sheer per capita rate of solid metal and rock bands from southern Alberta is amazing.

(More metal versions of 80s songs here.)

Molecules with MW > 200 Found in Enceladus Vapor

That's bigger than all amino acids and nucleobases. (Note, 9 months old, I had missed this before.) Press release here, paper here. (Postberg et al, Nature. 2018 Jun; 558(7711): 564–568.)

Putting Numbers on Panspermia: Material From Earth Impacting Outer System Moons, and Escaping Solar System

In a simulation, Worth Sigurdsson and House (2013) (WSH) retrodict that Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus have received 1,900, 370, 510 and 340 metric tons of material from Earth, with 3.4 billion metric tons from Earth ejected from the solar system entirely. Enceladus may be less interesting if it really did only form in the cretaceous, but the others have all been there since the start of the solar system. WSH state explicitly that they didn't try to estimate the viability of life surviving the journey, but it cannot be repeated enough that we now have evidence that living things - metazoans, in fact - can survive uncontrolled re-entry with minimal protection, as some worms that were on board the Columbia were found alive on the ground weeks later. We're now able to start putting bounds at least on local panspermia (within our own solar system), though it would be interesting to estimate the chances for gravitational capture by surrounding stars. This is exciting not only to flesh out the realism of panspermia as traditionally considered, but also the idea of very small, molecule- or cell-sized organic von Neumann probes passively spreading between lower-gravity bodies.

A very basic calculation using water surface area and the time it took for life to appear on Earth, shows that all other things being equal, there is a 1-in-3 chance of indigenous life on Europa. An experiment in reproducing impact conditions and local conditions on these moons, along with adding most-likely-transferred Earth fauna, seems that it would be fairly easy to do - a sort of Miller-Urey experiment for local panspermia.

R.J. Worth, Steinn Sigurdsson, and Christopher H. House. Seeding Life on the Moons of the Outer Planets via Lithopanspermia. Astrobiology, Dec 2013.

Asteroid Bennu is Ejecting Dust; Also, "Alien Tech" on Bennu? (Hint: No)

One solution to the Fermi paradox is that there's evidence around us and we just haven't noticed it yet. An estimate of 20 MA for colonizing the whole Milky Way has been advanced, and if von Neumann probes (VNPs) are possible, then they should be around us. We have a tendency to think of VNPs as industrial-age metal objects like Apollo 11, but organic VNPs could diffuse between low-gravity bodies when interstellar comets or asteroids pass through solar systems. Therefore, when we start finding some interesting high molecular weight organic polymers with non-random monomer sequences in the sample-return specimens from asteroids like Bennu, we should seriously consider that this might be what we're looking at. It is therefore interesting that Bennu is ejecting material (see here and here), which would be required if the VNPs are cellular- or molecular-scale chemical replicators that spread passively.

Here ends the serious part.

Admittedly this is an extraordinary hypothesis, and it requires consistent extraordinary evidence to support it. However, noticing that asteroids have boulders on them isn't extraordinary.

Look! Boulders! And they're circled! Gosh, that MUST be alien tech!
One excitable UFO-hunting schmendrick insisted (after doing a complex analysis in Microsoft Paint, i.e. circling the boulders) that Bennu is "littered with alien tech". Then so is the construction site near my house! So is the desert! There are boulders all OVER the place - my gosh, we're surrounded by alien tech! Run! Apparently skulls have also been spotted. Space pirates? This is a particularly morbid form of pareidolia.

Security Precautions for Keyless Ignition vs Remote Entry

This is certainly the most practical post in the history of this blog, but it involves the hazards of relying on modern technology; specifically, power over reliability; one characteristic of the twenty-first century.

Some months ago I came home from vacation to find my car door open - not wide open, in fact as shut as it could be without actually being closed. Of course the battery was stone dead. I worried that this meant my electronic entry system had been hacked (otherwise, I would have to accept that I'm the kind of idiot who doesn't close my car door all the way when I'm about to leave for vacation.) Recently, another person on my street had both their cars entered without any signs of being forced, and they're quite sure the cars were both locked. Neighbors have been advising me to put my car keys in a Faraday cage when I'm out of the house.

If this is actually a problem, you can't rely on car manufacturers and dealerships telling you about it, despite it being clearly documented as a real problem that occurs in the real world. (Also, yes I do physically block cameras on my devices when I'm not using them - and yes, my wife once caught a virus which started taking photos from her camera - and yes, when James Comey was director of the FBI, he recommended covering your device cameras as well.)

For grins, I called my Honda dealership and asked the service department about this. With what sounded like a straight face, the technician told me that this has never happened. When I told him it's been documented on video, his counterargument was: no it hasn't, it's never happened. So they weren't much help. Ultimately I called a locksmith who verified what I thought must be the case about the various systems. (If you're reading this and I have anything wrong, PLEASE comment.)

The reason I'm posting this is that I had so much difficulty trying to answer the question by searching online, partly because there's no consistent terminology that I could find online. That's why I ended up having to call the (useless) dealership and quite helpful locksmith. So let's define terminology.

A remote door opener (the older original kind, which is the kind I have) requires you to press a button to send a radio signal, which unlocks the car or opens the trunk. There may be a chip in the key that is required for the car to start when you turn the ignition - but you do have to put the key in an ignition. Most of these use a rolling code that changes each time. In other words, every time you press the unlock button, the car sends back a signal saying "okay, that's the right code and I'm opening the lock - but here's the new code for next time."

To review: remote door openers only send a signal when you press the button, and you have to physically turn the ignition.

Keyless entry may require you to press a button on a key fob to open the door, or it may just automatically unlock the car when you're standing right next to it. Then, once you're in the car, there's no ignition to turn, just a button to push. The car will only start if the key fob is very close (inside the car.) In this case, the key fob is constantly sending out a signal to the car without you doing anything - certainly, in order for the car to start, and (if your locks open automatically without pushing any buttons) to open the locks as well.

To review: keyless entry constantly sends out a signal, and when you're close enough to the car, the car will allow you turn it on (and may unlock automatically.)

The "hack" is called a signal amplification relay attack (SARA), and really only is useful for keyless entry, not for remote door openers. Why? Your keyless entry key fob is designed to be very weak so your car can't detect it from more than a few feet away. But if the key is close enough to the outside wall of your house, with a special device, a criminal can detect the coded signal, amplify it, and send it to another device that's right next to the car which repeats the code. No code-breaking required; just one device for picking up the code as it's being constantly transmitted by the keyless entry key fob, sending it to a second device next to the car which repeats it. The car thinks that the key fob is right there, opens, and allows itself to be driven. (This is exactly what they did in the link above.)

You could conceivably do the same thing to a remote door opener like mine, but the bad guys would have to be sitting on your street with their devices to record the signal when you press it. The weakness of keyless entry is that it's constantly transmitting and actually lets you start the car. This is in contrast to remote door openers, which only transmit when you press the button - and even then you still need the physical key to start the car.

CONCLUSION: if you have keyless entry, then YES, you should keep your keys in a Faraday cage - especially when they're going to be sitting unused for a long period (when you're on vacation.) Most people recommend wrapping in aluminum foil or putting them in a coffee can, inside your refrigerator. (I'm only repeating what I've read and make no claim as to whether this is actually enough to defeat SARA devices.) It would be much harder to do this to one of the older remote entry keys, and I am definitely not planning to get a keyless entry key fob. The risk:benefit is obvious. The only benefit to keyless entry is literally that you don't have to press a button, and don't have to move your arm to turn a key - in exchange for exposing yourself to this security problem.

AIs Are Beating Experts at Old, Relevant, Real-World Problems

When I was a molecular biology undergrad in the mid 90s, the Big Question in biochemistry was protein folding - how to predict the 3D structure of a protein from its primary (linear) sequence of amino acids. Solving this problem would provide a massive boon to many fields, not least of which is drug development. But it's a hard problem: a factoid cited to impress this upon people is that if proteins folded by passing through every possible configuration randomly until they found its working (not usually lowest energy) conformation, the process would take longer than the lifespan of the universe so far. Obviously this isn't what's happening. And yet, the promise of number-crunching power being used to finally solve this always seemed just a few years away - many people, in retrospect comically, thought the problem would be solved by the close of the century.

The problem is still not solved, but scientists have made incremental progress, and now, the closest thing to a quantum leap forward. Every two years there is a contest where scientists competitively try to solve a structure, then get together and see who got closest. Mohammed Al Quraishi is a computational biologist at Harvard who writes about the 2019 meeting, and who the winner was: an AI named Alpha Fold.

This is exciting because computational biology may really be about to start paying dividends. It's scary because it's one more place where AI is starting to automate our jobs, even Harvard professors. Al Quraishi makes many interesting observations in his post, among them, that a technology company showed up and ate the protein chemists' lunch, and the reaction was muted; we're all becoming numb to this sort of thing. He tries to wake us up by asking how academic computer scientists would react if at a conference, a pharmaceutical company's scientists had showed up and beaten them at their own game.

I had previously made the informal argument that AIs would naturally exceed human performance on games, as games are clearly defined processes with discrete rules and entities, exactly the sort of thing that computers are good at. The difficulty comes when machines must interact between the information-overloaded not-fully-understood messy real world, which is why (again, I informally argue) computers are great at parsing text, and even writing text in the style of sports journalism or certain authors - but at bottom, these are all just very complicated echo chambers, with no meaning or subjective experience associated with the words and sentences. And indeed, the language manipulation has come first, but that doesn't mean encoding external experience in language is impossible. I had maybe subconsciously thought that something like protein folding, a perfect example of a messy real-world process, would be beyond the capabilities of machines at least for many years, but this theory has now been clearly falsified.

STOP METI

tl;dr if you worry about the singularity or bio-terrorism as an existential threat, you should help the effort to stop efforts to announce our presence to aliens. This should be a priority for the rationalist and effective altruism community.

Many people are familiar with the SETI project, Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. METI stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Freeman Dyson believe this is incredibly stupid and dangerous.

Of the 13 (known) attempts to deliberately signal another star so far, the earliest that any response could be received is 2036. The earliest that any response could be received from a sun-like star with planets in the habitable zone is 2085. Additional attempts are almost certain to be made in the next few years.

Most scientists recognize how important - in fact, world-shattering - contact with aliens would be, and there's actually a protocol for what scientists should do if a message is received. But these attempts are being made by individuals or small groups, with no oversight, often with really stupid justifications. One was an art project; this one invited kids to compose the message.

The argument against deliberate messaging is that even here on Earth, contact between members of the same species with differing technology was catastrophic for not just the humans on one side, but the ecosystems. A visit from aliens with enough technology to detect us or visit would therefore likely be devastating, even if they don't have malicious intentions. Once we're detected, we can never be un-detected.

The arguments for METI are laughable, and best thought of in terms of a native American on the shores of the Atlantic, talking about building signal fires to bring the Europeans over even sooner. Their best arguments are:

• Aliens might already have noticed us anyway. (So why make it more likely?)
• It's extremely unlikely anyone will get the message (So why do it at all?)
• They won't come for a long time. (If we discovered a form of energy that would start poisoning our descendants in 10,000 years, would we use it?)
• If all the other aliens are remaining silent, then by doing the same, we're part of the problem, and we're hypocrites for trying to detect others (given the risk:benefit, that's a trade most of us would be comfortable making.)
• Aliens who can respond or come here will necessarily be moral beings and won't hurt us. (This one is really absurd, and not only makes assumptions about the intentions of the aliens, it sounds very much like a religious conviction.)

You can see a more thorough treatment of these arguments by a SETI expert in this paper, and the abstract finishes with these sentences: "Arguments in favor of METI are reviewed. It is concluded that METI is unwise, unscientific, potentially catastrophic, and unethical."

You can see some of these arguments being made with a straight face by METI's founder Doug Vakoch in this article. Note that METI is a splinter of SETI, since most of the scientists involved in SETI forbade active communication attempts.

Going forward I'm going to do my best to create awareness in the rationalist community and put priority on this as an existential threat alongside AI. My plan is to contact the people at SETI to see what they're already doing and how others can contribute. It seems like the best approach for now is stopping transmissions by blocking individual projects, but ideally there would actually be a law against this as well as norms that socially punish defectors. To end on an optimistic note: because there is a chokepoint (money and limited time on transmitters which are mostly controlled by universities) this problem is actually much more tractable than avoiding a "bad hard takeoff" of general AI.

More on the C. elegans that Survived Re-Entry During the Columbia Disaster

Living roundworms made it intact to the ground after the Columbia crash, as noted multiple times before (here and here.) There is more information in the article about their level of protection: "'They sustained some heat damage to exteriors, but that's about it,' Szewczyk said. The thermos-size metal container holding the nematodes was housed inside the locker of a crew compartment that was reinforced specifically to protect the materials inside. Once that compartment ruptured, however, the nematodes still survived the crash to Earth thanks to the locker's build, Szewczyk said. The C. elegans stayed alive upon impact because by the time that part of the shuttle fell to the ground, it had already decreased in speed, allowing the nematodes to touch down more gently." A locker is much less protection than being deep inside a solid chunk of rock.

This has obvious implications: "'From an astrobiology standpoint, the important thing was that if you had a multicellular organism going through the atmosphere you can have interplanetary transfer of life by natural means, and Columbia demonstrated that,' Szewczyk said. 'It was a fortunate thing to demonstrate that in the unfortunate circumstances that there were.'" Their descendants are kept at the University of Minnesota.

Excerpt from The Cleveland Wrecking Yard (Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan, 1967)

Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who’d bought things there. One of them bought a huge window: the frame, glass and everything for just a few dollars. It was a fine-looking window.

Then he chopped a hole in the side of his house up on Potrero Hill and put the window in. Now he has a panoramic view of the San Francisco County Hospital.

He can practically look right down into the wards and see old magazines eroded like the Grand Canyon from endless readings. He can practically hear the patients thinking about breakfast: I hate milk, and thinking about dinner: I hate peas, and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night, hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed.

He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard.

My other friend bought an iron roof at the Cleveland Wreck­ing Yard and took the roof down to Big Sur in an old station wagon and then he carried the iron roof on his back up the side of a mountain. He carried up half the roof on his back. It was no picnic. Then he bought a mule, George, from Pleasanton. George carried up the other half of the roof.

The mule didn’t like what was happening at all. He lost a lot of weight because of the ticks, and the smell of the wild­cats up on the plateau made him too nervous to graze there. My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun­dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in the Livermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to George than the wild side of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

For the rest of it, see here. For context, see here.

Mozart, Symphony #25 in G minor, 1773

Could Modern Bacteria Seed Early Earth? Could Bacteria in Earth Ejecta Do the Same for Extrasolar Planets?

The C-index is this: how close would we have to be to an identical twin Earth to detect them with our SETI searches, given our current detection technology and our (their) emissions? Many argue that we would identify zero twin Earths this way because to detect them, they'd have to be within 3 LY or so - closer than the closest star.

But this post is asking a different question: if modern archaebacteria were seeded onto Hadean prebiotic Earth (say, an iron-sulfur species like the ones that our best guesses show were the last universal common ancestor of all life on Earth) - would they run rampant and colonize the whole world, or would they collapse, relying on some pre-existing network of metabolites produced by other cells? This is relevant to the question of passive colonization of simple organisms from Earth to nearby stars over arbitrary time scales. Archaebacteria in particular are a concern for NASA in terms of contaminating other planets.

This idea has been floated multiple times, including by astronomer and writer Fred Hoyle. Here is how the process of passive colonization could work. Asteroid impacts are sometimes powerful enough to eject surface material at greater than escape velocity. This is how we have over 100 fragments of Mars on Earth right now. If this happens, some bacteria may survive the initial shock, heat, then freezing and dehydration (some bacteria can survive these conditions; and in any event it doesn't have to be many.) Some of these meteorites will escape Earth orbit. If in vacuum and cold they're stable for arbitrarily long periods, they'll just accumulate in the solar system as septic Earth-meteorites over time. Some percentage of these fragments will interact with a solar system body (e.g. Jupiter) and be accelerated to solar escape velocity (like Oamuamua was in its native system.) Some percentage of those will enter another solar system (this is likely to happen once every 15 billion years, based on calculations inspired by Oamuamua.) Some percentage of these fragments will pass through a solar system with "primitive" planets with a liquid water-CO2 atmosphere like the early Earth. Some percentage of fragments will actually strike those planets, and some percentage of bacteria will make it to the surface intact.

Of course there are many unknowns and I only cited one number. We need to know the bacterial "burden" blasted out of orbit per unit time - none of those in our lifetimes, probably not even Tunguska; the percent chance of survival; the stability over time once frozen (being in solid phase is certainly not absolute protection against radiation). The frequency of planets is roughly known, but not the frequency of terrestrial CO2-water worlds, although reasonable bounds could be placed. As to surviving re-entry, this tends to raise the most eyebrows - but it's worth repeating that roundworms on the Columbia did in fact survive uncontrolled re-entry and were found alive on the ground weeks later. Inside a large iron-silicate rock they may be even better protected.

The most uncertain part of this list of attrition factors is the last one we've now come to, the chance of the bacteria fluorishing on the new planet (lack of metal ions for enzymes, or presence of cyanide, low volcanic activity if we're relying on the iron-sulfur archaebacteria; etc.) But we can start actually filling in the values for passive ("dumb") colonization - the equation to show how fast Fred Hoyle's "lifecloud" and Arrhenius's panspermia would actually occur. Note that this is a different concept from the organic von Neumann probes that could also unintentionally seed life as a side effect, although mechanics would be the same, and we would still be looking on watery low-gravity bodies for evidence of them, like comets and asteroids.

Initially I was tempted to make a stab at setting bounds on 50% chance of colonizing another star, but many of the probabilities would be just guesses. It's clear that this is quite a list of attrition factors, reducing the chance nearly to zero for any one cell or asteroid strike on Earth to seed a future alien ecosystem. But over geologic time there have been quite a few of these strikes, and assuming vacuum-frozen surviving bacteria are stable for a long time (a relative straight-forward thing to test), then the solar system has been slowly filling up with septic asteroids - some of which no doubt have been ejected. So for the near-term, this is unlikely to produce lots of passively seeded worlds, but over arbitrary time, the universe would be accumulating archaebacteria from every place that life evolved. If we think of the Sun as a second-generation main sequence star, then planets of third generation stars are more likely to have been seeded by second-generation ecosystems - and may have more metals available in the ashes of the second generation stars from which they're built.

Other quantitative predictions: a one-third chance of life on Europa.

Van Halen, Hot For Teacher, 1984 (covered by Dillinger Escape Plan, live, 2008)

Bonus - Rebel Yell by Billy Idol, covered by Children of Bodom (Skeletons in the Closet, 2009):


Double bonus - Disposable Heroes (Metallica, Master of Puppets, 1985) as if Meshuggah covered it, by Morten Müller:

Reaction: Gun, With Occasional Music (Lethem)

Highly recommended; spoilers follow.

Science fiction which only recycles the surface trappings of the genre without using them as a vehicle - i.e., that doesn't take advantage of the freedom allowed by world-creation to get at something - is a hollow failure. Using a novel to investigate the function of language itself, as this one does, seems an abstract and sterile endeavor and in lesser hands probably would be, and might be impossible if you couldn't invent a counterfactual world that better exposes the uneasy conflicts inherent in such a question. Gene Wolfe's New Sunnovels are about the limitations of language - the Ascians who can only speak in stock phrases and communicate meaning by how out-of-tune the uttered phrase is with the current situation; or the degeneration of imagination as moves from direct experience to more and more iterations of mere telling, like people breeding in a prison who thought bees were a foot across because they'd only heard about but never seen them; or the silo-ing of genres into guilds. Gun, With Occasional Music is a meditation on language using the medium of detective fiction, and properly using the freedom that science fiction allows to explore its core concerns - language's richness and its relationship to truth, authority, and action.

As a point of comparison, the influence of Philip K. Dick on this novel is obvious, in the same way that Black Sabbath's influence on Metallica is obvious - Lethem takes what's good about PKD and makes it better, with much better writing. Gun is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, more fully developed and better-written. Androids is a manatee and Gun is a dolphin. If you need this novel put in terms of other novels, it's about half Androids, a quarter Scanner Darkly, and a quarter auster's City of Glass, the latter of which is the only work of anti- or meta-detective fiction I've read that does that particular "genre" justice. (Again, by properly using it, and not leaving the genre's tricks un-fired on the mantelpiece.)



At its core, this is a detective novel about a half-washed-up private eye trying to get a guy off for a crime he didn't commit. It's the world that they inhabit The plot really serves only as a medium for you to notice the author's investigations of language, and if the book has a flaw, it's that the plot is overly complicated and distracts from the central value of the novel. The world this detective finds himself in is one where questions are illegal, metaphors are misunderstood, jokes are taken literally, and by the end, even too many simple statements become suspect. There are also evolved animals and developmentally-accelerated children, though (key to my criticism here) none of this is really essential to the plot. There is a recognition of class, though this seems more a necessary part of a detective novel, and less an actual exploration. In a nutshell, the animals and babyheads (more on them below) are clearly lower class. So?

Questions are an obvious threat to authority ("The number one enemy of progress is questions!" - Jello Biafra) and in this world there is an Inquisitors Office, which contains the only people allowed to ask questions, and then only in the course of their investigations (them, and the occasional private investigator - but they need a license to ask.) There are several references to psychoanalysts - the most instrusive question-askers of all - but they're illegal, replaced by Inquisitors. In fact the only psychoanalysts encountered in the novel are a hollowed-out degenerate incarnation thereof, going door-to-door like Jehovah's Witnesses, and they're evangelizing - that is, telling, not asking.

But the threat from language to authority comes not just from questions, but from metaphor. Dictatorships are famous for their difficulty understanding, and (therefore) their intolerance of, parody and ambiguity. Consequently this is a world where authorities either cannot understand metaphors, or have forced them to become literal. Criminals are put in actual freezers. Everyone is using an officially issued drug ("make") and one of them is described thusly: "Think of it as the opposite of deja vu - nothing reminds you of anything, not even of itself." A more certain death for metaphor could not be described! Evolved animals jump from figures of speech into real life - Metcalf has a monkey on his back at one point, a sheep is afraid to disobey the man she lives with, and just as he was emasculated in leaving the Inquisitors Office to become merely a "private dick", his manhood was taken by the woman who broke his heart and left him after what he thought was a temporary trade in genital sensation, made possible by future neuro-programming. The character who turns out to be his arch-nemesis is an evolved kangaroo. This one I couldn't process other than to realize that since Joey is common young gangster name, it would make sense in this world for that gangster to be an actual young kangaroo. Every now and then the prose snaps out of gumshoe-rhythm but it's typically associated with certain characters; Testafer is the closest Lethem comes to exposition, and to a lesser extent the antagonist Phoneblum. But these sections don't expose the central theme, and the closest Lethem comes to just giving away the come occurs when the protagonist, in frustration with the babyheads, asks "What if I told you I thought Truth and Justice were two completely different things?" This narrator seems to actually think in clever metaphors (as is common in detective fiction) but the Inquisitors Office goons often flatly don't understand his constant wordplay. Late in the book, when the character wakes after six years in the freezer to an even worse world, people don't even understand jokes without the help of computers they carry with them to tell them they just heard a joke. (They still don't understand the jokes, but they know the appropriate response is to laugh.) TV shows and even the news are abstract and non-representative. The news is delivered with music, which, as an abstract art-form, is un-threateningly indirect and un-revelatory (This is how the USSR announced Premier Konstantin Chernyenko's death, though it's certainly not the only dictatorship which has been less than eager to explicitly communicate bad news.) But even TV shows are abstract in this world, seemingly serving as animated Kandinsky paintings, like visual muzak.

Then there are the babyheads, the accelerated infants, deliberately drawn as the most disturbing and creepy entity in the novel. There's an implication that the babyheads are the future, spouting pseudo-profound nonsense (which is therefore harmless); I can't help but think he's picking on the post-modernists here. In the babyhead bar, they make clear their contempt for the prohibition on question-asking, but you don't get a feeling of liberation that you're in some inner sanctum where linguistic freedom has been protected. Rather, you're clearly in a cognitive and linguistic ghetto.

A final thought on the predictions that Lethem got right. Everyone in this world has "karma", a system of points which, when the Inquisitor's Office has penalized you so much it reaches zero, you're shipped off to the literal freezer. Reading this in 2019, you can't help but think of China's social credit system, which is amazingly under-discussed in the West. There is no discussion of how the world got to be this way - it's not really what the novel is about - but as the fire chief described in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, I can imagine a populist uprising driven by grass roots intolerance of question-askers in an increasingly complicated and difficult to negotiate world. There's no mention of a top-down central state here.

At the time of its publication the term "slipstream" was thrown around a lot as a category for this book, equal parts science fiction, litfic and post-modernism. But like most attempts at artistic hybridization, it looks more like one than the other, and Lethem falls more on the literary side. The critical question: is the novel about the technology? That is, do you and the writer care about the details of how things work, or are they a literary conceit that's serving another narrative purpose? This is why this novel, Fahrenheit 451, and Star Wars are not really science fiction. They create a setting that serves a purpose in the themes they're exploring, but Lethem and the reader do not care how the babyhead technology works (same for a light saber or the mechanical hound.) For that matter, in modern writing and film, many other genres have incorporated the superficial trappings of science fiction - thrillers especially, but increasingly romance as well. Another example is John Updike's not-really-successful science fiction experiment Toward the End of Time. It's literary fiction (fair enough) with some genuinely interesting science fiction ideas, unfortunately shoe-horned in. Updike wasn't fooling anybody into thinking this is what he usually writes about.

If I have a complaint, it's that the first few pages I was put off by the annoying intensity of the detective novel style. It's far beyond what would be needed to tell us this is a detective novel, and I appreciate that a debut author wants to showboat a little in terms of demonstrating his mastery of the idiom - although, for example, David Mitchell manages this better and less self-consciously in Cloud Atlas.

Dying Fetus, Your Treachery Will Die With You (Descend Into Depravity, 2009)

Arkona, Stenka na Stenku (Stenka na Stenku, 2011)

H/T Chris. Who know that the folk metal genre was rich enough to be sub-sub-divided into eastern and western folk metal? Also check out Korpiklaani.