Probability of Pre-Intelligent Life Seeding Between Solar Systems

That probability is increasing. Scholz's Star passed well within the outer edge of the Oort Cloud a mere 70,000 years ago. It's important to keep in mind that one theory for why we should expect to see life on Europa is that impacts on Earth must have thrown biological material into space, which must eventually impact on Europa. We shouldn't hold our breath for a whole giraffe to make it to Europa just yet, although it's worth recalling that the C. elegans worms (not giraffes, but at least metazoans!) on the Columbia survived re-entry and were found alive 3 weeks after impact (link here). While many outlets are covering the "Neanderthals must have seen this!" angle of the Scholz's Star near-miss, a more important take home is that if biological material can plausibly mix between bodies in the same solar system, it is not much less likely to mix between solar systems.

Scholz's Star is not unique. If this just happened 70,000 years ago, we can reasonably infer that this has happened frequently. 70,000 years is not a long time in astronomical terms. A number of known stars have come or will come within Oort-mixing distance in this 100,000 year period. In point of fact, the Stardust mission - which returned physical material from Wild-2 - showed based on isotope ratios that Wild-2 must have originated in a different solar system besides our own. We have classically thought about life moving between solar systems in terms of intelligent aliens building ships, but it may be more plausible to expect that something at the level of unicellular organisms or even simpler than that is what usually moves back and forth. The ideas is not new (probably Fred Hoyle articulated it first mid-20th century) but we now have more data to support the ideas as plausible.

Enceladus Ocean is Alkaline NaCl/Na2CO3 Solution

Similar to alkaline lakes on Earth; well within the pH range of extremophiles. Paper here.



Above: geysers at the south pole of Enceladus, credit teachastronomy.com. Below: Soda Lake in the Carrizo Plain, California, USA, Earth, credit Wikipedia.

Modeling Gamma Ray Bursts as Causes of Mass Extinctions

One of the explanations for the apparent rarity of life in the universe is the frightening gamma ray burst - perhaps life is astonishingly rare, and Earth has just been lucky to be in a narrow slice of space that for the last five billion years. But (almost?) everywhere else the planetary Petri dishes have undergone regular GRB autoclaving, or at least they got autoclaved before complex nervous systems develop. Putting numbers to this based on the observed distribution of GRBs, a recent paper modeled frequency and distribution of GRBs to estimate the chance over time of a GRB happening close enough to Earth to be life-damaging. Among their conclusions:

1) There's a 50% chance that a life-damaging GRB took place in the last 500 million years. Permian-Triassic extinction anyone?

2) The probability of a system being exposed to life-damaging GRBs goes up as you move toward the center of the galaxy. Many of our SETI efforts focused on our own galaxy have focused coreward, on the reasoning that there are more stars in that direction, therefore more chance of finding life. The reflex to this paper's model is to worry that we're looking in the wrong direction - but if you assume galaxy-colonizers, looking coreward may still be the best strategy - the GRB survivors on the galactic rim would be able to colonize inward.

Paper here.

Evidence for a Methane Source In Enceladus Oceans

Paper here. Hinges on the trapping of methane as clathrates, similar to subglacial lakes (i.e. Vostok) on Earth.

Carcass, Incarnated Solvent Abuse - Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious, 1991

The Film Martyrs and Horror of the Irrational

"Martyrs" is the first horror movie I've seen that I would put within hailing distance of Hellraiser. Here's a review; I'm not linking to a trailer, but you can find them on Youtube quickly. To put it mildly, "Martyrs" is postdoctoral-level horror, and don't watch it unless you would characterize the Hellraiser films as "intriguing". (Spoiler alert.)

Why does it deserve such high regard? Because "Martyrs" has a concept which intrudes into the real world and scares us that way, rather than just splashing blood on walls. Without a concept, a horror movie is just shock - and most fall into this category - and whether you're laughing or gasping, shock quickly becomes boring.

Hellraiser doesn't just present you with monsters and torture, it presents a whole new cosmology. It argues that there's a world underneath ours and that the rules we think govern reality are not the rules at all. ("Event Horizon" does something along these lines as well.) Turn of the century strange fiction does something similar. There's a horror of the irrational, a terror at the revelation that the comforting predictability of the rules we think govern the universe is an illusion; that either we only know the rules on this one world or in this one spiritual plane and these rules are so provincial that they might as well be an illusion.

The concept in "Martyrs" examines a similar idea, one that many humans in the real world take seriously - an afterlife - and posits a question. If we take this part of religion seriously, and many (most?) of the world's great religions have at their core a recognition that through suffering we attain transcendence, then shouldn't we explore this further? The protagonist in "Martyrs" encounters a cult that captures and tortures people precisely to get them to the point where they can see this next world. When this main character is tortured beyond all imagination to this stage of "transfiguration" where she can see into the next world, the cult leader gathers the rest of the group's higher-ups. The leader asks the dying protagonist what she sees, and of course it's kept secret from the audience - and then very soon after, the leader kills herself. "Keep doubting," she says to her second-in-command just before she puts the bullet in her own brain. The ambivalent ending is fantastic. Did the leader kill herself because she realized she had just been torturing people for no reason? Or, did she finally have a direct report of how wonderful the afterlife is - and acted rationally, given that information?

Interview with Scott Burns

You know, prolific 90s death metal producer at Morrisound Studios? If you don't know, then you probably won't care about this awesome interview.

What If We Assume We're Surrounded by a Galactic Civilization, and We're Missing It?

Overcoming Bias covers two papers on SETI; importantly, the papers distinguish between the search for artifacts (like Dyson spheres) and the search for communication. There are problems with searching for communication, among them: do we know what medium they'd use, can we understand them, and should we expect the beacons to be on all the time, or just intercept them briefly, like the WOW signal? The search for artifacts can be divided into looking for massive engineering undertakings of far away civilizations that are solar system- or galaxy-wide, and looking for them right here in the solar system where you're reading this. The latter is not a frequently considered approach, but that's why I'm excited for Dawn to finally make it to Ceres; there are specific reasons to think low-gravity bodies with water and organics would be the places to look for evidence of extrasolar technology. (But until there's a probe that lands and gets good chemistry we won't have evidence.)

Yet, we've found no clear evidence as yet. Add to that the argument that if there is any chance different than zero for any species to develop interstellar travel, the galaxy is very likely to already be full - that is to say, if space-traveling life is anywhere, it should be everywhere, because it would be vanishingly unlikely for us to be the first. And we don't see such life everywhere. At this point we can't conclude that no one is out there, but we can be more certain that no one is everywhere out there. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things, but as we look further and include more types of phenomena, the more we find nothing, the more we should assume we're alone or nearly alone as a technology using intelligence.

Hanson's concern is about the great filter. As it seems the evolution of life seems more and more likely in many places, the great silence we observe means that something is stopping all these living things from leaving their homeworlds, and by some arguments that something is more likely to be in humanity's future than our past. One candidate is that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end which causes species to wipe themselves out, which was exactly Fermi's original fear - that intelligence creates a superpredator that not only exterminates its prey but itself. An interesting bit of trivia: we are currently living through a mass extinction at least as bad as the K/T event, and maybe the worst so far on Earth, and we're causing it.

The other question to ask is this: which of the following two propositions is more likely to be true?

1) That life evolves very frequently, and intelligence relatively frequently, but only very few (or no) species make it to the point of interstellar expansion, so that we don't see a galaxy chock full of waste heat from their engineering projects (i.e. that life is anywhere but NOT everywhere);

OR

2) That they are everywhere out there, but we still don't know what we're looking for.

It may be instructive to work backwards. Start with the assumption that we are surrounded by massive (roughly galaxy-spanning) civilizations, as the papers envision them. We've been looking right at them since the first time a human paid attention to the night sky - how could we differentiate them from background? The uncontacted people in the Amazon are surrounded by nation states, and yet for a half century they've been growing up with the sound of planes in the sky, and they haven't inferred the rest of the world.

What are the things we already see that could be evidence? Dark matter is an intriguing candidate just because we understand it so poorly. The absence of obvious life could itself be a hint, i.e. still-extant species are hiding from or destroyed by others.

This is certainly a less depressing alternative than intelligence being an evolutionarily unstable strategy, which of course has nothing to do with its being true. I increasingly suspect that life in the universe is mostly space viroids that when seeded in a large, warm medium, incidentally produce replicators like life on Earth, that is then stuck there, because either it can't travel in space, or it gets smart enough to travel in space and therefore to kill itself.

Russian Short on Flying War Machines

Normally I care more about the ideas than how they're rendered, but this is outstanding enough that it made even my blunted retinas happy. The theme is somewhere between the Terminator and Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains.

Крепость/Fortress from Dima Fedotof on Vimeo.

Review: Progress Toward the Singularity

This focuses on ways in which GAIs could interact with the material world, rather than GAI itself. In either domain I make no guarantee of currency; you will note that most of these links are 2-3 years old and have presumably been developed and found application since then.

1) Automated lip reading. It's not just HAL these days.

2) Remotely reading the position of people in a room based on how our bodies distort WiFi fields.

3) Smart sand.



4) Drones through your mail slot.



5) Computers that can spot microexpressions and lies better than humans, as well as microchanges generally (color and motion changes).

6) Stock trading programs doing things that we can't understand, faster than we could even if we did - termed by researchers in Nature a "new machine ecology" of software.

7) Generation of mathematical proofs that no human understands, but which can be shown mechanically must be correct. P = NP? If we can't understand it, then for human brains, NP doesn't even equal NP!

8) Reading your mind and knowing what you're looking at; they can reproduce images from movies as you're seeing them.

9) Forget chess. They can beat everybody at rock paper scissors too, because you're a lot more predictable than you know (but not than the computer knows). The best you can do is flip coins and come to a draw.

10) A fair amount of sports print journalism has been replaced by computer-written articles already.

For now, all these technologies are very much dependent on large amounts of money and attention from humans, and are in no way self-replicating. But we should expect that those places where the most utility is derived by humans are where we see powerful (read: expensive) new technology first put into place - like the stock market, and warfare. Ask Al Qaeda, who have been getting gradually exterminated by the HKs circling over Afghanistan for over a decade. (If we don't call the first truly autonomous drones HKs, that would represent a missed opportunity.)

Skynet's Ancestors: Are Groups of Humans Also Conscious?

I just re-watched Terminator 2, which is aging pretty well, not least because it used CGI as opposed to live action latex-and-juice effects in the first one that today look fairly bad. A refresher: Skynet sends a new, scarier shape-shifting terminator back in time, this time to kill John Connor as a 12 year-old instead of killing his mother as in the first one. To counter Skynet, the grown-up John Connor sends back a re-programmed terminator to protect him. It turns out that there were parts recovered from the first terminator from 1984, and a tech company has been reverse-engineering them - creating a loop where Skynet essentially catalyzes its own creation. A big part of the movie is the side-mission taken by the Connor family and their pet Austrian to destroy the lab working with the old terminator's parts, thus stopping the creation of Skynet.

Of course this plot was an excuse to get Schwarzenegger in another movie even though the terminator (well, the first terminator) was killed in the first one, and to make him a much more central character. But the most interesting thing to me isn't that, or even the paradox of a self-causing AI. Certainly the idea of fate figures prominently in the second and third movies, and many who think the Singularity concept is a coherent one also think that such an event is inevitable, given a technological civilization with enough time.

And that's why the most interesting thing to me about T2 is the police. (How many? "All of 'em, I think," says the young John Connor.) First of all, the parallelism is interesting: fine Skynet, you try to kill John Connor's mother? Well then we'll kill your mother, what do you think of that? (As a side note, because the shapeshifting Terminator made no attempt to defend Cyberdyne, either Skynet didn't think of this, or had already seen Terminator 3 and knew it didn't matter.)

1970's Colossus, which deserves to be more clearly remembered as introducing us to the idea of defense computers using the nuclear weapons under its command to sinister ends. (Although if you were Skynet, you could do better than something so obvious as a nuclear war.)



But much more fascinating than that: even though there is no fully functioning, self-perpetuating AI inside Cyberdyne systems, a more dilute but still discrete pattern has begun forming around the primitive Skynet's birthplace, a wealthy society's resources marshalled to protect the womb. And much like in our own tissues, Cyberdyne's individual T-cells (investors, police) cannot possibly appreciate the ultimate result of the developmental process they're taking part in. It's hard not to see the invisible hand of Skynet's intelligence, already embedded in the logic of the human scientific enterprise and capital accumulation and the institutions we've created to advance those processes.

To be clear, I don't get the impression that Skynet was somehow magically reaching back through time and hypnotizing LA's finest (and Cyberdyne's investors) to protect its primordial ancestors, or that this is what James Cameron was suggesting. But it's interesting to contemplate not just in light of the concept of the Singularity, but of the serious philosophical debate about the basis of consciousness, and to what kinds of entities it can apply. If you think consciousness comes from a pile of neurons being connected, then does it matter whether some of the neurons are inside separate skulls, connected by speech rather than synapses? That is to say, if you believe that one person is a conscious entity, doesn't that mean two people must form an additional conscious entity, as would any combination of humans? So things like Wyoming, and Honda Motors, and investors in the stock market, are conscious entities! As would be Cyberdyne Systems (and its associated financial and security apparatus) - and Skynet is the eventual expression of the converging currents of that particular self-organizing system.

Avowed Metalhead Now President of World's Largest Muslim Country

More here on Joko Widodo, president-elect of Indonesia.



Given his shirt, I wonder if he is "chuffed". Indeed, perhaps his father said, "Turn that dine. Turn that unemployment dine. Wot koinda policies are them." Napalm Death inside jokes have a limited audience, but such is my refined taste in humor.

Why Video Games Haven't Wiped Out Movies

Video games generally have a much better ROI than movies (actual figures here), to a point where you can't help but wonder why the entertainment industry is still making movies. (Status to studio executives? Status and financial incentives to irrationally optimistic individuals, i.e. actors? Difficulty of retraining talent?) But there are reasons that games haven't completely dominated the entertainment industry yet, and one of the more not-immediately-intuitive ones is that each individual product tries increasingly to keep players online for more hours. Assuming a finite number of game customers, that means that as games get better at holding onto a finite pool of player hours, newer games have to be much, much better to compete, or just be satisfied with ever-shrinking market shares. Many more observations here.

A Fun Game: Science Fiction Mars, or the Navajo Nation

One is a picture of Navajo Mountain, Arizona (presumably from Lake Powell; credit mikereyfman.com) and the other is one of my favorite cover art pieces ever. Spot the difference.

File Under F for Fermi Paradox

"Taiwanese student in heavy water over homemade fusion reactor". If technology continues to progress, one day we'll look back on fusion as being in the same category of technology as smelting bronze. How many ill-advised school projects will there be between now and then?

Take solace in the fact that this particular technology is not self-reproducing.

The Boys from Brazil? Or the Boys from Toronto?

In keeping with making bizarre connections between pop culture and academic topics, I illuminate a creeping dark conspiracy that so far as I know, only I have detected! Dear reader, lean close to your screen, for I am about to impart arcane and forbidden knowledge! If you are a fan of economists, as well as the the greatest comedy show ever Kids in the Hall (KITH) (yes, in fact it has stood up better than Python), then shame on you if this has escaped your notice!

Here's Scott Thompson about 1990:




Here's the background picture on economist Justin Wolfers's Twitter feed:



I mean come on.*


*An underappreciated fact is that this is the English translation of both QED and ipso facto.

Heavy Metal Frost on Venus

False color, real topography rendering of what
Venus "frost" might look like (NASA)
Besides being the coolest title for a paper ever, this is the explanation for the highly reflective "snow" seen on high mountains on Venus by the Magellan mission in the mid 90s. Specifically, based on spectroscopic data, the authors argue that this material is lead and bismuth sulfides precipitated from the atmosphere.

Review: Dave Mustaine and the San Diego Symphony

There are many reviews out there, and few were kind. The show was sold out for quite a while. Relative to the '99 Metallica symphony show, the crowd definitely leaned more toward regular-symphony-goer types, but that could just be because it's 15 years later and the metalati are getting old, i.e. they ARE the symphony-goers anyway. Overall I think it was better than the Metallica SF symphony show, because it was more risk-taking. In execution, maybe not so much. Most of it was just the symphony, and the parts where Dave was on stage, he was the only extra-symphonic performer, and he didn't play his own material, and he didn't dominate the sound and make the symphony superfluous like Metallica did.


Set list:
Berlioz, Roman Carnival overture

Bach, Air (with Dave)

Vivaldi, Four Seasons, Summer and Winter movements (Dave joined them for Spring, playing the first violin part)

Dvorak, New World (4 movements)

Encore:

Megadeth, Symphony of Destruction (two main riffs, played by the symphony, without Dave)

Wagner, Ride of the Valkyries


Dave was fairly humble and magnanimous. He said that it was very intimidating being in front of so many accomplished musicians, and several times the pickups on his guitar cut out (which marred the performance) but he didn't seem to get upset. He was using a guitar with a wood body that looked like a violin. There were several places where his fretwork got sloppy and honestly the Pergamum version of the Summer movement on Youtube is superior. To be honest my favorite part was Dvorak!

As with the Metallica symphony show, the regular conductor was too cool to be there. I would argue that the conductor contributes the least of anyone in a symphony, so ih.

Dvorak, New World (Second Movement)

Shreddinger's Cats

1. Metal and cats. It's the internet, I shouldn't have to tell you anything else. I mean come on.

2. Extreme metal puss #1.



3. Extreme metal puss #2.



All bow before the god-king of all metal pusses.