Science Fiction Stories Are Being Set in the Nearer Future

(H/T Overcoming Bias)

Prometheus

I haven't been this excited about a new movie since Black Swan.  Or Jackass 2.  Seriously though, it's marked on my calendar, which I never do with movies.

My fear:  I hope it's more than just "aliens came to Earth long ago, put some heiroglyphs around as a message, and use our ability to travel in space as a marker to exterminate us!"  That's been done, many times.

Maybe it's just that this theme has never been done well in a film.  And that's a problem of the medium itself that even Maestro Scott can't overcome:  to communicate complex and/or novel ideas, you need lots of exposition, which you really can't do in film, unless you have a Star Wars style crawl that lasts 20 minutes or an Ayn Rand type info-dump.  Of course when you're watching a movie, the satisfaction is much more in the presentation.  Giger contributed, but the alien itself (the big one, not the face-huggers) will not make an appearance.

I will leave my high expectations in place.  Dammit, this is the prequel to Alien.

Stephen King's Dreamcatcher is Pretty Good

This Stephen King novelization was widely panned but I submit it isn't so bad.  Note that I did not read the novel.

1) It features actually alien aliens, with a life cycle more suggestion of actual animals (complete with weaknesses, e.g. sensitivity to cold).  This is much much better than the humanoid aliens which low-budget TV shows can at least blame on their budgets, but which bigger-budget films can only blame on lack of imagination, or a desire to insult their audience.  Also for some reason those humanoid aliens always seem to want to offer us brotherhood in the great galactic civilization where we can sit around in deep intellectual exchange all day long.  Just like Europeans did with Native Americans.  And that was within the same species. (For some mealtime deliciousness see below.)



2) The plot is actually well thought-out and contains (largely through Morgan Freeman's grizzled war stories) tantalizing hints of back-stories, placing humans as one species in a whole ecosystem.

3) There is no black and white morality, no heroic portryal of humans, just a struggle for survival.  This includes less-than-rational self-interested elements in the human defense force, Morgan Freeman's character prominent among them.

4) There is local New England color invoked in the poetry the alien chooses to recite.


Legitimate complaints:

1) The mind-reading/occupying metaphor is taken a little too far.  You could cut out all the mental warehouse scenes and the movie wouldn't suffer.

2) From a science fiction concept standpoint, the idea of a universal parasite is a little too easily believed (see Alien or the sure-to-be-awesome upcoming Prometheus).  Think about it:  yes, we have an alarming amount of effective parasites here on this planet, but even after a billion years of practice to evolve ways to invade and assemble copies of themselves within organisms with whom they share basic building blocks, there still isn't a universal parasite.  There still isn't a worm or virus or bacterium equally at home in any vertebrate or even any mammal.  Yet here come these guys from across the galaxy, using D-amino acids or a carbohydrate genome for all we know, and they find the human colon completely hospitable the first time they visit one.  (I think there's an argument to be made from first principles that if we do encounter parasites that have spread outside their ecosystem of origin, they are likely to be both simpler and more universal than other alien parasites we might encounter.  But this is just silly.)

Autocatalytic Systems

Hordijk, Steel and Kauffman move toward a generalized (i.e., substrate-independent) theory of autocatalytic systems.  This has implications for the likelihood of natural selection appearing elsewhere in the universe.

Terrestrial Planets Smashed to Bits Around Their Parent Stars

This happened within a few hundred light years. Because we're seeing the left-over crumbs in their final orbits, it also must have happened recently.

This could be either the natural death-throes of planets circling a spent white dwarf, it could be the decompiled planets of a post-singularity civilization, or it could be a civilization-exterminating alien force on its way to Earth right now!!!!!1!!!1111

It's probably the first one, but singulatarians should be looking for evidence like this in surrounding star systems. In particular, since we should expect this phase of an old system's evolution shouldn't last long, we shouldn't see it very often. If we do, something else is going on. So do we see more of these kinds of systems than we would otherwise expect to?

Saberhagen's Berserkers and McDevitt's Engines of God

I just read Fred Saberhagen's collection The Berserker Wars (1981).  Many of my criticisms are those you would get from 50s-60s science fiction (these were actually written from '67 through '79).  While Saberhagen was not the first to write about self-reproducing autonomous machines, he was the first to make them the central theme of his stories - in this case, they're the still-functioning weapon of a now-extinct species whose greatest weapon exterminated both their enemies and then their creators.

I didn't enjoy the collection, and as someone who obsesses about the advent of hostile self-reproducing machines, I was really looking forward to it.One issue I had is that Saberhagen was a chemist and electrical worker by trade but there's not much technical detail on these subjects in his writing.  Why not?  This is the kind of thing I was hoping for from him. 

My biggest complaint is that, for a series of stories about self-reproducing machines, there doesn't seem to be a lot about how machine intelligence or consciousness (if any) is different from us, what it's like to deal with them, the inevitability of civilizations building such machines, or any number of other deeper questions.  What he does do, in keeping with one of military science fiction's biggest character flaws, is just re-frame a real historical battle in science fiction terms - in this case, both Midway and Lepanto receive such a treatment.  For most people, when they want to read about certain historical battles, they read about them.  Yes, Asimov re-told the late antiquity and early medieval period of Europe with Foundation, but there were other lessons to be gleaned (i.e., direct examination of theories of history, types of governments, the predictability of human action over time) but Saberhagen's recasting of these battles, aside from changing costumes, doesn't ask or add anything.

My final complaint is that the machine aliens were nowhere near as alien or remote or sinister as they could have been to be the ultimate life-exterminating protagonists.  Daleks are scarier than these things, seriously, although too-human aliens are not unique to this book.  Which is my segue to another book, borrowed from friend Greg despite his protestations that I wouldn't like it, Engines of God by Jack McDevitt.  (It's bash science fiction day here at Speculative Nonfiction.)  McDevitt seems to have set out to create a hybrid hard + anthropological sf, and turns to the trope of "solving" ancient myths by recasting them in modern terms - in this case, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as an attack by a force which destroys technology-using species.  I would say "spoiler alert", but the characters spend the whole book stumbling around ruins trying to figure out if there's any connection between the planets they're excavating, and events on Earth, and any reader not in REM sleep knows that there must be!  Kind of like vampire novels where the police find the third victim drained of blood by two puncture wounds in their necks and say "Dangnabbit, this is the third one what ended up like this, what could this mean?"

Besides the, again, very human-like aliens (so that anthropological principles apply to them - religion, fertility cults, you name it - I'm not going to spend any more time on that) you have to ask, how is it possible that aliens happened to achieve the same technological level as us within 50,000 years or so, given the much vaster sweeps of time to be had on the scale of the galaxy as a whole?  It's hard to be impressed by science fiction where one alien race is considered ancient because they began traveling in space 100,000 years ago - because that's still an amazing coincidence!  100,000 years in terms of the lifespan of the universe is essentially simultaneous with us. "Ancient" would be if they did it before the Earth formed.  Even if they did it within 1% of the evolution of life on this planet, that would have been during the late Eocene, when most of the east coast of North America was still a jungle and we were only finally starting to get familiar looking mammals because clear orders had finally emerged (primates, carnivora had at least branched into cats and noncats, etc.  Certainly if the aliens that developed space travel within 1% of Earth life's evolution landed, there wouldn't be anyone to talk to.)  Even if later in the series it turns out some engineer species had indeed designed all the local intelligences to emerge onto the interstellar scene within a few dozen millennia of each other, that this isn't obviously a coincidence to all the characters right at the beginning makes it very hard to suspend disbelief.

Okay, I'm done beating up science fiction books.  That comment about the mammals of the late eocene prompts a question:  at what point in Earth's history was a primate the smartest thing on the planet?  The ancestral primate was not a brilliant-looking fellow (see below).  What were the smartest things before then and during what periods?

Above: your grandmother just 1% of Earth-life-time ago. And people are impressed with the ancientness of aliens that were traveling in space 50,000 years ago? Dude, that's pretty much simultaneous with us.

Unquestioning Loyalty Is Rewarded Here

A warm family film.

Does *Writing* Count for the Turing Test?

How about journalism? Automated story software here. I don't know of anyone today who argues that there's no way you could teach a machine rules of grammar and have a database with enough content tags and categories attached to each word to produce workable prose, which is fortunate, because that's exactly what these machines are doing. They're not just complicated echo chambers either, as previous Turing test failures have been cast - they're getting data from the outside world and responding to it. The more interesting argument is about whether there is experience attached to each word: whether when the computer says steak or pain, they're standing for a subjective experience of those things.

(Added later: have a final essay due this afternoon and you haven't even started it? There's an app for that, EssayTyper.)

Certainly the summaries at the end of March Madness basketball games (illustration here) or the sneaky causation-implying pronouns in end-of-day market wrap-ups on the news don't show that the human news writers understand the actual chain of events any more than a machine does. In fact this is a solid argument against a special status for human intelligence: that frequently when it appears we understand something, or even when we believe we do, we're clearly fooling ourselves.

An example of sneaky causation-implying pronouns (SCIPs): "The market was down today in profit-taking." "The market was uncertain today on light trading." Oh, is that why? These SCIPs are even more insidious because they make an assertion implicitly and subtly without bringing it to the surface (just as likely to avoid dissonance in the thinking of the speaker as the listener who they want to accept the claim). Certainly SCIPs are more sublte than the more obvious narrative-forcing conjunction because, which people too often let each other get away with.

UV Irradiation of N-Heterocycles Found in Asteroids Forms RNA Subunit

Specifically, uracil, when irradiation occurs in water ice. This is consistent with the nucleobases found on the Murchison meteorite; among the interesting molecules found on comets we can count at least the (simplest) amino acid glycine returned to Earth from Wild-2. More here.

This strengthens the argument for the origin of life by delivery of replicator molecules to the prebiotic Earth by comets and/or meteors (is this even controversial at this point?) but raises the bar on the kind of chemistry we'll need to see on those bodies to believe that we're seeing evidence of replicators from elsewehre, von Neumann probes or otherwise.

Michel Nuevo, Stefanie N. Milam, and Scott A. Sandford. Astrobiology. April 2012, 12(4): 295-314. doi:10.1089/ast.2011.0726.

Serious Literary Games

Imagine the relationship of E Clampus Vitus to the study of history, and the hash house harriers to running. The French literary club Oulipo seems to have a similar but slightly more serious, but equally free-spirited relationship to literature. (In a curious contrast, many modern French philosophers seem to have the same relationship to philosophy with the serious difference that they portray themselves as serious; whether they believe that themselves is another question.) Here's a second link. One of my personal favorites Italo Calvino is a member in good standing despite the challenges posed by having died in the 1980s.

You can find what as arguably an experiment in science fiction here; enjoyable either way.

Stopping the Singularity: Hacking?

Venkatesh Rao is a PhD start-up consultant who (among many other things) writes really interesting, really long posts. In this one he writes about the three possibilities for our future: collapse, singularity, and the "hackstable" future, made so by constant tinkering and subversion of technologies ("barbarian intelligence" is how he puts it.) I think singularity-proponents would argue that by saying a singularity could be held in check by this behavior, but his argument is interesting in that proposes a dynamic equilibrium, which is what I proposed here - essentially, that if AI is possible, a better solution than trying to systematize morality may be to make AIs whose entire purpose is to autonomously destroy or at least hold in check AIs besides themselves. This is essentially the truce that has been drawn between multi- and unicellular life for the last billion years or so, and would essentially be an AI immune system.

This introduces its own problems - the technological analogs of autoimmune diseases (the anti-AI AIs sometimes mistakenly think of humans as AIs) or of leukemia (the anti-AI AIs reproduce out of control). But mutation in AIs is certain - are they recursively self-improving, or not? - so I'd rather have the logic favor us from the start, than assume we can make them generally friendly. (This is one approach being explored by the Singularity Institute currently.) It's not clear how hacking would hold the singularity in check; malaria might have slowed the industrial revolution, but it didn't stop it, and post-singularity, you and I are Plasmodium.



Of Rao's three options, note that singularity is not necessarily different in the long run from collapse. Evolution is non-teleologic, and life on Earth has had damaging non-equilibrium periods. Before they occurred it would not have been obvious that they would not result in the end of life on Earth, and it is not obvious that an event like a technological singularity, no matter how smart it might be, will not result in not only our extinction as we currently understand our species, but its own. A global proterozoic cyanobacteria bloom poisoning themselves and remaking the atmosphere will seem Liliputian, to a future alien scientist looking at Earth's strata, compared to a singularity as usually conceived.

"But the singularity will produce superintelligent entities to which we will be as worms!" you protest. Yes, but granting this, there must be limits to what intelligence can do. Even with this concept in ultimate extension, we have to accept that computation requires discrete elements, of which there are a fixed number of combinations in our finite universe. There will at least be a limit. And intelligence isn't magic; if you're at the bottom of a sheer pit with both a worm and an AI that's in the same kind of body as you, and it's about to fill with boiling oil, you're all screwed, and it doesn't matter how smart the AI is. (Incidentally these limits imply that P does not equal NP, in any real sense that is ever possible in the universe, never mind the formalism.) If you're protesting that the singularity overwhelms the fact of an eventual fundamental limitation on computation and all physical laws are suspended, then you're arguing that superintelligence is the same as magic, and if you believe that you should also believe (as I would) that we should stop wasting our time talking about it.

As I've observed before, if we believe that we can't possibly understand any post-singularity events, this presents epistemological problems closer to home in the singularity's genesis. If we can't understand it, we can't even argue that it hasn't already happened! Note that this statement is not an argument against the possibility of a singularity or coherence of the idea, but it does present problems of what and how we can know about such a thing.

Rao doesn't argue strenuously for a "cap" to AI but if we believe a thing like the singularity is possible, then we should do everything we can to stop it.

How Music Memes Actually Spread in North American Cities

Of course I wish they had done a separate one for metal, but here's the network anyway:



Original paper here. One observation: neither San Francisco or San Diego come out particularly high - although look at that, in indie music San Francisco is less influential than San Diego. Oooh! That has to hurt!

What's really interesting is Los Angeles, the center of the music industry, is only third in indie music, and the first two nodes are both Canadian. Now before you indie fans get too proud ("of course L.A. is only third, it's indie music!") notice that L.A. doesn't even appear on the hip-hop network. You corporate shills.

(H/T Marginal Revolution)

Anyone Getting Malware Warnings?

One reader was kind enough to email me and say that he'd been blocked from this blog by Malwarebytes. If you're seeing this obviously you're able to get through, but if you've had problems please email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com. Also if you can tell me how the hell I tell Malwarebytes it's not an attack site.

Cassini Measures Enceladus Chemistry

This past weekend, Cassini sampled the particles in the plumes visible near the south pole of Enceladus. No chemistry results have been released yet, but if we're looking for interstellar replicators (von Neumann probes or otherwise) that build themselves out of common native materials on low gravity bodies, this is exactly the kind of research that's going to start finding interesting results. This is probably my most absurd belief - that there are artifacts of alien technology already here in this solar system, and we're going to find them on wet, low-gravity bodies like comets or Enceladus - but that's why I'm excited to get data that tests this prediction. If all that spray is just cold saltwater, that decreases the chance that we're going to find organic chemistry-based replicators anywhere else outside the Earth's atmosphere - but we already know there are simple organics in the plume, along with higher mass hydrocarbons. I don't know if Cassini's instrument can distinguish between higher mass hydrocarbons or (for example) amino acids, like those found on meteors and comets.

On a side note, this event has gotten amazingly little press outside the science blogosphere: a space craft flew over a moon of Saturn, straight through a water plume from an ice volcano, to sample the chemistry of that water - and indirectly, the probable oceans under the crust. That's pretty incredible.



Above: the Tiger Stripes on Enceladus, where the spray is thought ot originate. Below: the San Francisco Bay Area, from the same altitude (about 115 miles), just because it's cool to compare.

Texts from a Predator Drone

A new tumblr. Now you can see what the HKs are thinking. My two faves so far:

I liked this one too.

The Simulation Hypothesis and Christianity

Philosopher David Kyle Johnson at King's College asks whether Christian theologians' arguments aren't just a special case of the simulation argument (put forward in this form by Bostrom but really a basic epistemological question throughout history). Indeed I'm surprised that they don't do so explicitly, since I've already seen Christians online making exactly this argument. I imagine the same could be said of any religion that moved its core beliefs out of the realm of scrutiny and into a special rhetoric-only dimension; granting that our life here and now is a simulation, as always, the question remains of how we get information about the nature of the Simulator(s), and how we know what they want us to do.

If you're into this sort of thing, it gets really good in the second post when Johnson brings in Alvin Plantinga (for more on him go here.)

No Faster Than Light Neutrinos

No one is surprised except the researchers, but it was a loose cable.

I wonder if the XKCD guy made any money?

The HKs Over Pakistan

It was a hot summer night, too hot in the house of the building-contractor friend with whom I was staying, so I had gone out to sleep in the open along with several laborers who worked for him. The men were telling me about their travels in Afghanistan, how they would cross the border to fight for the Taliban and then return after a week or two to North Waziristan to work and make some money. Then I heard the buzzing, far above our heads -- like a bee, but heavier and unceasing, drifting in and out of earshot. The laborers said nothing.

On the other side of the Tochi River, in the village of Khatai, lived a famous Taliban commander whom the Pakistani military had once tried to kill. The operation had been a debacle; the military lost at least two senior officers, and hundreds of soldiers found themselves besieged not only by Taliban fighters but by the local villagers. But the small, lethal machine flying far overhead had accomplished what the Pakistani soldiers could not. "Nowadays he doesn't live here all the time," my host that night said as he pointed toward the commander's nearby compound. "There are drones in the air now."

Taliban fighters speaking a Waziri dialect of Pashto call the drones bhungana -- "the one that produces a bee-like sound." Their local adversaries call them ababeel -- the name of a bird mentioned in the Quran, sent by God to defend the holy city of Mecca from an invading army by hurling small stones from its mouth. Over the several days I spent in Ali Khel I became accustomed to their sound. It was there all the time. During the day it was mostly absorbed into the hum of daily life, but in the calm of the night the buzzing was all you heard.

Francis Fukuyama, himself a quadrotor hobbyist, asks how long we can expect before governments start making this technology illegal for individuals. More here.

Sonic Titans, Sonic Titans (Live, 2011)

Saw these kids at the Chabot College Battle of the Bands. They're every bit as young as they seem (15 I think), but man, that guitarist. Continue shredding and you shall be the Chosen One. Turn not to darkness, but...actually, yes turn to darkness, but make sure it's the awesome kind.

Detect Carbon-Based Life By Looking For Not Fully Oxidized or Reduced Forms of Carbon

There are already systems proposed to rank the likely habitability of exoplanets, but these are aimed at finding places where we'd like to live, rather than whether life exists already. In Astrobiology Bains and Seager make a general argument that Earth's living systems use redox chemistry not only to capture energy but to build biomass; and that furthermore, in contrast to energy capture, biomass processes must convert fully oxidized or reduced compounds into a more intermediate range. This may be a general feature of all living systems that use carbon. Because the effect of biomass is the most prominent directly observable feature of life on Earth (the absorbance of forests, for example), looking for large amounts of intermediate-redox compounds might give us a general way to detect carbon-based life elsewhere in the universe.

My own $0.02: since biomass is not likely to accumulate until life has evolved some complexity, it may help to narrow our search to ecosystems that have progressed beyond the single-cell stage. But it would be good to find one other ecosystem, of any kind, first.