The Earth Has Not Been Disassembled for Computation - Percent Utilization of Phosphorus and Nitrogen on Earth by Living Things

A 2015 paper by Landenmark et al estimates the total number of DNA bases in nature as 5.3x10^31 megabases. This of course leads to questions like: how much of the elements on Earth is life on Earth using? I'm aiming for an answer within an order of magnitude. This has implications for concerns about AI takeoff that I will return to at the end.


NITROGEN

Living things occupy slightly more than a billionth of the planet's nitrogen in our DNA (0.000000115%). Living things occupy 0.0023% of the planet's nitrogen overall, the lion's share of which of course is in protein. (See my assumptions below if you like.)


PHOSPHORUS

Living things are using only 0.00047% of the planet's phosphorus in our DNA - but that expands to 4.7% of the planet's phosphorus in living cells overall. This is a much more significant fraction.


Does this difference exist because life on Earth has chosen phosphorus as, effectively, energy currency to manipulate gradients? Or because nitrogen is harder to make biologically available? Even now we rely on relatively few bottlenecks to fix it.



IMPLICATIONS FOR AI TAKEOFF

There's no reason to assume that these numbers represent a global, rather than local optimum for resource utilization for replicators on Earth. That said, we've had four billion years to optimize. This is relevant because of the concern that AI taking off without regard to human welfare would disassemble the Earth into atoms for computation - the farther we are from truly optimized resource utilization, the more an intelligence explosion would be disruptive to the status quo. I found the Bar-On paper on amount of DNA in the biosphere from a link in a discussion about the computational efficiency of nucleic acids in cells. The latter paper suggests that protein translation is several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest current computers, and only an order of magnitude under the Laundauer limit. Of course, resource utilization and computing speed are two different variables, but it seems computation is getting near optimized already - and yet, no disassembly of the Earth for phosphorus. Not even 5% of the energy currency atoms are put to work! Of course, an AI would be qualitatively and quantitatively different in unpredictable ways from what came before, in which case there is no point in discussing this - but the replicators that exist in reality make the best starting point for such a discussiong.

What's more, protein translation is computation in the service of replication. It is quite likely that AIs would end up being selected in much the same way as cells have, with limited resources to be dedicated to refining the model of the universe (getting smarter.) The ivory tower AI super-minds would be dominated by the silicon bacteria. Of course, this is still no reason to think a hard AI takeoff could be disastrous for all life on Earth, an extinction like we've never seen - which the AIs themselves might not have the foresight to survive - but if they do, the best bet is that they will "revert to the mean" of all replicators, with making copies as the goal.




An imperfect analogy. In nature, you have to make do with what's there. The shapes aren't friendly for efficient packing and there are a lot more holes.

Assumptions:

I could not find estimates of the overall mass of nitrogen and phosphorus in the biosphere, so I used the percentage weights in living cells, and derived from a paper estimating the mass of carbon in the biosphere at 5.5x10^14 kg (Bar-On et al 2018), along with carbon being 18% of the atoms in living things.

For both I used 2884.6 kg/m^3 mass of the Earth's crust (weighted the differently dense continental and oceanic crusts at 0.3 and 0.7 resp.) My number for nitrogen comes from nitrogen in the atmosphere, plus nitrogen in the top meter of the Earth's crust, estimating mass of the atmosphere as 5.15*10^18 kg, of which 78.09% is nitrogen, and abundance in the crust as 0.002% by mass (there was some conflict over this between sources actually of up to an order of magnitude; but there is so little nitrogen in the crust compared to the atmosphere, about 347,000 times less using this number, that it's still a rounding error. I assume that there are an equal number of A T C and G which means 3.75xnitrogen atoms per base.

For phosphorus, I used a crustal abundance of 0.1% mass, ignoring the negligible phosphorus in the atmosphere. There is 1xphosphorus atom per base. The major "slop" in this figure occurs because different organisms have different fractions of phosphorus, for one thing since phosphorus is used in structural molecules like bone (85% of phosphorus in humans is in bone; even the same organism at different ages differs substantially, e.g. 0.5% in infants, close to 1% in adults.) Bacteria come in at 0.9% (3% dry weight, assuming 70% water mass per cell) so I used that figure, since bacteria outweigh us by a factor of a thousand, and the number is intermediate even for the values for vertebrates.


REFERENCES

Bar-On YM, Phillips R, Milo R. The biomass distribution on Earth. PNAS June 19, 2018 115 (25) 6506-6511.

P. Kempes CP, Wolpert D, Cohen Z, Pérez-Mercader J. The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2017 Dec 28; 375(2109): 20160343.

Landenmark HKE, Forgan DH, Cockell CS. An Estimate of the Total DNA in the Biosphere. PLoS Biol. 2015 Jun; 13(6): e1002168. Published online 2015 Jun 11. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002168

Michael Schirber. Chemistry of Life: The Human Body. Livescience.com. https://www.livescience.com/3505-chemistry-life-human-body.html#:~:text=Oxygen%20(65%25)%20and%20hydrogen,%25)%20is%20synonymous%20with%20life.

New Estimate for Number of Active Civilizations in the Milky Way

A summary:

• At a lower bound, it's estimated on average there is one 17,000 LY away. The number that is being reported is that this means at least 36 civilizations in the galaxy.
  
  
• They mention the problem of relying on M-class stars as abodes for life - because they're quite unstable (flares). I have not read the paper in detail, but it seems hard to understand, if there are only 36 star systems, why those couldn't all be G-class stars.
  
  
• They also estimate a lower bound of communicating for only a century (since we've been communicating for that long so we know it's possible.) If it's only a 100 year period, if we're hearing them now, they were active before agriculture.
  
  
• There's also the problem of being able to discern signal from noise at that distance - and not knowing what type of signal we're looking for. A useful thought experiment is the C-index, which is the distance at which we could detect a twin Earth with identical EM emissions. By most estimates, even if there were a twin Earth orbiting Alpha Centauri, we still today could not hear them. This leads the authors to conclude that interstellar communication is for all intents and purposes impossible.
  
  
• Therefore, any persisting civilization is plausibly more likely to be detected by self-replicating artifacts. This all reinforces the greater relative importance of looking for artifacts in our own solar system, which is something we can conceivably do with known technology in the near future, with less of a signal-to-noise problem.
  

Westby T. and Conselice CJ. The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life. The Astrophysical Journal. 2020 June 15.

The Asimov Library, and the Idea Catalog

Hat tip Marginal Revolution for both of these.

1. the nucleus of it is starting with this man, who as a labor of love is collecting/cataloging all of Asimov's work. Thank you Steven Cooper!
   
   
2. Catalog of science fiction ideas by year appearing - I've linked to the nineteenth century.

Review: Ad Astra

Initially I was excited to see this, not sure why it got so little fanfare, and now I know. Critics were surprisingly positive. I notice that any time Brad Pitt is in something, they give the film as a whole an inflated grade, even if he turns in consistently good performances. I can see why critics get a warm glow from his projects - he's a good actor, he's good-looking, he's a nice guy and he takes his profession seriously. But that can't save everything, and a movie with him, Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones that isn't a home run strongly suggests there's a problem with the script.

And there is. This is a movie that can't make up its mind. Are we a near-future hopeful thriller, or a nostalgia film, or a dark reflection on the qualitative differences of the new frontier and whether humans are up to the challenge. (It is possible to be all three, but this film ended up with a few confused moments of each and executed on none of these themes.) Do we want to be a plot coupon-collecting adventure, or a psychological exploration? (It's hard to tell which was central in the writers' minds, and which was added to support the other, because both are so unsatisfying.) The reasons many scenes take place are thin and barely coherent.

Keep in mind SPOILER ALERT I only watched to the part where he contacts his father from Mars, and read about the rest of it online to avoid investing another hour of my life in it.

1. The most realistic portrayal of space travel in film? That's a serious assertion made by the creators of this? 73 days to Neptune and a week or so to Mars...come on. Very little in the way of considering automation. It seems like they took the aesthetic of the Apollo era and extended it to the late 21st century, except the rockets were magically faster.
   
   
2. Action sequences are overall, again, crow-barred in as well, to keep it interesting. The only one that seemed interesting was the fall from the exploding antenna at the beginning. Reminds you of the drop onto Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot-meets-Baumgartner and Kittinger.
   
   
3. The journey across the Moon is where it really started to lose me. Why again do they not just land there initially, or failing that, at least take a rocket? Oh yeah, the Moon pirates. Surviving on the Moon takes a massive amount of infrastructure. So where are these Moon pirates hiding out that they're undetected, and how do their supplies get to them without detection? Within minutes of their appearance they're wiped out from over-the-horizon artillery, so it's hard to explain how a major operation like a Moon-base could get very far. Apparently it took a human seeing them to detect them (and not a satellite - ???) It's this and many other things that make the movie just seem like a cobbled-together set of action sequences with very little thought. We have almost zero background on the world situation at the time, which is made most obvious by these events (if the Moon is a war zone, who's at war? Over what?)
   
   
4. Why does a biomedical station have to be in interplanetary space between Earth and Mars? What do they get out there that they can't get in Earth orbit? This is where the movie more or less lost me.
   
   
5. Why again do they have to go to Mars to transmit to Neptune? And at closest, the one-way light speed communication time is four hours. Even if there is some hint I missed that in fact he's sitting there for hours, this is not conveyed well.
   
   
6. The "psychological" aspect to the movie - the father-son relationship, the protagonist's personality structure - is so trite and ham-fisted and again feels so crow-barred in that it's simultaneously irritating to have to sit through, and annoying at how ineffective it is. I thought the psych evals were going to be a clever plot twist and Pitt's character was fooling them.
   
   
7. Antimatter flares heading toward Earth and destroying all life? Even if this were the most realistic depiction of space travel, the liberties taken with other aspects of science dominate. It's a poor man's Interstellar, right down to its less effective attempts to carry on in the tradition of 2001.
   
   
8. The philosophical implications of being the only, or the first intelligence - unless there's something really subtle that the summaries missed, this movie really missed an exploration of a theme that's under-explored in science fiction in general and especially in movies.
   
   

Reinstate George Anderson at Oakland Music Center

This is George in Down Factor and From Hell. (Second from right - next to Paul Bostaph from Slayer.) I had the good fortune to know George, wow, over 15 years ago through a series of coincidences. He's a really good guy and a huge part of the East Bay metal scene. (Here's Walking Dead off Ascent From Hell.)

He should remain at Oakland Music Center. You should help make this happen - Change.org petition is here.

The Singularity Will Be An Extinction Event, and an Endogenous One

There have been exogenous extinctions, ie not from an ecosystem's "internal contradictions." Examples are massive magma flows like the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, or the asteroid strike like the K/T Boundary. These were at least partly caused by out-of-context events that life on Earth did not influence. Then there are endogenous extinctions, which were caused entirely by the actions of the system itself, with no external disturbance. The best example is the Great Oxygenation Event, where the cyanobacteria inadvertently poisoned themselves, and paved the way for a whole new kind of metabolism. About every 26 million years, a superpredator develops and kills everything – humans are filling this role currently – and even if there's not an extinction, there's a local minimum in biodiversity and ecological robustness.

Since we're the aerobic beneficiaries of the Great Oxygenation, we like to narrativize this in the form of a teleologic happy ending. That is: the story becomes, yes the cyanobacteria poisoned themselves, but it was to make way for the glory of oxygen-breathing life. That oxygen they fatally polluted themselves with turned out to be an improvement, a new fitness landscape. Any endogenous extinction clears the way for evolutionary progress!

This is false. Of course the Great Oxygenation Event turned out to be survivable, because we're here looking back on it. But choose any other model example of a closed ecosystem where the endogenous activity of the local organisms is rapidly changing their environment, and you are unlikely to find that the majority of them are success stories. Things poison themselves, and end up with no descendants that can survive. (There is no argument to exclude humans from this phenomenon. Both deforesting Easter Island and the ongoing Great Carbonization Event are good examples.)


Two implications follow:

1. The reason for the Great Silence (ie the Fermi paradox) could be that there are many watery worlds out there which evolve local cyanobacteria, but they have their own endogenous shocks, and these do not result in a survivable planet, or at least in a richer potential fitness landscape. As in Conway's Game of Life, if they're lucky they either settle into a simple oscillating system (bloom, mass extinction, bloom, same kind of mass extinction, ad infinitum) or the ecosystem collapses completely and ends.

Speculation regarding this: we're fairly confident the first metabolism on Earth was sea vent iron sulfur organisms, using sulfur in what is now oxygen's chemical role. The Great Oxygenation may have only happened when it did, a full 1.5 billion years after the first life and at least 800 million years after photosynthesis appeared, because an asteroid delivered molybdenum, allowing nitrogen fixation and more efficient anaerobic metabolism. Whatever the reason, had this happened prior to photosynthesis, we may have ended up with an Earth poisoned with sulfur or at least with a massive amount of oxidized sulfur.

In an interesting parallel observation: we're also confident that Venus was once a wetter, cooler world that had a runaway greenhouse effect. One of the mysteries of Venus is the origin of all the sulfur in its thick atmosphere; to a first approximation all sulfur on Earth's surface is assumed to be from volcanoes, but why so much more on Venus? Another mystery is the identity of the small UV absorbers (about the size of bacteria) that form the dark bands in its atmosphere; one idea is that they're cells descended from ancestors that evolved at the surface and now can only survive in the more benign lower temperatures and pressures of the high clouds. If indeed these are the survivors of a Great Sulfuration Event, while the event did not result in total extinction, it limited the Venusian ecosystem to oscillate on a barren fitness landscape, just from the bad luck of having richer crust contents or earlier impacts with potential-enzyme-cofactor-bearing asteroids that allowed more efficient iron-sulfur metabolism.

(Recent evidence however suggests a massive volcanic event 700 MA ago that resurfaced the planet after massive flows; this which may be enough to explain all the sulfur. A gradual boil off of water remains quite likely, for two reasons – the D/H ratio on Venus is about 150 times higher than Earth, where comets have at most a 3 times higher ratio than Earth, suggesting loss to space of hydrogen from water and preferential retention of the heavier nucleus; and that such a massive volcanic event could have been caused by the loss of water, and the cessation of plate tectonics which allow a cataclysmic buildup of heat. It's interesting that the Siberian trap flows and CAMP happened during a period on Earth when the continents were crammed together and perhaps less efficient at letting out volcanic heat, though these events were still nowhere near what happened on Venus.)

2. If a technological Singularity occurs, it would be an endogenous extinction. In this case we are the cyanobacteria, and our extrasomatic adaptations are the contradiction internal to the system, and the AIs are our oxygen-breathing descendants. Like them, we produced the conditions that destroyed us and paved the way for the next phase of life. It's true that cyanobacteria and anaerobic organisms persist but do not dominate the world as they did in the Archaean. Even if cellular life survives the Singularity, being relegated to the role of cyanobacteria is unappealing for most.

But then there is another possibility, in which the AIs drive themselves extinct too. Think of this as the super-pessimistic case. Singularity optimists think we can benefit from or at least co-exist with superintelligence (becoming the equivalent of cyanobacteria is actually optimistic in this scheme.) Singularity pessimists think the event will kill all biology. Here, I suggest the super-pessimist position, which is that the Singularity may kill us, then also itself, in the final, most spectacular ecocide of Earth's history. Why? One theory is that any self-improving superintelligences will necessarily disassemble matter, including whole planets, into atoms that can be used for computation. But there is no principle stating that intelligence must always exceed power; that is, that impact of behavior must grow more slowly than ability to predict impact of behavior. Certainly it didn't happen with cyanobacteria, and given the sluggishness of our response to global warming it might not be happening with humans. Even if the AIs are in fact superintelligences, they are still not omniscient. As they're disassembling everything, they may get to the end of a predictive computation and realize that part of the code has gone cancerous and is replicating out of control (and consuming matter in the process) and can't be called back, or they're going to run out of power before they get to the next planet or star system, or overheat, or whatever problem an AI might run into.

Therefore, if the Singularity does happen, it would be just one type of endogenous extinction. If in a hundred million years, aliens or their self-replicating probes visit the solar system (if such things ever occur in the history of the universe) they might find its dusty, partly-disassembled remains, and file the data under "ecosystems that ended with behavioral/artifactual singularities" and then move on. Interestingly, we have already found old planetary systems that are far dustier than we would expect, with no explanation for the inner dust ring and a some constant replenishment process. Even this assumes that the self-replicating alien probes can get there before becoming cancerous dead-ends themselves.

Gamma Ray Bursts as a Reason for the Sterility of the Universe

One answer to the Fermi paradox is that we are in fact alone, because life - at least intelligent life - is vanishingly rare or completely absent. If we ever get probes to other star systems, we may well find that any water world has its local cyanobacteria, but nothing beyond that.

And what exactly is it that this star system has been so lucky to avoid by accident? Gamma ray bursts are an obvious candidate. A 2014 paper by Piran and Jimenez use the known frequency and distribution of GRBs and calculate the likelihood of an ecosystem-annihilating one. What they find is that for systems within 13,000 LY of the galactic center, there is a 95% chance of a lethal GRB in the last 500 million years, and out where we are it's about a 50% chance. They speculate that some of our past mass extinctions may well have resulted from a GRB (the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event has been speculated without much evidence to be such an an extinction.)

So, it may well be that the Great Filter, or at least a major component of it, is not something endogenous to the sequence of evolution, but rather something completely random and external. It is therefore meaningless to talk about the Great Filter being "in front of" or "behind us."

This may also mean that we really are alone in terms of intelligences which, though boring, is the options we should wish for, it were up to us.

Phantom Hound, Northern Face (2019)

Terraforming Venus; Venus-forming Earth

Terraforming Venus would require taking almost all of the CO2 out of its atmosphere, so it becomes breathable, doesn't crush us (currently 90 atm pressure) and cools the planet down. Using our current mechanical carbon scrubber technology may seem simplistic and unimaginative, but the other options that have been discussed feature similar science-fiction-level ideas (crashing outer solar system ice moons into it, locking carbon into the crust down to a kilometer deep, or getting theoretically present hydrogen out of the mantle.)

This is less likely to happen than being able to move moons around the Solar System. Image from reddit.com/r/mapporn.

Let's make many optimistic assumptions:

That we can build self-replicating independent carbon sequestration plants; this minimizes transport costs and covers the planet.

That they can build and fuel themselves from materials available on the surface of Venus.

That they can withstand conditions on Venus (when the longest any machine we've put down has lasted is on the order of an hour.)

Current carbon sequestration plants are the size of a cargo container, and sequester 900 tons of carbon per year. Assume that this is the rate at which they operate on Venus, and that self-replicating carbon sequesterers are 100x bigger than the real, non-self-replicating ones we have.

Assuming near 100% working replicas, and a one-year self-replication cycle, it would take 40 years to cover the entire surface of Venus with these - after which they would take 2000 years to clean the atmosphere of CO2. (This would still leave a nitrogen atmosphere several times higher pressure than Earth's.)


Venus is not the best candidate for terraforming or habitation, and humans will not settle its surface for thousands of years at least. We should concentrate on terraforming planets in our solar system, building self-replicating technologies, and having humans in isolation from Earth in case of some sort of collapse (most easily, on the Moon.)


On the other hand, here on Earth, just to keep even with carbon emissions at the 2017 level, we would need 40 million of the scrubbers we currently have. That means no matter where you went on Earth, there would be one within less than two and a half miles of you.

We do have machines that are Venus-forming Earth, by making more CO2. They aren't self-replicating, but they seem to have a relationship with one species (unclear if parasitic or symbiotic) and in places they cover the surface just the same.

Star Wars Episode IX Review (CONTAINS SPOILERS BUT MAY NOT MATTER SINCE I'M THE LAST ONE TO SEE IT)

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these things would be easy to look up but I didn't. In no particular order:

• Overall, a fitting end to the saga. Much better than Episode VIII. Glad JJ Abrams is back; he's the master of playing well in others' universes. You walk out feeling that you saw a good Star Wars movie, much like Episode VII.
  
  
• As a Star Wars movie, at some point there will be: a desert planet, a cantina, a scummy trading city with a motley assortment of criminals, and people rescuing their friends and admitting how zany they are because they’re making it up as they go.
  
  . But it's not dwelt upon, and there were so many types of planets in this one that the desert planet doesn't stick out. Also, I hope I'm not turning into a social justice warrior, but the colorful festival on the planet with "third world" aliens did bug me a little bit, just because it seems so obvious.
  
  
• In that spirit: Star Wars movies are fantasy movies in space: knights, sword-fighting, wizards. A horseback attack on a starcruiser is therefore not only cool and original, it completely fits. Also, it stuck out in Episodes I through III that a) there was no improvement in technology across 30 years and b) that late 90s cell phones were about as good as Obi Wan's communicator. Some of the tech in this one looks positively 1980s - wired headsets, colored wires in C3PO's head that look like a Commodore 64 console - and that's great. It fits Star Wars perfectly. It's a fantasy movie, and these are set pieces to maintain the tone - it's not about technology at all.
  
  
• I noticed in the end credits for animation, there was a group of 8-10 names together that looked Thai or Lao. I tried to look up whether a studio in one of those places was used but couldn't find any mention. Always good to see more talent in the game, it benefits film-goers.
  
  
• I couldn't remember if Carrie Fisher died before they made this (she did), and couldn't tell if she was live, computer-generated, etc., and wasn't particularly worried about it either way. It's that last part that says the most I think.
  
  
• The introduction of matter transmission through force connections (and its continuing use) is quite a good cinematic trick. It's creepy as hell when Ren grabs Rey's necklace, and then this trick is used in the final battle with the Emperor (unlike some inventions in Episode VIII like hyperspace missiles.)
  
  
  
• The action starts immediately at the beginning and doesn't let up for quite a while. It's also full of plot twists. Nothing like the (pointless, non-plot-advancing) dead space in Episode VIII.
  
  
• Plot holes, discontinuities, and other jarring moments must be taken in context with the franchise. I'm a fan of hard science fiction (i.e., real physics) to the core but if I ever directly overhear someone complaining that "it's unrealistic because there's hyperspace" I will punch them. That said, no one came to help in the second one, but Chewie and Lando can magically raise a rebellion in a few hours by flying around in person? Doesn't seem required to advance the plot, though it does feel good and advance a nice moral ("they win by making you feel alone") so it didn't bother me so much. Also, where has Lando been?
  
  
• I'm going to come out and say it. Grown-up Daisy Ridley is much, much more attractive than at the start of this trilogy (and she wasn't bad then either.) She's also come into her own as an actor.
  
  
• Good performances also from Adam Driver (duh) and Oscar Isaac. I always wonder how hard it is for Boyega to stay in-accent when he's working with other English actors. As time goes on, he gets by more on his innate charisma, which is fine because he's just likable anyway (honestly, it's the very rare actor who actually masters another character and doesn't just enhance his innate personality. I like watching Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins, but come on, how different are they on-screen from their actual personalities? Gary Oldman and Christian Bale actually get outside their personalities for their characters, which carries a penalty of not being as "follow-able" as they might otherwise be.)
  
  
• Lots of nice parallelisms in this and tying up of themes. The Empreror as master manipulator tries to rise above the paradox of the Sith by having his death be the key to the rise of the Sith (and if Rey doesn't do it, her friends die and the fleet takes over anyway.) The balance brought back to the Force requires the dyad, with Ren and Rey. Ren, again Ben with the same words he said when he killed his father. Leia's death as she kills her son by distracting him (Ren killed Solo where Vader couldn't bring himself to kill Luke, twice.)
  
  
• Kylo Ren has to announce that Han Solo is a memory so we don't get confused. Luke has sparkly blue outlines so we know the difference between a memory and a Force ghost.
  
  
• There's a little bit of babbling of the sort that annoyed Alec Guinness, which annoys me mostly because you don't know where things are going and you can talk your way (in an unsatisfyingly unpredictable way) out of any plot knot. Then again, the Force is if nothing else a script writer's dream to resolve what would otherwise be massive plot holes by appealing effectively to magic.
  
  
• Much better psychology in this one, thinking about the characters' motivations (e.g., Hux being a spy because he hates Ren.)
  
  
• At the end where there's a crowd watching Palpatine and Rey: where did all these mystery Sith come from? And why have we never seen other Knights of Ren before? What is their connection to the Sith?
  
  
• The creator of Darth Maul said that Lucas came to him and said "I want you to use your worst childhood nightmare as inspiration." He described to Lucas a pale face slowly revealed by flashes of lightning. Sound familiar? I was happy that they used this.
  
  
• I didn't notice any lens flare, but there is a shot of Kylo Ren standing in front of the heaving ocean after Rey leaves, a bit fuzzy and shaky as if shot from far away, that gives it more immediacy. Adam Driver also looked genuinely cold, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he insisted on being cold and wet in reality for these shots.
  
  
• Rey being a Palpatine is somewhat of an obvious plot twist, just because if she IS the daughter of someone significant, the only decent move left is for it to be Palpatine (with intervening parents; why did they turn out so lame?)
  
  
• I was annoyed that a non-Jedi (Leia) could magically continue Rey's training. ("Hey, I'm a surgery resident. My attending just died. His sister is going to come continue to teach me surgery.") But they closed that loophole.
  
  
• Once Rey explained she gave a little bit of the force away to heal the giant snake critter, you could see a self-sacrifice (from someone) coming down Fifth Avenue in a cab. Same with the accidental force lightning, which immediately gave away what I suspected about Rey being a Palpatine. Good on the writers, I actually thought Chewie was dead. I'm sure that there are religious fundies somewhere all bent out of shape that Jedi can heal people.
  
  
  
  Above: Jedi Christ, who can heal the sick; only Sith can raise the dead. I bet Golgotha would have been a whole lot different with a light saber.
  
  
• Good coordination with trailers and writers. They know going in that everyone knows Palpatine is in it. I'm always amazed when trailers give away things in the movie and the film-makers expect you to be surprised (often this is no doubt marketing that's not in their control.)
  
  
• I thought C3PO was added to the list of main character deaths - a robot is its memory in a way that humans are not - but he was saved too.
  
  

Timeline of Manned Interstellar Travel, Based on Simple Economics: No Humans on Alpha Centauri Planets Until 2613

It has been estimated that a manned Mars mission would cost $100 billion. Compare this to the most recent unmanned lander, Insight, at $830 million; putting people on Mars then comes with a cost multiplier of 120.

The Initiative for Interstellar Studies estimates that an unmanned interstellar mission would cost at least "in the trillions"; Centauri Dreams cites Odenwald at $174 trillion. Assuming the same scaling, the lower and upper bounds on that then suggest that a manned mission would cost from $240 trillion to $21 quadrillion.

If on the other hand we take the projected cost of a manned mission to Mars, and assume it scales linearly with distance, a manned Mission to Alpha Centauri would cost $55 quadrillion.

It's worth pointing out here that world GDP is $80 trillion. Let's assume an annual economic growth rate over time of 2%. Let's also assume that starting tomorrow we put ALL of GDP toward such a mission - that is, every last human is working this mission and just barely otherwise just barely surviving as peasants eating crumbs.

Assuming an annual economic growth rate over time of 2%, then at earliest, we can launch a manned interstellar mission at the earliest by 2227; at latest, by 2501.

But forget about that. Because neither you, nor any other human on this planet will sign up tomorrow for their descendants being reduced to slavery for centuries for a space mission, which is what those numbers assume. So let's assume we continue to spend money on space exploration at the same rate that we in the US currently are - about 0.11% of GDP. This is already quite a generous assumption, given that most countries can't afford to dedicate such a fraction of wealth to endeavors that don't quickly return on investment. If you're more optimistic and want to set the relative rate of expenditure (over centuries) to the highest it has ever been (in a democracy - you said you were optimistic right?) that's 1966 USA, which is about twice what it is today, and only makes it happen 35 years earlier. (This is more dependent on economic growth than space program expenditure.) So let's stick with current NASA budget fraction, and assume that the future space program is ONLY working on this one mission.

By these assumptions, we can launch the mission at earliest by 2570; for the upper bound estimate, by 2845.

Our fastest spacecraft so far would take another 30,000 years after launch to get there. Let's be more optimistic and assume that the light sail technology we're talking about for unmanned probes also applies to manned craft, and can get the ship up to 10% of the speed of light. Therefore, taking into account travel time and speed-of-light delays, we wiill get the interstellar "Eagle has landed message" at an absolute cheapest earliest date of 2618.

Of course this is still unrealistic, because we're still assuming mission development starts in earnest tomorrow, assuming every government on Earth will let us use a NASA-sized fraction of their GDP for this, and that they will continue to cooperate for at least 550 years building the mission. Think of this in reverse: it's as if in 1470, the middle of the War of the Roses, and the Russians and Poles and Lithuanians still throwing off the Mongol yolk, everyone started spending money and cooperating on a project and continued to cooperate on it until this year.

I think it is unlikely, barring unforeseeable scientific revolutions, that human beings will leave the Solar System this millennium. I think it is likely that there will be civilization or species-threatening or destroying events in this millennium. This discussion of colonizing other planets to mitigate existential risks has a scatter plot listing a probability of event happening within 200 years/risk of civilizational collapse for nuclear war, coronal mass event, rogue AI, and nuclear war as 90%/20%, 70%/90%, and 95%/70%.

Using those same numbers, in the time period until launch there's a greater than a 96.6% chance of a rogue AI, and a greater than 99% chance of coronal mass event or nuclear war.

But fully automated probes could get out more quickly, particularly if we design self-reproducing von Neumann probes. We should start terraforming Mars now, as practice for remotely terraforming planets with von Neumann probes for when we eventually get there. We have time to terraform them, because if physical human bodies ever do get there, it will be in the distant future. But we do not have that much time to get the launch the hardware, which suggests we should at least colonize the Moon as insurance. Cryonics and hibernation technology at this point is still basically science fiction. These numbers are depressing given our previous dreams, but we calibrated on going from powered flight to standing on the moon in 2/3 of a century.

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.