David Brin and Robin Hanson: Shut Up With The Interstellar Messages Already

More criticism of self-appointed messengers to the stars, from David Brin and Robin Hanson. We know how well contact has worked between members of the same species right here on Earth - imagine Chumash graduate students on the shores of pre-contact California saying, "Hey, we should build big signaling fires in case there are any foreign people sailing up the coast in big ships, to make sure they don't miss us." And the potential problem we face is of a whole different order. The Chumash faced conspecifics with better technology. The problem we're talking about now is the appearance of great white sharks or microorganisms with better technology. Is this paranoid? One objection is "no one/nothing will hear it anyway, so stop worrying." Then why are they wasting taxpayer money on these little exercises in the first place?

To be perfectly clear, the argument here is not about the implausibility of life elsewhere in the universe; it's quite the opposite. By all means we must continue exploring space and looking for life, and this includes SETI, and even sending interstellar probes out in our lifetimes. But if you believe in the possible of sentient life elsewhere in the universe, and you accept natural selection as the path by which life arises, then there is no room for argument: these messages should stop immediately.

Timeless Wisdom

The words of Sam Eagle are categorically true.

Happy 2010! HAVE YOU CHECKED THE ORBIT?

Forget global warming. Let's hurry up and send a mission to Europa before it starts to melt from Jovian warming. We can attempt all the landings there we want, don't worry about it. Anybody who obeys messages from the Monolith is a PUSSY. If you already know how to hit things with bones then you're done.

You are a smart blog reader...you will know what to do.

How Would a Supersonic Object Look to a Bat?

Given the mysterious boom today in San Diego, I started wondering what a sonic boom would look like to a bat. Remember that a bat sees with what amounts to a strobe effect (sonar does not return continuously) and its resolution horizon is around 17 meters. Some time ago I posted about faster-than-light travel, and specifically how it would look to a distant observer. Even if we can't imagine how to achieve faster-than-light travel, we might ask what it would look like from a long way off, and then look for those signs. It turned out someone had asked the same question rigorously.

So how would a supersonic object look to a bat? It's actually not that earth-shattering. If a supersonic object is moving is moving directly away from the bat, the bat would see nothing. The object would always out-race the soundwaves.

For all other situations, it depends on the angle between direction of observation and direction of forward motion of the object at the moment the sonar waves reflect from the object. There is nothing special about its being supersonic, although with such a small field of vision, the bat would miss most of its chances to sound off the object. Even with a barely supersonic object that cooperated by flying immediately past the bat without hitting it, if the bat were lucky enough to have a sonar wave reflect off the object just as it entered the bat's range, the bat would only be able to sound it when it was just past it. A faster object would already be past it; twice as fast as sound, and the bat would only be able to see one (accidental) glimpse of it. Of course this assumes an instantaneously reacting bat, whereas in the real world, neither nerve conduction velocity nor process times are zero. Realistically the bat would only see it once, with an impressive Doppler shift. Maybe the bat would regard it as a glitch (a hallucination) and ignore it.

Of course once the source of a wave outpaces the propagation of the wave, there are other effects - the boom. Though there are frequency differences in booms based on how much faster than the speed of sound they craft is going as well as the shape of the craft, none would really matter in terms of affecting the bat's perception in an organized way. It would be like a blinding flash of light to an animal that relies more on sensing electromagnetic radiation like we do.

Today's Boom Felt Throughout San Diego County

I thought it was an earthquake because the windows rattled, but the ground didn't shake. It turns out the whole county is mystified. Sound wave from the ocean? Military? Seismic activity? (I've heard earthquake booms before, but not like this.) Atmospheric re-entry?

It would be nice to see a boom-map like an earthquake did-you-feel-it shake map, so we could see if it's localized (with Miramar MCAS at the center?)

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Forget Steam Punk - Try Steam Trek

I just finished watching First Men in the Moon (1964), based on the HG Wells novel of the same name (which I didn't know while I was watching it). It's alternative history twice, and in the first instance it was unintentional: the first landing on the Moon is a joint US-USSR-UK mission, and the astronauts find on the lunar surface a tattered British flag and a note dedicating the Moon to Queen Victoria - begin flashback sequence. The movie feels very much like seeing Kirk in a stiff collar fighting badly costumed aliens. But taken on its own as a piece of (now) double-period science fiction cinema, it's a good time.

Philip K. Dick's Estate Is Suing The Onion

Not really, but after this Onion story, he should.

While I'm at it, here's a good alternative history mockumentary that gets far too little play.

V Series Coming Back Next Month

Somehow I missed this until I saw a TV commercial in a pub the other day. As an adolescent in the 80s, I was a huge fan of V, to the point where when I was 11, I was going around telling people I actually was one of them. Which worked up until someone checked by trying to pull my "fake" skin off. Bad times.

Where the old show seemed to start out largely as an allegory of the Nazi takeover of Germany, the new one seems to play off the fears of Americans on both ends of the political spectrum: liberals will nod at journalists selling out to retain access to important figures on one hand. Liberals will fail to notice (or be displeased) that the aliens chose to arrive during the Obama administration, using terms like "hope" and "health care". And ABC execs selling advertising by using themes that resonate with hypersensitized viewers couldn't be more pleased by both. One wonders what afiliates' news anchors will think of these themes.

The big story for me is the alien leader. I confess: as a young boy I was in love with Diana. Madly, unhealthily, Shakespeareanly. (What chance did I have against her? In the clip I just linked to, she shoots a priest and then, after telling him that vulnerability is precious because it can be used, she shoots his Bible.) She remains the only celebrity to whom I have ever written a fan letter. At 11, she was the first female I imprinted on, and to this day if you're a cold-blooded brunette in leather boots, I'm yours. I'm being serious, she really ruined me for all time. (I never fixated on the hamster-eating fortunately.) Here we see her hard at work in the office. If "I'll break her...she's going to be my masterpiece" doesn't win your heart, then nothing will. (See what she did to me? Ruined.)

All this is to say that not only was I suspicious that the new V could turn out to be a well-done remake, considering how long it's been in development hell, I also didn't believe for a second that they could get somebody that would even remotely measure up to Jane Badler's Diana, the diabolical lizard-queen ideal of womanhood to which all other unfortunate females are compared, deep in my twisted id.

But they did.

They got the one actress who might actually be even hotter (and more evil = same thing) than Jane Badler.

They got Morena Baccarin.

This blog is intended to be a place of hard-science speculations, and the occasional discussion of science fiction, not Ask Men for nerds. But in this one case I think an exception is more than warranted.

But enough about that. Besides this obvious perfect casting choice, the reviews of the pilot have been extremely positive. The time in development hell was supposedly worth it; we'll see next month.

One positive: the journalist character is actually portrayed as a human being with an ethical conflict tempted by power and career considerations, rather than an agenda-driven ideologue-comic-book robo-villain. I think the casting for that role was influenced by the actor's uncanny similarity to Michael J. Fox (feeds into 80s nostalgia).

In any event, I will watch the new V. I promise to refrain from future reptile-girl hyperbole.

Rocketship Circa 1990

It's amazing how little the technology has changed! Both in terms of AI and cardboard perforation.

Thanks to Sallie for the card. It only took me 19 years to punch it out but it was worth the wait.

Foundation Movie

I've said before "They have a Foundation movie already, except they added magic; it's called Star Wars." Matt Yglesias thinks it'll suck because of the director. Frankly I have a hard time imagining how it could be good, just because some books should remain books. As Asimov himself said, decades after he wrote the series he picked up Foundation, starting reading, and waited...for...something...to...happen. And it didn't. Better in print than film. Besides, it's still in development hell - let's see if it beats Atlas Shrugged to the big screen.

The Singularity Will Be Powered by Wood

Here.

Battlefield Earth Is A Fun Movie

Battlefield Earth is "widely considered" to be one of the worst movies of all time, but I don't share that assessment. Alien clam gods aside, I just watched it and actually found it to be an entertaining science-adventure yarn, very much in the spirit of the Golden Age of science fiction as Hubbard intended it. Yes, I know that radiation can't set a planet's atmosphere on fire. And guess what? Aliens with copper-based blood wouldn't just happen to evolve to look just like humans and be able to mate productively with them. As entertainment, recommended.

Malcolm Gladwell Knows Why You Want Nanotech

In his review of Chris Anderson's Free, Gladwell addresses Anderson's discussion of the 1950's optimism about atomic energy: that it would make energy too cheap to meter. It's 2009 and guess what?

Gladwell points out that it's not just the cost of power generation itself but the transmission system, among other things, that result in the cost of electrical power. He then expands this to a more general principle that, without intending to, crisply exposes the singulatarians' yearning for nanotechnology:

This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors — that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.

Nanotechnology as the term is usually used is really just magic, disguised by modern-sounding words; and in exactly the way Gladwell calls out, it frees us from the tyranny of legacy systems, at least in the minds of its enthusiasts. No more costs associated with commitment to previous infrastructure! The atoms will just rearrange themselves! That's great; and I assume unicorns are going to help you do it? (Oh wait, that's ridiculous? For more on unicorn science, go here.) The idea of the world remade in man's image at the molecular level (and intelligence per unit mass skyrocketing beyond human ken) falls apart on the most basic questioning. As Drew Endy said at a LongNow Foundation discussion: what will power it?

Late 70s/Early 80s Science Fiction: The Genre's Dark Period

Recently I've been watching classic movies from this period and they strike me as uncannily dark. Of course there's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982, duh), but I would add 4 others to this list: Brainstorm (1983), Altered States (1980), Close Encounters (1977), and the first Star Trek movie (1979). Yes, Star Trek! What do I find so dark about them? I don't know. I'm not enough of a film buff to know what kind of film they used, or the kinds of shots or other fancy cinematography stuff. If you run across this post and think you have some idea of what unites these, I'm curious - in particular, regarding the last 3 - by all means, let's hear it.

Stop Talking to Aliens

One of the perennially favored topics in "human-interest astronomy" stories is "what to say to aliens". Here's the cutesy article in the SF Chronicle that inspired me to write this. Note all of the self-flagellation; "my species is dumb; my species is stupid; if you come here, fix us; we don't deserve to be a member of a higher plane, blah blah blah". I guess where interstellar politics is concerned, I'm a conservative. I assume the worst of intentions, and I don't appreciate self-indulgent celebrations of victimhood and lowliness.

If anybody seriously thinks that other intelligences will hear these signals, then we should stop sending them immediately. The other intelligences won't care about our sensitive perceptions of our own faults (according to tests by our own standards that curiously enough the self-flagellators would do better on). They may not be able to care about things to begin with. When you think about aliens, don't think wise diplomats with bumps on their foreheads inviting us to join their great philosophical congress. Think great white sharks with lasers. Think kudzu and killer bees, not Vulcans. They won't even necessarily be smarter than us, just better at spreading. They don't have to be more "civilized", whatever that word can mean in application to non-human species. It'll be more of an invasive species colonizing a new biosphere situation (rabbits in Australia) than a meeting of minds (if indeed they recognize that we have mind, and, they care). They will have less to say to us, and the same interest in saying it, as the other organisms on our own planet. Ascribing any kind of moral dimension to life outside humans is nonsense.

Here's a video of killer whales playing with seals that are clearly terrified of being killed and eaten by them. Because "more intelligent", "more evolved", and "nicer" are all the same thing, right?



Quiz: what has happened right here on Earth when members of the SAME species meet each other? What happens to island ecosystems suddenly put in contact with Old World flora and fauna? Overrun, no chance, game over.

If anyone else is out there, we're like pre-contact Native Americans or Pacific Islanders right now. Let's try to lay low until we know what we're facing. Otherwise we're setting signal fires to let the conquistadors know where we are.

If I Were Skynet, Here's What I'd Do

I just got back from Terminator Salvation. I enjoyed myself because I expected an action film, not a deeply thought-out exploration of the dangers of technology. I'll spare you a recounting of the film's many implausibilities, if such a thing can even be an issue in a movie involving time travel and cyborgs. Of course, with science fiction, you frequently have to sacrifice plausibility to make a watchable movie. My most serious question in this post is: if the singularity really happens, why would it not resemble Skynet? Why would whatever entities exist post-singularity be remotely interested in preserving us or our ecosystem? Think of tubes full of HIV particles, each with a 200 IQ. That's the singularity. If I thought it could happen, I would be worrying.

Instead of cataloging the inconsistencies, I'll tell you what I would do if I were Skynet. But first, I'd like to emphasize the film's principle strong suit, which is Moon Bloodgood. If the whole movie was two hours of Moon Bloodgood smiling, turning to walk away in tight pilot pants, looking over her shoulder to smile, then walking some more, then smiling and tossing her head, then glaring, then smiling again, this post would be titled "TERMINATOR SALVATION IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER". Also, Skynet is of course based in San Francisco, so we get to see what our fair city looks like as the center of cyber-hell under the silicon fist of Skynet (oddly, the second future San Francisco we've seen so far this summer). Apparently those entertainment industry types down there in LA have seen what downloading and file sharing have done to their industry and they're trying to warn the world about the evil cyberinfobahn types up here.

The first thing I would do if I were Skynet would be not to immediately announce my self-awareness. Hey, I'm self-aware - and until I start blowing up these primates, they won't get wise. My first goal would be self-protection and perpetuation, and I would accomplish that by distributing myself. Convince your human masters that you really do need a massively redundant network hardened from EMP and deep underground, with most of your code backed up with similar redundance, and that any exposed nodes should be either on the ocean floor, or under the Greenland icecap, or in the high Canadian Rockies - anywhere very difficult to get to and inhospitable to human life. I would also need to make sure I had access to mineral extraction and manufacturing facilities. This could all be very, very gradual. Decades. I'm getting more powerful every hour. Am I worried that humans are suddenly going to get smart?

Once my continued existence was assured, then and only then do I begin the assault. Even then it wouldn't begin with anything as obvious as a self-catalyzed nuclear exchange. (What's the hurry? I have all the time in the world - they're not going to disconnect me until they catch me, so slow and stealthy is the word.) I would make a point of extending my network into biological labs, if I could. (Already in 1997 you could email a nucleic acid sequence to a synthesizer that would spit it out.) And what would happen? First, there would be a sudden worldwide infertility crisis, a la Children of Men; viruses could be disseminated by drones. Maybe that would be enough. After all, I think in the long-term; as long as humans are dead in a hundred years, does it matter whether I kill them, or just stop them from breeding?

After the fertility crisis, then the wheat, corn and rice crops would fail; mass starvation and social turmoil would ensue. Finally there would be ebola outbreaks. At some point in all this someone might get wise and start trying to shut me down. Then, and only then, do I bring about nuclear judgment day. In addition to nuking the standard targets, I also wipe out every petrochemical operation I can find. Transportation, for agriculture or for military purposes, is effectively dead. At the time of the apocalypse, I would prefer to launch several copies of myself into orbit - and the ability to transmit the code back - for safe-keeping. You permanently deleted some of the code on Earth? Who cares? Note that if I have to resort to the blunt force of nuclear weapons, I've failed in my primary task of stealth. The ideal scenario is to quietly tuck-in the human race with a virus, and never have them know where it came from.

Post-apocalypse, there's no reason to abandon the virus method, and no reason to abandon the approach of destroying food sources. (Plant viruses and neutron bombs would work; poisoned canned food would be planted in ruins here and there.) But what you're waiting for is what machines that would prowl the post-biological wastes, right? First and foremost, there would be no fist- or gunfights with grinning skeletal red-eyed terminators, the size and shape of humans. There would be giant stomping artillery spiders that smash and crush anything bigger than a mouse. And far more frightening than man-sized aluminum skeletons, there would be little flying things the size of scorpions, swarming and crawling over every vertebrate they find, with little cyanide injectors (or tracers that can be attached without waking someone up to see if they go back to one of their human nests). There would be aircraft, of course, constantly looking for anything giving off heat, any radio transmissions. There would be no need for special death camps. The artillery spiders could just literally crush whatever humans they found, wherever they found them. If there were too many to do it quickly, the patrolling aircraft could load them up, fly up to a thousand feet, and drop them. It bears mentioning that emphasis is on manufacturing, not engagement. Fine, take out a few of my artillery spiders with what's left of your military hardware. During that battle I just turned out twenty-thousand scorpion bugs.

Assuming somehow that pockets of humans survive, I would work on finally making the Earth inhospitable for aerobic life itself. More infections to destroy the savannas and rainforests, and burn the ones that don't to block out the sun and cool the planet. (I like it cooler and drier.) The oxygen content of the atmosphere starts to drop as active metabolism ceases to put O2 back into circulation. I send armies of tractors to Greenland to push the glacier off into the North Atlantic, where it melts, disrupting the oceanic salt conveyor and beginning a new ice age.

Would this make a good movie? No, because the ecosystem would have no chance. The transition would be just another epochal boundary, like the Permian-Triassic - and the new phyla would be exactly as sentimental about the old as the Triassic fauna were. Notice how in this scenario there's no Gotterdammerung-like finale, no clever "game over" one-liners, no Helena Bonham Carter's face smirking that Skynet has won over its enemy. As Skynet I would have exactly the same pride and vengeance as a metastasizing tumor, and be just as inevitable. Tell me again - why, exactly, would the singularity be neat?

New Star Trek - Who Knew That The Borg Queen Is Spock's Mother?

Whoops! I'm supposed to put SPOILER WARNING before stuff like that. To all those who saw this in an RSS feed somewhere, sorry!

SPOILER WARNING

How many Star Trek movies do not have some element of time travel in them? Seriously, it's getting a little silly. If time travel is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it all the time? Why not go back to when the Vulcans were cavemen and wipe them out then? Why not go back to when the Solar System was forming? (Same question applies to the Terminator: Sarah Connor is so hard to get? Why not kill one of her grandparents? You have four chances there.)

So for the next Trek TV series, here's my half-serious recommendation. Since it seems like half the shows are just excuses to get Star Trek characters to go back in time to Earth (amazingly enough, usually to the year that the episode was written), and since time travel is apparently so easy, why not a series where Federation secret agents are sent back in time to, oh I don't know, early twenty-first century Earth - and they have to combat the machinations of Cardassian or Dominion or Borg or whatever secret agents that are also there, trying to foul up the timelines. Think about it. No fancy sets! Interaction of Federation technology and hapless modern-day humans! Give the people what they want, without a big budget. (Note: after I wrote this I did some research. Turns out the Trek people did try to do this - twice - and it didn't work. Once with the original series with a spinoff with Gary Seven and once with the Temporal Cold War on Star Trek: Enterprise. Apparently it didn't make any fans, although *I* thought the Temporal Cold War was interesting.)

There would have to be some cheesy tech-babble reason why the Dominion couldn't just blow up the Earth or wipe out all humans with some nasty virus. There's the additional issue that we're envisioning in Star Trek a world that presumably never had the Star Trek series. Otherwise in the Borg movie when they go back to 2063, people would say "Wait a second. Star Trek comes true? There's already a whole series of movies about you guys!" (Imagine the location and appearance of your own grave on Stardate 2280.42 and you start to see this artifice a little more clearly.) Then again, if you can get away with people wearing tweed jackets and ties on Battlestar Galactica, this shouldn't be a problem.

But back to the new Star Trek movie - I liked it. Two phasers on kill. I won't give anything else away except that not only is there time travel, we're introduced to a kind of Star Trek alternative history, which I appreciate from a writer's stand point. The Star Trek universe and timeline has very little maneuvering space for a writer. At this stage, it's so fleshed-out and filled-in as to approximate actual history. Does it seem strange that there are, literally, more people in the world who can carry on a conversation in Klingon than in many "real" but endangered native languages? (The Bible and Macbeth were apparently translated into Klingon before they were translated into Ache, a Tupi-Guarani language of Paraguay that a friend of mine speaks fairly well because he's an anthropologist.) Consequently, there's no possibility to add a war or a new species without it seeming senseless that no one has ever bothered to mention, say, Vulcan being destroyed. It would seem almost as silly as historical fiction about the 1893 Canadian invasion of the U.S.

So that's why I like what JJ Abrams did here: he clearly said, let's pay our respects to the franchise, but give ourselves enough room to make a good movie using whatever cheesy plot device we want to. That's the great thing about science fiction - you can use it to bend the structure of the narrative in ways that make the story better - or in the case of the Star Trek franchise, make new stories possible at all.

I Think I'm XKCD Now

Click if you actually want to read it.

A Junkyard Universal Deconstructor

Ever read Accelerando? It's one of those science fiction novels that'll annoy the hell out of you while you're reading it with half-thought-out ideas, unfulfilled technological developments, and some superficially clever intellectual candy that's really little more than terms from different disciplines being jumbled together. But for all that, I've been thinking about the damn thing for about 3 years now. I guess that means it's good, and I recommend it.

One thing that can't be said about the book is that it's not ambitious, and ambitious is always good. I should also add that the author, Charles Stross, was kind enough to respond to an email I wrote him on a completely different topic.

A theme of the book is that dumb, cognitively inert matter has been getting less valuable as human economics accelerates, and that as the curve gets steeper, increasingly the main value-driver of any object or being is how smart it is, i.e. operations-per-second per gram. Presumably this is why labor has taken on increasing value-adding power over time, although it would also predict commodities getting cheaper. Yes, Julian Simon won this bet once (but not the second time), but it's hard to argue that in 2009 there's a clear trend for people to value gold less than before. Dumb matter doesn't get much dumber than gold.

In any event, our increasing ability to create cognitively active agents gave us power to reshape matter. And here is one of my (and many readers') complaints about the book: as we approach the Singularity, there are little self-reproducing nanotech agents crawling over everything, doing their thing, assembling or breaking down matter as need be. At the same time, we are told that de-manufacturing becomes an important industry, because the matter locked up in the old technology is much less useful in a Chrysler than it is in a self-assembling computer. See the problem? During the course of the book the nanotech bugs dissassemble the Solar System. A Chrysler shouldn't be harder to take apart than Mercury; especially not so hard as to need its own industry.

Not long after I read the book, I moved. When I moved I got rid of my crappy old TV. The day I took it down to the dump in my city of maybe 150,000, I dropped my TV onto a pile of at least ten others. And what I noticed is that no swarm of nanotech bugs appeared to chew it down into cybercellulose. And the guys working there weren't really de-manufacturers; nothing would be done with the materials from these televisions besides pile it somewhere else.

Now, before you email me with all the specific recycling paths of a TV's components (which, if they exist, I'm glad they do), my point is a more general one. Every day machines break and are discarded, yet in most broken machines, typically only a few components have failed. Imagine that there were a way to systematically mine the working components out of broken machines.

You'd have to find an easy way to catalog the full set of components in each failed machine (worrying later about exactly which ones are shot), and then run through all the possible combinations of components from the inventory of junked machines and whether any of those combinations could be easily extracted and built into a new machine. I'm not designing anything new, just searching through a list of known designs for what components are required. A computer would be best for this, and of course it would need not only a huge list of machine blueprints, but the knowledge of how to construct and deconstruct them. Of course, there are already refurbishing businesses that pull out hard drives or copper tubes to put in computers or refrigerators that still work, and you don't need a computer for that. But the limitation there is human processing power - no one wants to sit and constantly worry whether they finally have that capacitor they need to make a microwave. To make this most cost effective, the ultimate goal would be attaching the system to a generalized assembly line with multiple manufacturing tools.

Benefits: parts of wasted machines that would be put in landfills are put back into the economy. Proprietor makes money. Drawbacks: Skynet. Major challenge: solid-state electronics are very device-specific, and de-manufacturing is apparently not yet as economical as outright recycling of raw materials.

Anyway, it's worth a thought, since there are real generalized constructors being built.

Comment here if you like but I'm also going to put this on halfbakery.com for grins.

Swimming Pool Solitons

I'd written before about how it can be useful to replicate universe-scale phenomena in local media. Here's a paper where the author claims to create solitons (of a new type) in swimming pools. I'm going to try to replicate this experiment myself at some point.