Blue Juniata (Marion Dix Sullivan; perf. Roy Rogers)

Fleeting years have borne away The voice of Alfarata:

Mad Max Is Not the Old West; Also, Why Does Everything Alway Get Worse?

In the peri-marketing articles that appeared with the release of Fury Road, there was a lot of comparison to Westerns. This comparison is never explored, probably because it's wrong, and frustratingly so. Mad Max and Westerns both feature a lone warrior with a rough sense of justice fighting the good fight against desert savages. The difference is that in Westerns, the sheriff is fighting to protect civilization because he knows that things will eventually get better. In Mad Max he keeps fighting despite knowing that things will only get worse. In Westerns, good folk set up homesteads on the frontier knowing full well that there are savages around, but the settlers can be reasonably assured that the sheriff or the cavalry will gallop to their aid from the unassailable (if remote) centers of civilization back East. In Mad Max, there's no hope; the raids tomorrow will be worse than the ones today, and for damn sure there will never, ever be any cavalry to help you. (In fact, you should assume a lot of the savages used to be the cavalry.) Yet, despite this, Max does retain something we recognize as a sense of right and wrong, which appears increasingly absurd given the futility of resisting the overwhelming tide of barbarians and madness. And that's why he's interesting. The free will to choose right instead of wrong is the only thing left to him, and he chooses right. Mad Max is much more like Dr. Rieux in The Plague than he is like any frontier lawman.*

That leads to the second part. Mad Max movies revel in how much nastier the world keeps getting each day. Mad Max movies are apocalpyse porn. Through the four movies we watch as life gets progressively more nightmarish. We go from some punks robbing people in the first one, to an irradiated Darth Vader wasting water in front of dying old people and imprisoning women for their wombs and milk. Why this dystopia fetish? As always with any fictional narrative, we can break the answer into two kinds of influences: forces internal to the logic of the narrative (what happens in the story), and forces external to the medium (that is, economic forces in the real world where the story is a product). Internally, we get the filmmakers' message that oil-based society will crash badly, and that nuclear war would have grotesque consequences. Externally, over time these movies found themselves in a market with more and better action movies and had to sell tickets. Utopias offer few opportunities for violent conflict and therefore ticket sales. And frankly, there's also a very real pornographic aspect to making the world more and more hellish that emerges in post-apocalpytic fiction generally.

Absent from the movies after the first two is any kind of collapse-of-moral-authority warning that social conservatives love to illustrate in detail: that if we let the softies and criminals take over, well then the strong men are justified taking matters into their own hands to give the baddies a dose of their own medicine.** (Maybe all social order requires a threat of violence somewhere at the core of the system, and the very real but better-socialized psychopaths currently in charge get mad at the threat from outsider psychopaths, and ache to respond in line with their true natures.) In the first movie, Max is a cop, guarding the roads and avenging his family. Certainly by Thunderdome, there is no longer a clear source of legitimate moral authority (at least with armed, loyal adherents to enforce it) for Max to defend anymore. Was there ever a legitimate authority? Possibly the greatest cruelty of the world of Mad Max has been to take away even the past by exploding the comforting myths of history. And possibly, this bothers us because we've had the same thoughts.


*Deserts tend to figure in existential and/or exotic fiction for Europeans and people/cultures of European descent - even cultures that have deserts, like the U.S. and Australia - because to European eyes, the desert is bizarre, and open, and by its nature obviously threatens our continued survival and even our sense of our own significance in the scheme of the universe. Science fiction may rely a little too heavily on this trope, although granted, Dune would not have been the same in a boreal forest. Still, I can't help but wonder at the source of the different roles that deserts play in the psyche and literature of Australians and Americans. American deserts are a little more liveable, and they have mountains and therefore rivers and occasional green spots - versus Australian deserts, which have much nastier critters, and which look like Mars with a few tufts of grass, and are about as good at growing crops. Australia doesn't celebrate its desert-crossing pioneers to the same degree as America, because mostly what the Aussie explorers got was a clap on the back from their countrymen that they made it, after accurately reporting back "Yep, it sure sucks out there." Australia also doesn't celebrate its homesteaders, because to a first approximation it doesn't have any, and can't. Consequently, American deserts became places of optimism and adventure and conquest, and Australian deserts are places devoid of meaning and best avoided.

**Have you noticed the following pattern with Mel Gibson's characters and scripts? A moral man driven to darkness by his enemies, angst-ridden, often taking vengeance on those enemies in horrifying ways only slightly less insane or evil than them. Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Apocalypto...and what was that Roman-Middle Eastern one?

Avoiding Detection by Cloaking Earth With Lasers

A proposal discussed here. The full-on proposal is to eliminate any trace of the transit shadow, with a second less energy-intensive option of just cloaking the oxygen in the atmosphere.

This kind of idea is worth taking seriously, although a problem with this proposal seems to be that you have to know which star system is looking at you, or of course you could just point 30 MW lasers in all directions and run them continuously forever. Astronomy grad students seem to think it's a kind of game to deliberately broadcast messages to Sun-like stars. If they actually believe there could be intelligent life in that direction (which many very smart people do) then they're either stupid, or suicidal, like Native Americans building signal fires so the Europeans could find them more easily. Except with probably a much worse outcome.

Predicting the Limits on Life by Observing Stars and Galaxies

The more that our models (using only "dumb physics") are able to effectively model the universe, the less we should assume that the large scale architecture of the universe - even the "medium" scale at the level of stars - are affected by the evolution of intelligent life.

Another way of saying this is that physical simplicity apparently dominates the architecture of stars, galaxies, and superclusters, without the complexity that we see in things like genomes and nervous systems (and the complex behavior those systems allow). If we are able to differentiate something usefully called "life" from background noise, then this complexity is certainly a core feature. At the scale of the universe, with each additional non-puzzling observation we make, it seems more certain that life has not had much effect. When we see a few stars that we can't understand, like KIC 8462852 or Fomaulhaut, that might mean some living things have crawled out of their respective primordial soups for long enough to build Dyson spheres, and we should be happy. But when we see something like dark matter, that's so mysterious it requires a whole new subatomic particle, we should rejoice! Maybe THAT is where everybody is, and that's is the ultimate fate of intelligence, uploaded at the end of evolution into some kind of ether! The sky's the limit! (Until of course, we find out that dark matter is just boring, simple, basic dumb predictable stuff.)

Whether this means that intelligent life does not appear (often), does not last long enough to have an impact, or has impacts at spatially smaller levels than this (see involution), is another question.

To argue that we can't know the impact of intelligences alien and greater than our own is to argue that we shouldn't bother talking about it, because we can't tell if any one proposition about alien intelligence is more likely to be true then another. That's a classic PEP (pointless epistemological problem).

I Totally Predicted the Current Metal Dark Age

It's difficult to declare the start or end of an age when you're living in it, but I totally did it dude. In 2011 I looked back and said, "I'm reasonably sure it's not just that I'm getting old, but it seems like we've entered another dead zone. 2009 is the start of the dark age." It's the third such interregnum since metal began as a distinct genre in the 70s.

So allow me to quote a "metal is dying" article, and specifically none other than Cradle of Filth's Dani Filth: "I think the last big year that everyone’s talked about was 2008, the last big year that people across the metal scene said that they bought a sports car or went out and did big shows." Whether there is a shift in culture that will prevent another resurgence, I have no idea - although thanks to the internet, it's pretty hard to scare people with your subculture these days, which is a big negative for a subculture that wants to seem scary, or even be separate at all.

As an aside, have you noticed the recent proliferation of articles and blog posts by grown-ups complaining that Kids Today Aren't Cool? I'm not going to bother linking to one because if you care enough, you can find one on your own. One in particular made me laugh, whining that he saw 20-somethings in a Brooklyn bar listening to Justin Bieber. First, I don't recall a shortage of clones with mass-produced taste when I was growing up in the 80s, so I'm not sure what's different here; second, these articles boil down to "Hey man, if you don't conform to the same music that I (a guy your dad's age) like, then you're not a real rock n' roll rebel!" If only these guys could hear themselves. If rock is dying, no wonder!

Star Wars Episode VII Observations (Spoilers)

Quite enjoyable, and as many people have said, on par with episodes III and IV. But most important: Abrams has developed a trick that avoids a difficult problem of rebooting a franchise, or continuing someone else's. If all you do is remake the movie, people accuse you of making a boring recycled risk-averse sequel. If you actually do something original, people come out of the theater saying "I paid to see a Star Wars movie, and that didn't seem like a Star Wars movie."

Star Wars actually doesn't have it quite as bad as other franchises. If a franchise leans on a paradigm shift driven by a big reveal, there's really no way around it. Ridley Scott had difficulty with this in Prometheus because if you have chest-bursters, people will say "Boring!" but if you don't have body-horror critters any kind, people ask how it can be an Alien prequel. I imagine the people making the V reboot had an even worse time. The Visitors are reptiles? Yeah we already know, it's V, do something original" versus "Wait, the aliens aren't reptiles? What is this bullshit?"

Consequently there's an insoluble knife edge of make something new (and too different) or make something familiar (and boring). The trick is to acknowledge the influence inside the narrative, by having characters recognize how they're influenced. This occurs when BB-8 (obviously this movie's R2) meets R2 and has obvious affinity (by the way, nice cat-like head-bump). Abrams uses this trick the most when he builds a character who obviously is copying Darth Vader to a fault, and has collected his mask. Can we imagine Anakin deliberately styling himself after another Sith this way? This youth and even naivete also gives a nice depth to Ren's character. Yes, there is sort of an "I am your father" moment with Solo and Kylo Ren, but it's out of the way relatively early; and there's a nice contrast when he takes off the mask and betrays our expectation of a "creature" underneath. It should also be added that the fallen star cruiser and AT-AT (and the reverent screen-time they get) are in keeping with the practice of the characters themselves consciously referring back to the earlier films.

As an aside, Abrams did something similarly clever in the Star Trek reboot when Vulcan is destroyed. You're watching that movie and you're relaxed because you think, well obviously Vulcan wasn't destroyed...and then it is. You can hear Abrams at the writers' meetings saying "Hey, we're making a science fiction movie. If we're too hemmed in by franchise canon, well science fiction has time travel and we can do what we want."

All that said, the beginning of the new movie seems unnecessarily derivative. Early in the film the plot is established when stormtroopers attack and, as the smoke clears from the carnage, a masked agent of the Dark Side appears with terrifying powers; against all odds the maguffin (a hologram with critical information) is carried by a hapless droid across a desert planet, ultimately found by a mundane wretch who seems to yearn for something beyond the horizon, and ends up in a dirty trading post. Wait, am I talking about episode IV or VII? No way to tell! The main difference is that the attack happened on the planet rather than on a ship in orbit. Somehow it's the fact that it's another desert planet that annoys me the most. I mean come on, would it have killed you for it to be any other climate? Unless Jakku turns out to be the sneakily re-named Tattooine, that's weak. Second on the list of annoyances is another cantina scene, inexplicably in a cathedral in the middle of a forest. On the other hand, in Abrams's defense, better to err on the side of conservatism than make something that breaks with franchise tradition so early.

As a comment on Star Wars generally: it's hard to call these science fiction films. There are swords. There's magic. There are demi-humans that aren't elves or orcs but might as well be. There is not one lick of interest in how hyperdrive works, or the light sabers, or the economics or politics or history of the First Order and Republic. Which is fine, because it's consistent with the franchise, and that's not what Star Wars is about. And speaking of politics, isn't it a little troubling that basically the fate of the whole galactic civilization comes down to one family with special powers? Much like the Superman franchise, which makes Krypton seem like a third world dictatorship where their whole government really just boils down to a struggle between interstellar Hatfields and McCoys (or the -El family and the Zod faction) who bring their provincial little struggle with them wherever they go. (Yes, obviously it's more interesting when everyone is related and then you sell more tickets or comic books, but people invariably complain when one points out how beholden to the narrative is to the true function of the medium that conveys it.)

I didn't notice any lens-flair, although during the Millennium Falcon chase into the engine of the crashed star cruiser, there's a power-zoom that is distinctly un-Lucas-like.

And a final acknowledgement must be made, of Kylo Ren: forensic psychiatrist extraordinaire. I'm going to start wearing black gloves during intake examinations with my patients.

Fermilab: Universe Looks a Little Bit Less Simulated

Fermilab tried to measure "quantum jitter", which would be expected if space and time are quantized, like energy. They did not find it.

This is another way of testing the holographic theory of the universe - which is itself an extension of the model that black holes' entropy can be measured entirely from their event horizons. Of course, the model could be wrong or the instrument might not be detecting it, but even from a primitive Bayesian standpoint this moves us away from quantized spacetime, a holographic universe, and our expectations of what we might find if we are in a simulation. The two problems with simulation arguments remain: in general what we mean by "simulation" is very poorly defined and not agreed upon, and there is the PEP (pointless epistemological problem) of saying that the simulators could always make us forget the results, or change that parameter somehow when we try to measure it. In which case, the simulation argument is about the most untestable thing there is, and if we can't ever in principle know, why are we bothering to discuss it? (By the way, the "simulators could change it" argument assumes we know something of the simulators' nature and that it/they are trying to deceive us.) (Below from SMBC of course.)

Early Evolution of Intelligence More Likely Toward Galactic Center, Model Shows

As argued previously by other parties. From the abstract:

Our model also shows that [the likelihood of the emergence of intelligence] is increasing with time. [According to our model and fitting actual observations,] intelligent life emerged at approximately the present time at Earth's galactocentric radius, but a similar level of evolutionary opportunity was available in the inner Galaxy more than 2 Gyr ago. Our findings suggest that the inner Galaxy should logically be a prime target region for searches for extraterrestrial intelligence and that any civilizations that may have emerged there are potentially much older than our own.

1. Note that their point is that we should be searching there, NOT announcing our presence in any particular direction, especially core-ward. We should not do that if we seriously think there may be aliens in that direction, and there is a nonzero chance of any of them not being warm and fuzzy.

2. Furthermore, as we look toward the galactic center, we should be looking for Super-Earths (more surface area means more reaction volume to produce complex chemistry for biogenesis.)

Morrison Ian S. and Gowanlock Michael G. Extending Galactic Habitable Zone Modeling to Include the Emergence of Intelligent Life. Astrobiology. August 2015, 15(8): 683-696. doi:10.1089/ast.2014.1192.

Greatest American Hero Ep. 22, "The Shock Will Kill You"

This was a great show. First of all it had Bill Katt (who should've been Luke Skywalker instead of Mark Hammill, because Bill Katt can, you know, ACT), it had Connie Sellecca, who was an early crush (of course before I found my true love Jane Badler). I remember that the alien eel thing scared the crap out of me, despite that they were obviously filming in such a way as to protect their budget. (Re-watching the nuclear attack scene in the 1980s made-for-TV The Day After similarly reactivated an old fight-or-flight response.)

Watching it again as an adult in comparison with modern "rules" for television genres, I found it interesting that the astronauts on the space shuttle unambiguously died. Today, that would be allowed in a serious prime-time show, but not a show with tongue-in-cheek overtones like this one had. I also liked that a random FBI agent comes into a California dam facility and demands an immediate water release so that a reservoir can be filled, and the guy listens to him! Of course we were much more loosey goosey in this state back before California turned into Arrakis; today the alien eel would have overrun the state!

Computers Can Solve Long-standing Problems in Science and Create Theories

Yes, of course they can, because after all we create theories, and we're computers - but this is less trivial, because this is the first time silicon computers have created theories. There have already been exercises where data about the motions of bodies in the Solar System was put through automated inductive reasoning and reproduced the laws of gravitation. But this is different, because we already knew the answer when we re-constructed laws of gravitation. Software has now solved a problem in genetics that troubled the field for a century. (Original paper here.)

An objection might be "but does the computer understand the theory?" We humans often have a non-propositional, subjective sense that we understand something once we arrive at a model. But this sense is really like an emotion - that is, an internal experience that doesn't correlate to an object in the external world, and is separable from the reality it purports to relate to. That is to say: everyone has had the experience of feeling a "Eureka!" and then realizing they were wrong (and this feeling can range from seconds to years) - just as people with panic disorder genuinely feel terror as if they're going to die when they have a panic attack, without actually having their lives in jeopardy, in a kind of emotional hallucination. The computer is likely not experiencing a subjective eureka, but this has nothing to do with being correct.

Spike Jonze's Her Is Not About the Future

There are a few comments online about Her that are fully on the mark about the content of the movie, yet miss the main goals I think Jonze was striving for. That people think enough about any work of fiction to be annoyed by it is usually a compliment. What Robin Hanson said was

The main character of Her pays a small amount to acquire an AI that is far more powerful than most human minds. And then he uses this AI mainly to chat with. He doesn’t have it do his job for him. He and all his friends continue to be well paid to do their jobs, which aren’t taken over by AIs...Soon after they all leave together for a place that ”it would be too hard to explain” where it is. This is somewhat like a story of a world where kids can buy nukes for $1 each at drug stores, and then a few kids use nukes to dig a fun cave to explore, after which all the world’s nukes are accidentally misplaced, end of story.

Yes, when you think about AI for a living, you can't help but notice these kinds of incongruities. For that matter I'm a casual fan of Roman history, and I still get annoyed when I see tailored clothing in Roman-period movies. Along these lines, for me the silliest thing in Her in terms of predicting the future might be the China-India merger news near the beginning of the movie. But if you can get past the window-dressing to remind you it's the future so the creator has some license to alter the setting to make his point, then you can also realize Her isn't about geopolitics and economics. The technology Jonze creates is only a means for him to focus on his main themes. First, even though Her is set in a science fiction near-future LA, it's a better depiction of LA than in most movies. For example: LA is on the coast, and it often has really nice clouds. (If you live or travel there, pay attention. It's not the vanilla neutral people-terrarium portrayed on our screens.) A simple touch like this, letting LA speak for itself, warms the heart and makes the city in the movie feel more similar to the world outside the theater. In fact, the movie almost made me homesick for Southern California, while I was living in Southern California! And another thing about LA: there is a natural world that the city hasn't obliterated. There are mountains. There are islands. There are things to do outside. There are restaurants very much like the ones the people in the movie go to. And speaking of restaurants, the differing ratio of white:non-white you can see among the characters' friends, as opposed to waitstaff, felt accurate too. (People in California don't like to talk about this discrepancy.)

But more importantly, Her is about how the nature of intimacy has changed in the modern age, with the gain turned up a little on the role of technology to help focus on this. There is the obvious point being made that the protagonist's job is to write heartfelt cards for others' intimates, and in so doing, interpose himself (by invitation, for commercial reasons) in the most tender moments between lovers and family members. Yet he himself spends most of his life alone in a dark apartment, his only close friends from back in college. There's always clearly a connection missing - made all the more obvious by the people around him during his commute - always physically alone - constantly talking to friends on their earpieces. His material comforts (which are many - witness the great view and the cool video game system) don't make up for his lack of connection. In all the material and surface aspects, this guy has a great life - even with that dumb mustache he manages to get a date with Olivia Wilde, which seems to go well, and then he whiffs. And finally, the most aggressive and uncomfortable experiment in intimacy is the "real" woman standing in for the virtual Samantha, yet another intimacy intermediary. I found this scene not at all salacious and indeed only slightly less uncomfortable than the threesome in the film version of The Handmaid's Tale. (Seriously, don't look it up.)

Probability of Pre-Intelligent Life Seeding Between Solar Systems

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

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

Enceladus Ocean is Alkaline NaCl/Na2CO3 Solution

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



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

Modeling Gamma Ray Bursts as Causes of Mass Extinctions

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

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

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

Paper here.

Evidence for a Methane Source In Enceladus Oceans

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

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

The Film Martyrs and Horror of the Irrational

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

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

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

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

Interview with Scott Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OR

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

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

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

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

Russian Short on Flying War Machines

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

Крепость/Fortress from Dima Fedotof on Vimeo.