Van's Blog: Computing and the Future - Review of Berleant's: "Human Race to The Future"

The Human Race to the Future:

What Could Happen — and What to Do

by Daniel Berleant, 4th Edition 2017

In this book, MIT and Univ. of Texas trained scientist, Daniel Berleantz probes, in several epochs, where humans, the planet, and cosmos are headed. The book is available on Amazon in print and electronic forms. I have chosen the electronic form for this evolving study and review. In my first impressions, I make a short note per chapter, with the promise to evolve this commentary into a full book review as I study each one. This book has 338 pages, which through the miracle of Kindle device independence, maps into 6962 virtual locations. The comments, entirely my own, are evoked by the the topic of each chapter.

Beginning

Published by the Lifeboat Foundation lifeboat.com Visited this link.
Organization has been funded by donors to a level of $2.2M.

The Washington Academy of Sciences is at washacadsci.org Visited this link. An old-guard science lobby active since 1899.

Chapter One

What It Means That an Hour’s Work Yields a Week’s Food

The author states, "So if all people wanted was to be fed, the average person would need to work only about 1.9% of a 40 hour work week. That’s less than one hour a week! La dolce vita (“the sweet life”)."

Industrial productivity benefits have been offset by the hoarding and unbalanced distribution of wealth, ownership rights, and resources. Is this sustainable? Will it cause political instability? One could argue that it already has - but not in a consistent fashion.

The author explores the metaphor of labor and land as exemplifying time and space. I think of this in an industrial-complex context as "on time and under budget". It is interesting that so much of our GNP goes to entertainment related activities, not just movies, but recreations and sports franchises. In these teams play as though the outcome were life or death when the only consequence, the only value added, is to have "entertained" someone. It will be interesting to watch developing countries "leapfrog" by skipping steps that take them directly into the knowledge economy without having to evolve the intermediate steps such as incandescent light bulbs, tube radios and CRT's.

Chapter Two

Smart Pills ’n Such — Cognitive Enhancement the Easy Way

The author discusses pharmacology, nootropics, aka cognitive enhancers enumerating names like Provigil, Dexedrine, Ritalin and Adderall. Two of the four just cited are amphetamines - implicated in damage to neural pathways in the prefrontal cortex, but are widely prescribed nonetheless. Strychnine is also mentioned, and is the most toxic of the group. Poisoning by this chemical is one of the most painful poisonings known and resembles the symptoms of tetanus or lockjaw, noted for is painful muscle spasms, backward arching and contracture of the feet. It is important to proceed with caution when exploring new regimens.

Opisthotonus from strychnine poisoning: Painting by Sir Charles Bell - 1809

Two-dimensional chemical structures can be as useful as three-dimensional ones in identifying potential modes of action. The visual complexity of realistic 3D molecules can mask the functional structure of the agonist. Most pharmacological agents exploit the fact that the body uses a populus economy of small molecule signals that transit between enzymatic pathways of considerable structural complexity. This structural complexity emerges from the fact that enzymes surround their small ligand, and with a distribution of force and charge, that dramatically reduce the energy required to edit the ligand. In most cases the small molecules are transformed, metabolized and excreted, but in some cases they have their effect and are eliminated unchanged. For nootropics and neurotransmitter modulators there are common structural idioms that repeat themselves. Thus it is useful when considering any drug or nootropic to examine its structure and ask what structures it is similar to. The following questions are useful in nootropics:

What neurotransmitter families are up and down regulated?
(e.g. serotonin, dopamine, histamine, GABA)
What is the metabolic half-life of the substance?
Is it an immediate acting drug, or is it a neuron remodeling drug?
What is its LD₅₀?
(How toxic per kg of user body mass is it?)

For example with digitalis, a heart drug, the therapeutic dose is very close to the lethal dose and the patient must be monitored for signs of toxicity. The same is true of the psychiatric drug Lithium.

As an exercise, for each of the small molecule nootropics mentioned in the book I have drawn the structure and annotated the common name along with the half-life and LD₅₀. Consider the triple-ring motif in many of the substances mentioned, and in smaller molecules, the effective triple-ring that is approximated by side groups.

An exception is the structural complexity of Strychnine which earned Robert Burns Woodward who synthesized it a Nobel prize in 1947. "In his 1963 publication Woodward quoted Sir Robert Robinson who said 'for its molecular size it is the most complex substance known.'" Consider also the high LD₅₀ of table sugar and the low LD₅₀ of nicotine. One striking paradox - some substances that will absolutely addle the mind of a user, are not particularly toxic. LSD, Mescaline, and Modafinil are in this category. Also sage, the herb, has 28 potentially active components with a wide range of actions. The principal component in sage by a factor of twenty is eucalyptol, the active ingredient of Eucalyptus, which drives its aroma and taste. The structures, names, half-lives and LD₅₀are enumerated below:

Nootropic References

goo.gl/BDpVW1 goo.gl/Ax6dWn goo.gl/3snwAa goo.gl/S1cnwk goo.gl/yY88Z3 goo.gl/qLiF2P goo.gl/wBEs4G goo.gl/EDSmrd goo.gl/yrvG2L goo.gl/2H12jW goo.gl/NfL86q goo.gl/kCfiQF goo.gl/UTct1f goo.gl/ASVm2B goo.gl/asuiEQ

goo.gl/KbcP6j goo.gl/Z6ejRA goo.gl/8G9BaA goo.gl/tHbS19 goo.gl/5W6Tqf

goo.gl/JrfPyk goo.gl/ezBTHB goo.gl/XPoUyt goo.gl/vT1hZK goo.gl/tm8UEy

goo.gl/6H99Sm goo.gl/fz3jZ7 goo.gl/wnDdXw goo.gl/55yFyp goo.gl/zsCB5p

goo.gl/yPz87x goo.gl/yjesHC goo.gl/bjMiMQ goo.gl/oWTYwS goo.gl/QigfSY

goo.gl/sqtT1f goo.gl/HTxebH goo.gl/5c4Z8b

Chapter Three

Screens Today, Mind Reading Tomorrow

Side Note: An Audio Version of Human Race to the Future You have my vote for an audio version of this book. I tried to get Siri to read it to me on my Apple iPhone so I could ride my bike on the River Trail and listen to it, but even after enabling various Accessibility modes Siri claimed it could not read the pages. Side Note: Mapping Kindle Locations to Print Pages On the Kindle reader that I am using this book consists of 6962 'locations'. For reasons of reading-hardware platform independence, the notion of the page has been eliminated. Kindle Chapter One starts at location 492. Kindle Chapter Twenty-Nine ends at location 5534. According to the Amazon Previewer the Print Book starts on page 1 and ends on page 298. This means I must read 338 locations to have covered 20 pages. I had already finished the first two chapters which put me at location 779. You may want to remember that there are 17 locations per page. More precisely I found myself reading to location 1118, the EMP of Chapter Six and beyond.

Brain-computer interfaces are very interesting. How to accomplish this? This rekindled an interest of mine resulting in further discussion enumerated here under the section PMTMS which stands for Permanent Magnet TMS.

Location 789

Future users will prefer much more convenient methods.

Undecidable: I'm trying to become more rigorous in my "predict" vs. "enumerate possibility" best-practice discipline, so I find this statement "undecidable" in that context.

Location 790

Advances in speech understanding

Affirmative. This has happened in the last couple of years, along with ubiquitous and universal language translation. It has altered my life considerably on a daily basis as I engage with foreign-speaking colleagues around the world and have extended conversations with our Google Home appliances.

Location 791

But direct brain-to-computer communication — mind reading — will soon follow into the mainstream.

Undecidable. There is a wiring and brain-injury technical issue, and resolving power through the shielding of the skull that lowers EEG resolution considerably.

Location 793

Progress in speech understanding

I followed the "speech-synthesis is easy" vs. "speech-recognition is hard" technology evolution throughout my career. It is extremely comforting that both are now here in full force.

Location 796

Apple’s Siri

Siri is behind Google AI in everyday conversation, but hopefully catching up now that Apple has poached Google's AI chief. See: https://goo.gl/k3uzKd

Location 801

no intrinsic reason why computers could not advance even beyond human speech performance.

this has already happened

Location 803

The impetus is that speech is more convenient than typing.

Not yet. I find even high quality dictations to Siri substandard to fast typed input of my ideas. I can type only slightly slower than I can speak. I also retain content I have typed (or written) much better than when I speak it. I posit this is because typing gives me four rehearsals (thought, typed, read, error-corrected) of the content, while speech only provides two (thought, spoken).

Location 805

A microphone for speaking is both smaller and cheaper than a keyboard for typing.

A microphone is an adjunct to, not a replacement for a keyboard. All my computers have microphones.

Location 808

Speech can do everything keyboards can

Overreach: This optimism does not reflect the additional rehearsal and retention that keyboards enable. I have read this sentence three times, once when I typed it, once when I finished it, and once to error correct it.

Location 814

Amazing things can be done by sticking electrodes directly into the brain

Yes, and amazing infections can ruin said brains.

Location 816

Giving everyone the same standard USB socket embedded in the skull won’t solve that problem.

Heavens, I thought I was outspoken.

Location 818

which most people will stubbornly prefer anyway.

I'm not sure that stubborn is the way I would describe not letting people stick wires in my head.

Location 827

before brainwave reading smartphones no longer come with — what did they used to call them? — “ keypads.”

The optimism here borders on wild.

Location 832

and will only get better over time.

I hear this phrase often in technology that doesn't (get better over time) to the point that I would almost add it to my list of common fallacies. (wdv.com/Various/Writings/Fallacies/fallacies.pdf)

Location 834

In 2008, fMRI was used to observe brain activation patterns associated with thinking about nouns.

Yes and 60 minutes did a report implying that witnesses could be cross-examined for lying using fMRI, but I have yet to hear of one example of this being used in court and it has been 11 years. fMRI machines are hard to lug around, because the magnets are huge, and this appears to be a fixed limitation of the physics, not the magnet technology per se.

Location 839

computer gaming provides a ready market for mind reading

I agree with this even though it is speculative, gaming is driving the computing industry hard on all fronts, from visual synthesis to user interface and haptic devices.

Location 846

2008 the US Army sank millions of dollars into developing technology for a future “thought helmet”

Takes "Friendly Fire" to a whole new level. "Oops Captain, I did it again, she sings as the rocket-propelled grenade goes off." Why stop there? How about the "Thermonuclear warhead tipped missile helmet". Consider if opposing forces hacked the thought helmet to deceive soldiers on the battlefield. That would make a good Sci-Fi movie.

Location 858

No Lie MRI was providing limited commercial services in 2014

Yes! This was the outfit. Haven't heard a word from them. Wonder if "admissibility in court" became an issue. Googling them, it looks like they are fading fast.

Location 860

The necessary mind input hardware devices should get progressively lighter , more portable , and more comfortable until they are as easy to wear as baseball caps or sunglasses — and as cool (or even cooler).

Need mechanism - a plausible technology path by which this would take place. The migration of computers into glasses is certainly in play, sensing thoughts, not so much.

Location 864

For women who don’t care to wear their baseball caps backwards

Spoken like a true engineer.

Location 869

Many of us would like to know how fast mind reading technology is advancing in order to know when to expect specific capabilities to arrive.

This is a good sentence. How would we quantify the rate at which specific technology is advancing?

Location 874

Nielsen’s Law

I have fiber to my living room at 500 Mbits/second and I love it.

Location 876

An exponential trajectory will generally slow down given enough time, becoming the initial part of a “ logistic ” or S-curve.

This is good. identifying, for each situation, rate-limiting or gating phenomena is a key skill

Location 879

Thus I propose a law, too: The fraction of all identified exponential laws still in force declines over time.

I really like the "meta"-ness of this one.

Location 880

Getting back to brains, technology for safe brain scans was measured as doubling in power every six years in spatial resolution, and doubling every one and a half years in time resolution.

This seems like a more solid basis for estimating possible futures. How many generations before the spatial resolution reach that of the neuron and the temporal resolution reaches that of the highest frequency brain waves.

Delta waves (.5 to 3 Hz). ... Theta waves (3 to 8 Hz) ... Alpha waves (8 to 12 Hz) ... Beta waves (12 to 38 Hz) ... Gamma waves (38 to 42 Hz)

Location 882

include the volume of brain tissue

Yes, excellent point.

Location 884

fast, they will nevertheless start giving way to mind reading devices sooner than most people think.

Undecidable: What do most people think?

Chapter Four

Wiki-wikipedia

Location 890

Wiki - Wiki - Wikipedia

More than one reviewer thought this was good. Looking forward to understanding it.

Location 898

They also made us better informed and thus (we hope), smarter.

or pathologically lazier. The first thing the German rocket scientists did was get their library cards.

Location 903

a long-standing dream of information connectedness.

A Modern Day Tower of Babel. What happened with the first one and will that be repeated? To wit, Genesis 11:1–9

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Location 907

Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher , or particle accelerator.

And now, even with Higgs discovered and Standard Model intact, they want to build a much bigger one: https://goo.gl/Crax2Y

Location 916

Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, As we may think,

I scanned this article, he foresees Amazon among other things.

Location 956

Closed in 1934, its remnants still exist, see www.mundaneum.org

I visited the mundaneum just now. It features three main themes pacifism, anarchy and feminism. (illustration)

Location 962

The web is a quality-uncontrolled, giant disorganized mass [] of information.

Is it even possible to canonize knowledge, distilling it down to its essential logical facts without coloration or slant from the observer's point of view?

Location 965

The article cites numerous sources and makes a convincing case that Wikipedia is similar to traditional encyclopedias in its degree of reliability but states that “Wikipedia can not be considered a reliable source”.

It's pretty good considering except for highly trolled topics. Reading the "Reliability of Wikipedia" article it's interesting how the Encyclopedia Britannica put up a furious, pathetic and losing fight to the inevitable superiority of Wikipedia. I grew up reading encyclopedias, the Britannica was so starchy as to be unpalatable.

Location 972

Their interest has a specific slant, a context, that varies from one reader to the next

the word slant implies bias that doesn't seem intended here.

Location 977

If there are 5 million single - subject articles, there would then be 5 million × 5 million double - subject articles. That’s 25 trillion!

But as you state these articles could be generated on the fly, and any annotations could be associated with the compact tagline, instead of the with permanently-stored hybrid text.

Location 981

Wiki - wikipedia will be a better home for the many of us who would benefit from not just general information , but information customized to our needs at the moment of access.

In this line you define the moment of the singularity and provide a compact way of assessing its anticipated distance. Why? Because the intersection of machine learning and wiki-wiki now appears on the horizon of conceptual plausibility. This could be the best line in the book. I call it the "Wiki-wiki" meets ML moment.

Location 992

That is because the sentence is a natural unit of knowledge.

Fairly stunning factoid right there. Also highly self-referential. So that is one step forward in how we canonize knowledge independent of source. Call it, "Source Invariant Factual Tenets" or SIFT for short.

Location 998

Google’s Talk to Books feature

We just had a talk about qubits. The take home is that a qubit can be in two states simultaneously, unlike a bit, which has to make a commitment. This combination of states can be represented as the linear combination of a |0> + b |1>, where a and b can BOTH be complex numbers.

Chapter Five

Live Anywhere, Work Anywhere Else At JPL I worked with an early telecommuting pioneer, Herb Younger, who was also an Amateur Radio operator.

Location 1003

Chapter Five Live Anywhere, Work Anywhere Else

I've been a long-term telecommuting practitioner. What amazes me is how much traffic there still is.

Location 1018

rectangular mats called paper

Paradoxically I still learn more when I take notes on paper (per the rehearsal argument mentioned above) than when I type on the computer, even though I am proficient at both. Also drawing sketches is cool, and still unequaled by even the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro.

Location 1029

enabling efficiencies beyond what merely living nearby would or even could provide.

but if cities will always have faster internet due to RF dispersion characteristics, cities will win from physics alone.

Location 1031

video hookup going to a telepresence robot.

These things are super hookey meaning wierd or off-kilter. For some reason i want to tip them over, channeling my inner Luddite.

Location 1038

to the content moderators sometimes known as data janitors.

A new world class distinction... see also the Geico Caveman commercial https://goo.gl/8Xp4Y4

Location 1048

The “employee of organization X” aspect of our identities will become correspondingly more divorced from our careers, lives, and identities.

This can't happen soon enough.

Location 1052

Profit sharing schemes will proliferate.

Undecidable

Location 1058

Working at home, for some, would be a dream come true.

We need a new term for this... houseworker-in-residence?

Location 1061

The problem with working at home all the time is that many people will want to get out a bit more when they work.

Ugh, tell me about it.

Location 1063

Small cubicles will rent for a low price, and larger cubicles and walled - off offices for more.

I see this happening for manufacturing, prototyping and fulfillment as well. For that 3D printer that is just out of reach of one-person ownership.

Location 1069

Such a center

These are already all over Silicon Valley.

Chapter Six

From Highly Centralized to Highly Decentralized Society I continue to be amazed by the stoic resistance by Electrical Utilities to the concept of residential solar energy. There are some barriers to entry, but costs are dropping. Why do Solar Panels not seem to obey Moore's Law? Is it because they are a surface area intensive technology? One barrier to entry is siting solar panels in the context of existing architectures that were not engineered with sun facing geometry. Also vegetation and trees can block rooflines from the sun.

Location 1079

Chapter Six From Highly Centralized to Highly Decentralized Society

Solar Power is already pseudo decentralized, pseudo because it benefits from home and office tracts built to exploit it. When placed in rural areas, electricity transport costs come into play when excess generating capacity is present.

Location 1085

Society will be much more resilient to disaster as a result.

This channels my inner survivalist.

Location 1104

Five years without any gasoline would transform and weaken society if not destroy it completely.

Which is why fossil fuels must be sequestered for the transition to a fully solar/nuclear generation grid. I don't like nuclear fission, but due to AI/ML fusion is making some headway for stabilizing high temperature flare-outs. https://goo.gl/4P7gAw

Location 1110

fruits, nuts, vegetables, and other specialty crops as well as nearly all other foods, requires transportation.

A third of our food comes from California. No more goodies if they secede.

Location 1118

In recent times major blackouts tend to be caused not by fuel interruptions but by sudden, uncontrolled electric grid breakdowns.

X-class solar flares continue to pose a hazard to the electrical grid and long distance communications and remain largely unpredictable. We do get about a day's warning however in some cases do to satellite sensors. https://goo.gl/9tF9zS. Oops, you develop this in the next paragraphs.

Location 1142

Stuxnet worm, computer virus - like malware thought to have been written by government defense agencies which damaged Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The United States and Israel contributed significantly to the engineering of Stuxnet, as in, they made it. https://goo.gl/nbhy53

Location 1146

just as people still die of unknown causes despite all the advances of modern medical technology.

... frequently as a pathologist at Columbia Regional Hospital once told me, of undiagnosed drug reactions and side effects.

Location 1154

For example as society becomes increasingly infiltrated by computer controls, computer worms and viruses will become means for commanding machinery to go beyond design tolerances so that they fail catastrophically and are destroyed.

Stuxnet meets nuclear fission and fusion power plants.

Location 1167

A deadly and highly communicable disease present in the city might scare away the truck drivers.

they could just drop their trailers and go, their cabs providing some degree of isolation.

Location 1168

On the other hand, a disease - free city trying to protect itself from such a disease arriving could face an impossible dilemma : getting supplies in while keeping the disease out.

Nice counterpoint. A generating function when it comes to understanding unintended consequences.

Location 1173

Blockades by roving militias could also halt food distribution.

I had a friend that believed that TV shows like, "The Walking Dead" were really just carefully engineered survival manuals, preparing us for a calamitous future.

Location 1189

few who can would find building a refinery next to it to be a poor investment decision.

Not to mention persecution by the Neighborhood Associations.

Location 1204

However, fusion energy enthusiasts might well point out that solar energy is , indeed, fusion energy, but fusion energy emanating from the center of the sun rather than from a future nuclear fusion reactor here on Earth.

And some consider that a safe distance for placement of a nuclear reactor per the NIMBY criterion. (Not In My Back Yard)

Location 1206

Electricity created directly from solar energy , technically called photovoltaic energy, has been getting cheaper and cheaper for years.

Yes, but not in a Moore's Law way. Here's why. Refining pure silicon requires a certain melting point and purification energy to be spent. Silicon ingots are sawn, etched, doped, leaded, packaged and framed. The cost of such processing is proportional to the surface area of the silicon, which at best is currently 22% and theoretically only 37% per the Shockley-Queisser Limit. https://goo.gl/sSBZcL

Unlike computing hardware, more solar collector means more surface area, so cost grows as some manufacturing constant times surface area. Not a Moore's Law Decrease, but some slowly decreasing steady state cost per watt. Silicon foundries require gobs of energy whose power density is paradoxically best generated with fossil fuels due to I²R power law considerations. With computer chips of higher transistor density, we get more and more capability per unit area until eventually we are getting infinity for nothing, or as Bill Gates put it, "A 747 for the cost of a pizza". The limiting principle of course is heat dissipation and etching linewidth which at this writing is around 7 nm, about 1/100th the wavelength of visible light. If we could spray-on our solar cells in very thin coats we could work around, but not eliminate the surface area growth laws in solar panel costs.

Location 1224

It will be sold to the grid when you have extra

My friends Frank Kelly and Bill Ball routinely install net-metering equipped solar panels to wealthy homeowners which allows power to be sold back to the power company. Entergy is not happy about this law which my friends proposed and got passed. Full capacity net-metered solar installations are out of the reach of the average homeowner at this writing (2019) costing somewhere around $30K for 10 kW of capacity. https://goo.gl/nKaNG2

Interestingly LED lighting is already more cost effective than tungsten bulbs or Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulbs. Combining solar power with these kinds of lights leads to a win-win. Where solar power loses is in heat or thermal intensive applications such as air conditioning, heating and cooking. It takes many panels to perform high-wattage activities and those are time of day sensitive where net-metering may not be sufficient to load balance the modernized grid.

Location 1234

For example, an electric car (because it has a big battery pack) could be connected to a home electrical system.

This is a fantastic load-leveling mechanism that could further decrease dependence on a centralized grid. One could sell energy, buffered in one's electric vehicle, back to the power company, in times of widespread power outages.

Location 1239

In an emergency, you could get electricity from your next - door neighbor almost as easily as borrowing a cup of sugar or cooking oil. Just run an extension cord.

The cabling and infrastructure to do this properly is more costly and complex than one might first think. Nonetheless small arrays of interconnected neighborhood homes could become the new power-aggregation unit of the future.

Location 1241

But cars eat up so much energy that if you drive a fair amount you might not have enough solar electricity.

So true. An SUV at 60 mph requires 60 HP just to maintain speed on the highway. That's 44,000 watts, way in excess of home generating capacity.

Location 1242

Putting solar panels on the roof of the actual vehicle helps but does not produce enough energy so such vehicles still need supplemental power

It doesn't help much, a vehicle would have to be left in the sun for a month to make a trip to the grocery store.

Location 1256

A more sustainable approach to gas is to generate biogas from organic waste.

If you think the neighborhood composter was an stinking eyesore, well just wait for this one!

Location 1257

The secret is to decompose [] organic material anaerobically.

Or perhaps use genetically-engineered aerobic organisms.

Location 1262

The digester will need a pump and a tank to store the gas until you use it.

I call this, "A Hindenburg in Every Neighborhood"

Location 1266

They’re called Stirling engines, after Robert Stirling who invented them back in 1816. All you need to power this engine is an external heat source. (clarification) Burning wood, charcoal, trash waste oil, gasoline, ethanol, and gas all produce heat and would work fine.

Try to buy one.

Location 1269

It is also possible to convert waste into electricity.

Best done at a neighborhood scale...

in somebody else's neighborhood. - Oscar Wilde (not)

Location 1276

In 2013, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded funds to develop urine - powered microbial fuel cells.

In all sincerity we haven't seen a lot on this in the last six years.

Location 1293

Even in congested cities without yards, anywhere the sun shines — windows, roofs, land strips along roadways, even sides of buildings — could be used.

There is the real problem of roof-collapse when soil loads exceed anticipated loading conditions.

Location 1308

A robot that can dock and self-fill with water is not much more difficult to engineer than a robot docking and battery recharging system, which home vacuum robots already have.

It is more difficult to do it than to say it, as my Drexler-devoted friend once found out.

Location 1314

The home mowerbot serves as a model of cultivator robots for other crops.

I acknowledge the leverage to be obtained here, but not the scale. It works best at the scale of the regional farm.

Location 1327

People could go back to not knowing their neighbors very well, just like now

Sounds like a plan. Some of my neighbors scare me.

Chapter Seven

When Human Genomes Get Cheap

Location 1338

We are acquiring ever vaster amounts of information on how variations in our 20,000 – 25,000 genes affect our physical, mental, and medical characteristics.

At this writing 20412 genes for protein down from previous estimates of over 100,000. According to wikipedia: Protein-coding sequences account for only a very small fraction of the genome (approximately 1.5%), and the rest is associated with non-coding RNA molecules, regulatory DNA sequences, LINEs, SINEs, introns, and sequences for which as yet no function has been determined. It has turned out since the genome was sequenced in 2002 that knowing the gene sequence has not been as helpful in treating disease as had been hoped. The sequence of the cystic fibrosis gene, elucidated by Francis Collins has been known since June 1989 - nearly thirty years. Side Note: Due to an error in the html rendering of the blogger platform, commas (,) periods (.) and parenthesis in quoted passages render with a space in front of them. Apologies for this.

Location 1345

With genome sequencing costs breaking the $ 1,000 barrier in 2014 according to Illumina , Inc . ( exactly how the cost should be calculated is a matter of debate ) ,

It's $200 on special if you act now: Wired Magazine: https://goo.gl/uy83xC

Location 1347

Soon it will be possible for nearly any disease , condition or characteristic you can imagine to be checked to see how much it is influenced by each of the roughly 20,000 – 25,000 human genes .

This perfectly reasonable sounding statement is actually highly speculative because we don't know the wiring behind the genes. For example, the Cystic Fibrosis gene was sequenced in 1993 by Francis Collins. This information has produced very little benefits to the sufferers of CF. See "One Gene: Twenty Years", https://goo.gl/xck8sM. However Crispr-Cas9 in vivo technologies may help. https://goo.gl/yNiVCz

Location 1349

Ultimately we’ll know almost anything you could think of about how a person’s characteristics are associated with variations in each gene and its related molecular machinery that regulates when and how much the gene is activated .

Currently undecidable.

Location 1354

Organizations and clubs will doubtless spring up for people with specific gene variations .

"The Happy Eugenics Club", watch the furnace on your way out.

Location 1360

as “ genologers . ”

currently termed, "genetic counselors".

Location 1366

This wave of research will last a long time , because checking the connection of each of 20,000 genes with each of , say , 10,000 personal characteristics means up to 20,000 × 10,000 possible things to check . That’s a lot — 200 million ! Synergies and interactions among genes and their variants will be another area demanding extensive research.

This is where the real combinatorial complexity is. DNA is basically a Lindenmayer fractal code of extraordinary complexity. https://github.com/alpha721/lindenmayer-systems

Location 1372

When leukemia researcher Lukas Wartman came down with leukemia himself in 2011 his leukemia researcher colleagues hit the ground running , using full - genome analysis to rescue him from what appeared to be certain death .

This statement identifies an extremely powerful strategy in cancer treatment, to wit, "Understand and treat one person's cancer successfully and you have treated a thousand." Trying to treat the thousand is not as successful as treating the one.

Location 1376

Cancer increasingly should be treated based on the specific genetic mutations that made the tumor cells cancerous .

Yes, but due to the deterioration of cell-cycle checkpoints such as tumor suppressor p53, as the cancer advances, so does the degree of mutagenesis. So curing the early version of the cancer may not be sufficient to cure the late versions due to this tumor, "field effect".

Location 1377

because people have greatly varying sensitivities to medicines .

See previous comment from Location 1146.

Location 1383

Thousands of orphan diseases are known , some more serious than others .

And in the current health-care client, pharmaceutical companies are charging exorbitant prices to provide drugs such people even though the costs of manufacturing the drugs is low. See the essay I penned in January 2019 in preparation for this course: https://lvwarren.blogspot.com/2019/01/computational-medicine.html

Location 1403

Instead , expect at least some future prospective parents to splice the new gene into their sperm cells right at home ,

The paragraph after this, though intended to be humorous is quite creepy. I would rewrite it or eliminate it.

Location 1423

It is reminiscent of a rope , except that ropes are often three strands twisted together , rarely two .

Collagen, incidentally is a triple helix.

Location 1428

The Cas9 then cuts the cell’s own DNA at those points .

An illustration would be nice here.

Location 1431

Since the replacement templates have new genetic material provided by scientists , the overall genome has now been modified accordingly .

there is the notion of penetrance, that is, of our 37 trillion cells treated with a CRISPR therapy, what percent of them are reached. Also is there a diffence in the penetrance between somatic (body) cells and germline cells.

Location 1445

Their trick is to host symbiotic microorganisms in their digestive tracts that break down the cellulose into sugars , which are then easily absorbed . Humans host symbiotic microorganisms in the gut too , but they are not the kind needed to digest cellulose . Too bad .

Can our genome be overloaded with features or is their capacity for expansion? If so, how much?

Location 1455

Why not make bacteria that will break down the cellulose in a vat in a factory instead of in the human stomach ?

Or as one author proposed, implant in the skin cells of a persons palm modified cells that make the drugs a person needs on exposure to light. http://wdv.com/Various/Writings/newGenes.html

Location 1466

Such autocratic soldiers of Satan have historically viewed successful people as a threat

presumes a belief in the supernatural on the part of the reader and actually distracts from the excellent point being made.

Chapter Eight

Cheaper Teaching , Faster Learning Certainly seeing that this is true, see my recent animation of the mathematical simulation process. this should be included in my lecture blog(s).

Location 1488

Online education is growing because the “ invisible hand ” of Adam Smith , father of the economics field , is pushing it along .

Conclusion without evidence, undecidable. Actually develop Adam Smith's argument, then apply it to these excellent points.

Location 1499

Additionally , institutions themselves must build and maintain classroom space , parking lots ,

A useful calculation for any institution to make is the surface area in parking lots it must maintain for a given staff size and enrollment. This figure adds 200 square feet per person that drives to the institution.

Location 1508

Looked at more closely , the issue is really a connected web of subissues . An important one is duplication of effort .

This is a deep point. How much duplication of knowledge do we really need. Scarcity increases value, abundance decreases it. If enough people are highly educated the value of that education drops to zero. Is that a good or bad thing?

Location 1513

Now suppose each student learned at their own artificially intelligent computer ,

Yann Lecun, AI head at Facebook, said today that new programming languages are needed for working with AI. https://goo.gl/QyGtf1

Location 1523

Udacity founder as well as a well - known roboticist ,

I've taken Udacity courses on AI, ML, TensorFlow and Python. They are fast, compact, cheap and provide source code. I don't see how traditional academic institutions can begin to compete with their efficacy. They address the singularity for specific intellectual content. If I were a Dean at a CS department I would enroll my students and faculty in these and forego existing classes. Upside: The university collocates similar interests, and that environment fosters powerful synergy that the courses, by themselves, cannot provide.

Location 1541

point , it is undeniable that students generally learn some things they don’t really need to know .

The problem is, how do you know which knowledge bits are unneeded? Learning and more importantly MAINTAINING thinking skills requires continuous exposure to knowledge possessed by others. Filtering by interest is one way, are their others that are more efficient?

Location 1554

Hence change is incentivized by economist Adam Smith’s ever - present invisible hand .

I wish you had developed this goblin more fully prior to frequently referencing it to fully exploit its fear inducing power.

Location 1563

If you have been to college you can doubtless appreciate the magnitude of change in the college experience that would ensue if students pursued collections of certificates instead of single multi - year degrees .

This is a great idea, and would allow more idealized fitting of applicants to jobs by organizations like LinkedIn, Monster and Indeed.

Location 1576

Promoting those interests in a democracy is sometimes most effectively done by cloaking them , because implementing those interests is easier with the support of the general public who, if they better understood the situation , would instead support their own, different interests .

One of my favorite lines so far. One could write a series of great books based on this topic alone. And it would be totally relevant to the modern reader.

Location 1589

Let us expand that concept by also teaching people to identify the statement writer’s agenda and thus any incentive to manipulate the reader .

Like TV stockbrokers who must declare their holdings when offering financial advice.

Location 1599

Spelling will soon be taught less , owing to the general availability of spell checkers and the inroads of speech recognition .

We could be setting ourselves up for a new kind of stupid if we neglect to equip students with basic reading, spelling and mathematical skills. It appears we are already there, with few students able to perform "back of the envelope" calculations in their heads. If the computers go down, we literally are back to the stone age, as when the computers go down at the grocery store and everyone just stands around looking at each other as if to say, "What do we do now?" One could argue that every automated system must have some kind of manual backup so that essential actions can continue without interruption, albeit, less-efficiently.

Location 1601

Grammar will become increasingly unnecessary to study as automatic grammar checkers continue to improve .

Building the case for a nation of Jabba-the-hut feeding gamers who have lost the ability to do anything but lay on the couch and stuff themselves. Wait, that has already happened...

Location 1608

Google retrenched , while public excitement focused on Oculus Rift . With further progress the earpieces of such glasses

This keeps failing, like 3D glasses did at the movies in the 1950's. When will it reach critical mass and adoption? What are the perceptual barriers to adoption?

Location 1611

Such eartop devices will be much better than Siri .

Google Home Assistant is already astonishingly better than Siri although that gap may close soon. I frequently have extended discussion with my four Google Home appliances. Here is an entry I made six days ago:

"Just now I spoke with my Google Assistant, a device the size of a peach, in a paragraph long dialogue that ended with me asking, “Does the NSAID Meloxicam interact with the beta-adrenergic receptors that affect heart rate?” That I could be led into such a conversation with an intelligent machine blows my effin mind."

Location 1613

Facts will therefore become less important to commit to memory .

But with no facts in residence to feed our metaphors and analogies, will we be able to think at all?

Location 1624

At this point , teachers will be unnecessary . Of mainly historical interest , people ( and their eartop guardian angels ) will wonder at the old days when the phenomenon once called “ schools ” existed .

Fanciful and undecidable but possible.

Location 1633

The first is for universities to develop unique angles in what is taught and how ,

Universities that become "Collaboratoriums" will do better than those who ignore this change of paradigm. Why? Because collocation and collaboration are structurally facilitated by the University model.

Location 1642

The problem is that this protects universities from having to compete for students with universities in other states .

This is currently a disaster. There a just a few universities that are perceived as having been, "worth attending". Setting state universities, such as UALR, free from the historical stigma's of low acheiving is a critical goal.

Location 1649

Universities would then need to get much more serious about competing .

And one way to compete effectively is to specialize. How should UALR specialize so as to become nationally competitive?

Chapter Nine

Soylent SpringThis makes me want to literally run to MacDonald's. I will never eat artificial meat. I don't like cricket flour. It is a complete gross out, like when they eat eyeballs and tarantulas on Survivor and Fear Factor. To quote Dana Carvey quoting George Bush senior: "Not gonna do it, not gonna".

Location 1658

Artificial meat

not happening

Location 1683

to sundry other noxious substances like the small quantities of arsenic often fed (deliberately!) to chickens.

I didn't know this and it was true, although this practice has been curtailed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332189/

Location 1715

They hope to start selling the lab-cultured meat in 2021.

The food of the future, and let's hope it always will be.

Location 1740

Quorn, for example, tastes pretty good, but is expensive. Made from mycelium (fungus roots — yum!) it tastes surprisingly like chicken.

I have noticed in several different contexts, when people want me to eat something bizarre or strange, the line, "it tastes like chicken" somehow works its way into the conversation.

Location 1741

Beyond Meat, that came on the market in 2012 and is now available in thousands of grocery stores is, according to one reviewer, “so good it will freak you out.”

I'm already freaked out by the term "artificial meat".

Location 1743

It appears that veggie burgers are in striking range of beef burgers in both taste and cost but do not yet have the upper hand.

Veggie burgers, made of mashed up corn meal and grain are fine with me. It's the 'artificial meat' idea that is a problem, because the first thing my limbic system wants to know is where this came from, and it has some kind of implanted memory subconscious association with Soylent Green ingredients. If the term, "veggie burger" was used everytime in this chapter that the term, "artificial meat" was used, it would have been easier to get through.

Location 1752

While such a 1:1 conversion ratio may be impossible, the present, profligate 10:1 rate certainly presents an opportunity for vast improvement.

Metabolism is extraordinarily efficient, mitochondria operate at an efficiency of greater than 40%, which few other thermodynamic processes made by man have achieved including transportation. So it plausible to believe that 10:1 or something near it is the actual ceiling, especially when one considers the work function of laying down muscle tissue through DNA replication.

Location 1753

Long term, even growing plants is a wastefully inefficient way of using solar energy to create food.

Plants convert at between 3 to 6% efficiency, but solar panels are often in the single digits for conversion efficiency as well.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency

Location 1758

Watch out meat animals, you’re going obsolete!

like in the sixties when we were promised flat screens...

Chapter Ten

Battle for the Mind

This topic reminds me of Michelle Bachman's "Pray the Gay Away" program, an intrusive attempt at reprogramming the basic sexual identity of gay individuals, part of the symbiotic power and influence relationship that has emerged in the last two decades between the GOP and evangelical Christianity.

Location 1810

One has to wonder how many innocent people are in prison because of this phenomenon.

Especially people of color, who in the minds of their accusers, "all look alike".

Location 1811

In another experiment, Loftus & colleagues persuaded up to 18 % of people that an implausible event — witnessing demonic possession as a child — probably happened to them personally.

A friend of mine, a Hollywood screenwriter, sincerely believed he had been abducted when he was younger and brainwashed like Jason Bourne, in the Robert Ludlum trilogy. I always wondered if the thin line of sanity was what gave him, and writers like Philip K. Dick their ability.

Location 1847

Yet as well - known neurologist Oliver Sacks writes, “ Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. ”

And he knows because?

Location 1858

the Philip K. Dick story that later became the motion picture thriller Total Recall

He was such a genius writer. For a period believed he was living parallel lives in the present and the distant past. Like the prolific mathematician Paul Erdos and the band Korn, he made heavy use of amphetamines during some portions of his career.

Location 1861

Will electronic chips containing “memories” of learning difficult subjects — foreign languages, history (revised or not), business and legal cases, technical, mathematical, and so on, be implanted in our skulls or “merely” piped into our brains via ultrasonic, transcranial magnetic, or pharmaceutical manipulation?

The scene in The Matrix where Trinity learns to fly a helicopter in a few seconds is reminiscent of this.

Chapter Eleven

Will the Artificial Intelligence Singularity Threaten Civilization ?I love the stop button problem in General Artificial Intelligence as articulated by Rob Miles. It is a source of endless theoretical entertainment. Impediments to the Kurzweil-ian Singularity as articulated in my first ICF blog post, "Too Many Languages" keep me from worrying about any threat to civilization in my lifetime. That said, I cannot resist a good James Cameron - Film Noir - Terminator rerun.

Location 1889

Artificial Intelligence Singularity

The AI Singularity is a presumption proposed by Ray Kurzweil in a book of the same name, but it is just that. In my first homework blog I proposed there are serious factors mitigating a singularity. Among the worst of them is having to negotiate with the library to get a paper that is out of network and then waiting forever to arrive, only to find that it isn't exactly what one was looking for.

Location 1904

Soccer is different from chess and Jeopardy!, but robots compete in that game too.

Robotic soccer is a watermark, that when achieved will represent a change of paradigm for athletics. But will it? J.R. Pierce noted that when computers synthesize music people didn't stop going to concerts. The human factor is something humans want. Can you imagine robots going to a robotic soccer match and not inviting humans? THAT would be a change of paradigm.

Location 1910

It was created by British code breaker and war hero Alan Turing.

...who was basically murdered by the Brits driving him to suicide after chemical castration because he was gay, see also, "The Poison Apple". Oops! You cover this on the next page...

Location 1944

This machine would in turn be able to design one with yet more intelligence.

Assuming that intelligence isn't an asymptotic attribute, approaching some finite maximum. Also assuming that superior intelligence is value neutral with respect to benevolence or malevolence. My calculator does not love or hate, it just calculates. It does so faster every Moore's law cycle, but hasn't taken on emotion yet. I like that it calculates faster, better, cheaper. It doesn't know this however.

Location 1950

Consider that it takes a sizeable community of skilled humans to create even a pencil.

How many people? This would be a number worth knowing.

Location 1953

Even the simplest computer is obviously far more complex than a pencil.

Similarly, how many people to make the simplest computer from materials dug from the earth and extracted from the air? I have often fantasized time traveling to the past to a primitive, yet literate civilization. I imagine myself instructing them on how to make a transistor and a solar cell, thus leapfrogging fossil fuels and bringing in computers early on. I would also get them going on hot and cold running water, since I can't live without a warm shower. That requires plumbing, but I digress...

Location 1957

Tasmania is a well-known example.

How? I don't know, and there isn't a linked reference.

Location 1957

Another thing to consider is that technology advances faster and further in larger populations because, for example, there are more people to invent things.

Is this why big cities seem to get more done and become portals for that which is interesting. Like New York in the early days of broadcasting radio and early television?

Location 1958

So one hyperintelligent computer is not as likely to change the order of things as large numbers of them together.

Not buying the underlying assumption because one hyperintelligent computer might do things differently than a fleet of humans.

Location 1960

Still, AI does appear to be improving.

And it is improving more in the last four years than in all of history. See HW 6.

Location 1960

Computers are already far in advance of human intelligence in arithmetic

I worked on the University of Illinois Plato System in the late seventies. It was a microcosm of today's internet with similar problems. This experience leads me to the observation that there is a threshold of communication and computational complexity at which viruses become possible, and viruses are symptomatic of the emergence of life forms, albeit ones whose only goal is to make copies of themselves. That drive however seems to be independent of scale. It has the funny side effect of reducing entropy, which is fundamental to living things.

Location 1962

This will continue to happen with other computer capabilities.

Computers seem autistic to me, they lack emotions and the ability to make two-way social relationships. Programming emotion could certainly be done, and we are seeing primitive forms of it in Google Home, Siri, Alexa and Cortana, but the computers are not yet equipped with memory compartments such that they "feel" anything. Reinforcement learning, a burgeoning research area in AI could change that, but emotions would still simply be a number, a reinforcement target whose score is run up as high as possible. Numbers are dopamine in the domain of reinforcement learning

Location 1962

such as mishap-free motor vehicles,

There are enough driverless cars out there that they are now killing people just like human drivers. The good news is they kill fewer of them. The bad news is that they may inadvertently kill more people with darker skin, according to Futurism magazine.

Location 1978

The AI singularity on its way

Once a calculation can be done fast enough, it doesn't matter if it can be done any faster, it is effectively instant for the user. This would seem to be a mitigating factor against an AI singularity as long as AI remains in the realm of calculation, as its embedding onto graphics processors seems to indicate.

Location 1991

Let us categorize the possible modes as cooperation, competition, and combined cooperation and competition.

This sounds like, "Let us make man in our image", from the book of Genesis. I wrote a short essay on competition vs. cooperation here.

Location 1992

the literally super-human thinking powers it will have after the AI singularity occurs.

Maybe we idolize intelligence, giving it more credit that its worth in the limiting case.

Location 1994

Combined cooperation and competition.

Cooperatition is the handy shortening of this.

Location 2004

Robots imbued with artificial intelligence could potentially eliminate the emotional need of individuals to interact with other people, leading to social and perhaps population collapse.

I already spend as much time talking to and listening to Google Home AI as people. But I don't feel my world has collapsed, rather it has been enriched, because my home AI is better informed, and thus leaves me in a similar position to the extent that I can absorb it.

Location 2008

Laws against robots having certain key human-like characteristics

Why have a law against them if they aren't hurting anyone? A Japanese man recently married a hologram in an $18,000 ceremony.

Location 2015

(A self-driving car is, in fact, a robot.)

As is a washer, a dryer, a microwave oven or any other programmable (albeit specialized) appliance.

Location 2021

What forms could such deterioration take, how far it could go, how would we recognize it when it starts to occur, and what are the solutions?

Watch any old episode of Roseanne. It's already here.

Location 2025

and the only solution may be genetic engineering of the human species,

another solution would be to destroy all the robots, or to destroy the just the robots that are bad for us like those that keep us from exercising or those that make us eat foods containing high fructose corn syrup. My point is that genetic engineering might be the last solution, rather than the first or only.

Location 2028

Robots become autonomous, and make their move.

Like in the movie Ex Machina 2014. I just can't get enough of the Robot engaging in finality with her creator.

Source

Location 2029

...a new model of robots that do not obey their human masters. Humans decide to shut off electricity to this factory. Unfortunately, it turns out that robots are running the power plant that generates the electricity so that strategy fails. Next, humans attempt to issue an order to quit shipping needed materials to the factory. Unfortunately, robots are the ones driving the trucks that bring the materials to the factory, and so on.

Location 2033

I mention this often, but Rob Miles articulates this "stopping problem" very cleverly.

Location 2035

The war is on, and it’s them or us, winner take all.

...or a small band of rebels remain ala Cameron or Lucas.

Location 2036

For example, oxygen leads to rust which is bad for robots, so they might try to get rid of it.

This line rocks. Great premise for a scifi novel.

Location 2038

We don’t know how to do it. But we should think and discuss, hoping that such forays into a forward-thinking existential robology will identify solutions before it is too late.

The current tack, addressed by Miles et. al. is to make sure that AI's and humans are aligned to, "want the same things". Andrew Ng thinks we are too obsessed with this because it belongs to the general AI problem, which he sees as a long way off. He says, "he worries about superintelligence in the same way that he frets about overpopulation on Mars." Combining the converse with your oxygen metaphor, maybe robots could be used to terraform Mars for us, but then they decide they don't want us and our oxygen-loving ways..."

Location 2041

AI could be embedded in robots used as soldiers for ill.

This is happening now and it's bad news for pacifists like me, those at Google and those at Microsoft.

Location 2043

The seductive doctrine of protection through MAD (mutual assured destruction) will be hard to resist.

Leading to a robotics and AI Arms Race. This is bad and it will happen. As the Native American singer Buffy Saint Marie says, "We are outgunned", so it doesn't matter if we're right, just that we're outgunned.

Location 2047

I predict that the movement to ban weapons that choose their own targets will pick up support and become like the movements to control other weapons of mass destruction: chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons.

I'm betting on human nature and a race to the bottom. As soon as one country adopts AI and robotic weapons, any other country that wants to survive will have to be able to match their ever-escalating capability, resulting in a new arms race. Niels Bohr, the scientist, and a great one BTW, wanted everyone to have nuclear energy, even the Russians. He got his wish. The same thing will happen again because it has to. Its the nature of the beast. So how can we position ourselves in this impending arms race? We can't. Its the business of nation-states who have a mind of their own. Only the escalation can be predicted and not its eventual consequences. OK, I'm scared now, and I don't scare easily.

Location 2050

highly capable AI tasked with promoting the interests of a large organization

Like an election.

Location 2052

An emergent property of a corporbot, robosoldier, or other AI intent on doing what it was created to do as effectively as possible would, logically, be a drive to improve itself.

I like this chain of names of AI/robot creatures - worth expanding their phylogenetic tree just to anticipate their potential effect.

Location 2061

the venerable bottled genie bearing wishes,

the first wish of course is for infinitely more wishes. Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

Location 2068

Another factor that might be useful is to count the rate of new AI applications becoming available over time. A suitable composite metric would allow us to know just how fast AI is advancing.

This would be a great project, the outcome of which would rival Moore's law in importance and consequence. In other news, today TensorFlow 2 was released. Fewer, more powerful API's including eager execution. See HW 6.

Location 2081

you’ve encountered a singularity,and there is no answer.

or you have encountered more than one answer. Division by zero exists, it just isn't single valued. It has two values depending on whether zero is approached from above or below. Since these values are plus and minus infinity, they couldn't be more different, but they both exist. This frustrates formalists. Infinity isn't a number however. It is a collection of ideas of different sizes.

Location 2084

the density of matter at the center of a black hole

Interesting fact: supermassive black holes are of such low density that they can float on water. I didn't believe it either, but it is true and one can Google it. I explore this in detail below to find that the largest black holes have a density equal to that of the earth's atmosphere at over 200,000 feet! Not intuitive to say the least.

Chapter Twelve

Deconstructing Nuclear Nonproliferation

The fascinating thing to me about nuclear proliferation is that the world hasn't
already been blown up twenty times over. My only stab at proposing any kind of
gating process is that the refinement of Uranium using its hexafluoride in
centrifuges is a nation-state scale of process, and most nation-states having
gone to the trouble, seem to protect their reserves. Also the meme of
Mutually-Assured Destruction seems to keep the leaders of these nation states
at bay. The combination of radical religious ideologies could break this loose
at some point. The question is why hasn't it already done so. What is the
Moore's law of refining Uranium?

Location 2099

Deconstructing Nuclear Nonproliferation

Discussing AI and Nuclear Nonproliferation in sequence is a brilliant move. The order could be reversed with just as much effect. This would put them in chronological order, priming the reader to relate the lessons of the nuclear age to those of the AI age.

Location 2109

The first country to go nuclear was the US, with a test explosion in 1945.

An excellent book on this, that my Google Home read to me, is Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". It is my favorite scientific documentary volume and at 37 hours long, it really is a volume.

Location 2119

The military potential of U-235 enrichment has led Iran into conflict with the US, Israel, and many others.

Indeed it has, but honestly, what entitles us to have it, but not any other sovereign nation state?

Location 2123

its own nuclear opponents, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer,

There would have been no atomic bomb in WW2 without "Oppy".

Location 2126

The ultimate resolution of Iran’s nuclear path is unknown as of this writing.

You can bet that the centrifuges have restarted, and this time without the pesky "Stuxnet" virus, developed by the US and Israel and detected by Kaspersky labs in Russia.

Location 2133

“It is difficult to predict, especially about the future”

Direct attribution to Yogi Berra would work here.

Location 2142

since each of the 10 could attack each of the 200.

Each of the 10 could attack each of the 200 plus 9 of the nuclear countries, however unadvisedly. When the analogy is addressed this way, the result is exactly double the number of attack pairs if we move from 10 to 20 countries. As nuclear proliferation continues however, your model rolls off to zero, as mentioned. When everyone has nuclear weapons, mine grows to the square of the number of countries. Since reality is usually between two extremes I averaged the estimates. The results are still foreboding:

As this note is written, sentiment is that India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers that despise each other are trying their best to avoid nuclear conflict and Israel is dying to nuke Iran.

Location 2171

A finer metric would also count steps toward nuclearization as appropriate fractions of full membership.

An excellent measure of a country going nuclear is the rate of "criticality accidents". They nearly always happen as U235 concentrations increase without operational handlers having experience.

Location 2175

For example Cuba’s status as such a country brought the world close to a second nuclear war in 1962

And we are doing the complement by installing intermediate range ballistic missiles in Europe. Thus we have now a potential Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.

Location 2196

US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger

And we are likely in a worse predicament now!

Chapter Thirteen

Space Empire — From Mercury to Neptune — and Beyond

Having worked on Mars Pathfinder at JPL this is one of my favorite topics - as
something of a naysayer, to wit: Taking Mars for example, there is no air, no
water, no food. The discovery of frozen water at 78 degrees latitude could open
up some possibilities, but hauling the infrastructure to Mars and setting up a
self-sustaining colony is mission fraught with peril. It is interesting that
the round trip travel time is of the same order as that of Christopher
Columbus. Speeding that up seems out of reach. Impact with particles at high
speeds is a serious problem, but I have proposed that spacecraft generate their
own magnetic fields and travel in a plasma to abate this.

Location 2236

“Mercuria” will do, as it highlights its exotic and intriguing home.

You have a gift for writing science fiction as well as science forecasting. Hope to see you do a novel at some point, or at least a short story.

Location 2237

So to found Mercuria, we must solve the basic problems of heat and vacuum.

The vacuum is a real problem, and the heat is a close second. Who wants to live in a thermos bottle? We can never go outside. Mercury's magnetic field is 1% of that of the Earth, and given its proximity to the sun, there is little hope of retaining any atmosphere generated. That said, sending an unmanned probe to mine and melt ice, and generate oxygen and CO2 is very much within the realm of the doable. If one could send nanobots that replicate these products could be generated for us. That would make us the Mercurial gods of Mercury.

Location 2256

An ideal place to collect solar energy would stay lit 24/7 (or the Mercurian equivalent)

The inclination of mercury is 7 degrees, so the range of the constantly illuminated pole is quite narrow compared to that of earth's whose inclination is 23.4 degrees. Mercury is rendered below for fun.

Location 2265

Mercury's polar regions are actually a great place to be.

Not a lot of real estate for ten million people. An advance party of life-forms or nanobots engineered to terraform the planet could help this situation.

Location 2272

Mercury will be settled, strictly speaking, by cavemen.

As England settled Australia by sending their prisoners there.

Location 2277

be a technical challenge for which Mercuria’s schools would prepare its youngsters

those youngsters that had not been ground up and eaten for food, Donner party style.

Location 2282

that manufacturing computer chips is such a challenge even on Earth

FedEx delivers to Mercury now, so they can get computer chips.

Location 2286

developing indigenously sustainable ways

there is a fork in this scenario - one branch that can communicate and receive material support from earth and one branch that cannot. What could Mercury send back to Earth as payment? What can Mercury be mined for? There is a lot of magnesium on Mercury, which would be cheap to deliver due to Mercury's low gravitational constant (38% of Earth's) and the low density of magnesium (1.7 g/cc). It would still be more expensive than Earth magnesium due to launch costs. It would be the cost of of launching a payload whose density is 0.66 g/cc from earth. Magnesium is $26 per kilogram on eBay and about $10 per kg on Alibaba.

Location 2315

Indeed, Venus’s greenhouse effect makes its surface fairly steady at about 860° F (460 °C), day or night, equator or poles.

Solder melts spontaneously at this temperature.

Location 2316

Fortunately the extreme runaway end point of the greenhouse effect on Venus is not a concern here on Earth.

In my lifetime CO2 levels have increased by 25%, which is basically crazy for such a powerful greenhouse gas. So I am concerned.

Location 2322

The most reliable and doable approach might be to build underground.

A better bet might be to live in the clouds and float habitats on the high density and corrosive atmosphere. At 50 km the density is the same as earth's surface. Oops - you talk about this on the next page. Here's a graph anyway:

Location 2327

if the surface should be calmed thus inactivating the windmills.

possible book typo on 'be becalmed'. The question is whether the windmills would fail by melting, or by corroding in the sulfuric acid. They would need to be made of titanium or some other metal tolerate of the temperature and oxidation potential.

Location 2351

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

I always thought the omission of [a] was intentional.

Location 2359

Astronomers believe there are enough caves, called lava tubes and created by ancient flowing lava, to give colonists choices.

I checked this and indeed, they look like a great first destination providing protection from cosmic rays and meteor strikes. The ceilings have collapsed on some.

Location 2397

locally manufactured plastics much easier to make than glass.

A sketch of the manufacturing and mining process would be useful here.

Location 2427

You would rarely have trouble getting up,

the gravity on Ceres is 3% of Earth's. A 200 lb person on Earth would weigh 6 lb on Ceres. You could jump 37 times higher on Ceres than on Earth. Oops - you cover this on the next page. Even so consider: A person could not reach the Ceres escape velocity of 1666 feet per second by muscle power alone however.

Location 2518

If you think the task of setting a diamond the weight of an iceberg into a cocktail ring

I find the extension of some of these analogies tenuous. This tone of this chapter is considerably more speculative and even campy than the previous ones. I'm not sure that is a bad thing, but I wasn't ready to switch from scientist mode to fanciful mode so quickly.

Location 2525

Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede have plenty of ice too, and subsurface liquid water, but also lots of dangerous radiation at the surface.

this should be mentioned more often, since movies about exploring these often neglect it.

Location 2531

Sulfur is the modern name for what used to be called “brimstone”

interesting. I'm making a rudimentary connection of something I never quite put together, to wit, sulfur can be collected from the brims of volcanoes, where it condenses in nearly pure form. This must be the origin of the name.

Location 2551

The New Horizons spacecraft launch of January 19, 2006,

and arrived in our lifetime to give us great pictures of Pluto, which was a spectacular accomplishment.

Location 2572

Once the energy problems are solved — bon voyage !

The more I read the more I wonder if Earth was "Seeded" by an Alien Civilization. Like this has all happened before many times over in episodic drama form.

Location 2579

we have no evidence yet that there are any planetary bodies orbiting Proxima Centauri on which to land.

Although the exoplanet situation is improving due to Kepler and now Tess.

Location 2588

One is that, because there are so many of them, the nearest ones are a lot closer (hence easier to get to) than the nearest stars.

The nearest rogue or nomad planet is 7.1 light years away. Still out of reach for this generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet

Oops - you address this substantially on the next page. Well at least this reader's anticipation is in concert with the author's which is good for readability.

Location 2655

Your gardening experiences here on Earth, both good and bad, will mirror to a significant degree those of future space colonists.

At least one's indoor gardening experiences.

Location 2666

Each nutrient on that list needs to be matched with a manufacturing process for creating it in a form suitable for human consumption.

This would be a worthwhile exercise, especially if combined with the Roche biochemical pathways:

Chapter Fourteen

Chasing the Future — Spoilsports of the Prediction Game

In math we have the obligation to either prove that something is true or false, or to prove that it can't be proven, causing our ignorance to remain in the second order. I like the distinction Berleant has made between the notion of 'predicting' the future and that of demonstrating 'possible' futures. Saying, "These are the possibilities that could arise" seems much more intellectually responsible than, "This is what will happen.".

Location 2700

Political polls affect voting behavior.

And prediction markets affect people's perception of who is winning, thus the incentive to manipulate them.

Location 2701

The social competition theory of human brain evolution even holds that game theory is the key to why we are intelligent.

Although we posited in a previous lecture that all knowledge generated by nature is accomplished by the search algorithm of mutation and natural selection. The current corpus of knowledge resides in the creatures currently living.

Location 2708

Heisenberg uncertainty principle

Heisenberg didn't flee Germany like his Jewish physicist contemporaries. He became a Nazi and nearly got them the atomic bomb.

Location 2721

and the bright dot on the wall will smear

I did this experiment which caused me to discover the batteries on my laser pointer had corroded. After repairing this, I did the experiment and noticed a drop in intensity and a horizontal polarization at the end of the V-notch before the laser spot disappeared entirely. This looked to me like the Fourier transform of the original spot. I'm having trouble with the word smear, because I want to really understand the mechanism.

Location 2741

Wet blanket # 3 — quantum tunneling

I'm hoping you mention entanglement in here somewhere along with the quantum teleportation principle. It's really interesting and has some classical constraints.

Location 2785

As goes weather prediction, so goes prediction in other topics.

not quite. Weather is unique - the partial differential equations of weather are hyperbolic - meaning they are sensitive to small perturbations in their inputs, or small uncertainties in their values. Contrariwise, the equations of solid structures like bridges are elliptic, meaning they are stable and not subject to the chaos of the butterfly effect. Thus we can predict that a bridge will remain viable over a much longer interval than we can predict the weather. Our first responsibility is to figure out which set of equations are governing the system. With respect to homo sapiens, it seems that chaos rules the day. If a small political can give rise to a nuclear exchange, we are definitely living on the ragged edge of small perturbations for extinction events of various scales. Would you like to buy a radiation detector?

Machine Learning holds some promise into being able to understand the sentiments that lead to conflict before the conflict occurs. Thus ML could be a life-saving or world-saving technology.

Location 2797

Consider the Lorenz water wheel again.

I did and the video you recommended was fantastic. The newer material shows that the same events happen, but the time between them is altered. Yet on average, the same things happen, to the same degree, taking similar amounts of elapsed time, but with different phases. I also watched a quaternion video that was in sequence and it was also fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EgbgTm0Bg

Location 2802

attempt to predict it in detail will soon founder

[sic] 'flounder'?

Location 2820

“ Solomon Grundy ; Born on a Monday ; hristened on Tuesday ;

[sic] christened on Tuesday. This could be some kind of Kindle or html glitch.

Location 2821

Buried on Sunday ; hat was the end ; Of Solomon Grundy. ” ( Mother Goose )

[sic] that was the end. This could be some kind of Kindle or html glitch.

Location 2825

The problem is the distress, not the laws of the universe, since meaning and purpose are mental and cultural, not physical phenomena.

What if we are a crop of creatures being raised by the universe in an attempt to give meaning to itself?

Location 2829

Even if humanity avoids destroying itself, in 10 million

Or next year, the capability is there.

Location 2834

Multiple religions that each believes all the others are wrong presents a bit of a conundrum, if you think about it.

I call this, "We're it doctrine", meaning that each sect considers itself worthy and the others destined for damnation. It's both humorous and tragic, part of the fuel for our current cold civil war between the left and right.

Location 2840

Political decisions focus on short-term, narrow-minded goals

Except the Japanese who have a 100 year plan and more.

Location 2852

The weights of future events should be based on their importance if they occur, the likelihood they will occur, the value of procrastinating, and the cost of acting.

This is the definition of a Recurrent Neural Network, more or less.

Location 2914

how much do you care about your grandparents ’ grandparents

Interesting question - I have searched out what has turned out to be over 9000 people in my family tree, each of whom has some stake in my existence. It is hard to comprehend all of them, or the lives of those who have lived in times before that are so much different than now. Yet I try to consider what their lives must have been like and remain grateful for the impact they had.

Chapter Fifteen

Warm , Poison Planet

This could be titled, "Why aren't we like Venus, where lead would melt in puddles and we feel the same pressure as 3000 feet under water? Where our skin would fall off from sulfuric acid? Venus is about the same size as earth, not that much closer to the sun. Is this the greenhouse of our future? Was Venus pretty before it fell into runaway warming?

Location 2935

If that happened on Earth, our fair planet would be hotter than a self-cleaning oven.

A useful calculation to make would be the actual heating as the CO2 level went up. We've warmed about a degree since the industrial revolution began in the mid 1800's and the CO2 levels are at all time high. A degree every 150 years over the long term could leave us in a bad way.

Location 2966

methane hydrate crystals

these clathrates pose a current hazard as ocean temperatures rise of setting off a runaway warming event.

Location 3000

Thus there is no need to buy a gas mask just yet.

Unless you live in Beijing.

Chapter Sixteen

Day of Contact

I spent the last couple of evenings classifying light transit curves from the TESS spacecraft. I found several that indicate exoplanets are orbiting their parent star. The proliferation of exoplanet discoveries is one of the most exciting things to happen since Steve McQueen got in his fast machine to freeze the Blob!

Location 3013

Day of Contact

Tess and the new exoplanet data are resulting in a flood of new discoveries taking Kepler's results to a new level.

Location 3020

The Chief Technologist tried to stay calm.

you begin to hit your fictional stride here. let it flow.

Location 3040

With their eyes so like and unlike ours?

The movie, Arrival (2016) wins best abstract alien, hands down and is the anti-anthropomorphic template of best guidance. Directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer.

Location 3050

acquire great wealth,

Aliens may not be capitalists, though they may thirst for our resources. Pick two, say water and Palladium.

Chapter Seventeen

Darwin , Meet God . "Pleased to Meet You."

I have done some work in this area. Specifically if you permute the first chapter of Genesis in the order: [1,4,2,3,5,6] the first order conflicts between science and Genesis are removed. The question then becomes, can this permutation key be used to unlock other mysteries? Here is my proof:

Contradictions of the Bible and Science
L. Van Warren MS CS, AE
December 2018

Genesis 1:1

  "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Day 1
 God creates light ~13.77 billion years ago

Day 4
 God creates the stars ~13.32 billion years ago
 God creates the sun   ~ 4.60 billion years ago
 God creates the earth ~ 4.54 billion years ago
 God creates the moon  ~ 4.53 billion years ago

Day 2
 God partitions water/sky ~3.8 billion years ago
 Cyanobacteria fossils    ~3.5 billion years ago
 Plankton      fossils    ~3   billion years ago

Day 3
 God creates dry land     ~600 million years ago
 God creates plants       ~470 million years ago

Day 5
    Eoraptor dinosaur fossils ~231 million years ago
 God creates birds         ~ 65 million years ago

Day 6
 God creates land borne life ~ 63 million  years ago
 God creates mankind         ~200 thousand years ago
                                                                                        
Contradictions:

By science, Day 4 events occur before Day 2 activities.
Bacteria, Plankton, Dinosaurs not mentioned in Genesis.

The most accurate sequence is [1, 4, 2, 3, 5, 6].

Location 3077

Many people would like to reconcile religion and science.

I would hope so, and further would like this statement to have some backing in the data. I have found that many people don't seem to be too worried about it and either opt to be religious and consequently less thirsty for knowledge, or scientific and dismissive of religion in toto. See Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell, et. al.

Location 3114

Would the first trees have been created complete with annual growth rings?

Not if they grew from the first seeds.

Location 3122

Human genomes show evidence of different population splits at numerous time points in the ancient past.

And because of the conservation of ribosomal RNAs we have an excellent clock for they phylogenetic tree of life. But the hands are not swept out or measured in seconds, just as genes are not demarcated by special markers. Epochs are ticked off by the occurrence of mutations that enable better, more fit versions of the organism to survive and reproduce. One of the principal investigators of this is Carl Woese.

Location 3126

All of these examples suggest an ancient past at odds with a literalist interpretation of biblical creation.

I did some work on fixing the order of events in Genesis, mentioned at the beginning of the semester. But it is not just the order of events but the priority assigned to them that makes them a troubling account to begin the first page of an influential book with.

Location 3133

The universe could have begun 13.82 billion years ago, as cosmologists have concluded; or as some believe, it could have been created de novo by God, but in a form that meets scientific criteria for looking like it started in a big bang 13.82 billion years ago.

The de novo hypothesis violates both Occam's Razor and the notion of a truthful and sincere God.

Location 3136

That’s the omphalos argument in a nutshell, and it really does reconcile the conflict between the science and fundamentalist religious views of creation.

Reconciling two incompatible views requires one party to be fibbing or fudging. What motivation would religious people have to make everyone else think, act and behave like they do?

Location 3145

From the standpoint of even a literalist religious creation doctrine, invoking the omphalos argument renders scientific results no longer a threat.

I watched Duane Gish debate a biologist at the U of I four decades ago and it wasn't pretty. The problem is this. The Creationist is looking for evidence that justifies their a priori belief, and they introduce substantial, even kooky, bias into their results. The evidence-based Scientist just collects evidence and asks what the most plausible explanation is, without kowtowing to any particular interest group or policy. This process created great problems for Galileo and it was 400 years before the Catholic Church issued an apology. That is quite a delay.

Location 3166

The omphalos argument implies they simply don’t conflict.

It is a specious argument. When I was in high school a friend tried to convince me that the Earth was created recently with the dinosaur fossils in it to look old. I found this fanciful, nonsensical and completely unbelievable. The facts just don't bear that out. We have good dates for dinosaurs, the moon, the earth and the observable universe and they don't jive with Genesis and the 8000 year genealogical calculation. That means somebody is lying, perjuring or just making shit up.

Location 3171

Are you really reading this, or are you just dreaming that you're reading it?

A reference to Inception would be worthwhile, as it captures the notion of a dream within a dream, recursively.

Location 3190

But when an uploaded mind running on a powerful computer faces the possibility of the computer being turned off,

Location 3191

Jerry Leaf and Ted Williams are two examples of those who want the power to stay on: https://www.coolweirdo.com/12-amazing-cases-of-people-who-were-cryogenically-frozen.html

Location 3203

like universe and not even know it?

1) the universe appears to be discretized
2) quantum mechanics makes the imaginary as important as the real
3) only measurable things exist to be measured.

Location 3203

If so, what is the likelihood of such a scenario?

What's an example of a crack in the system that we notice but can't explain?

Location 3215

Literally billions of people dream every night. That’s a lot of simulated worlds.

If there is a God, and He is going to judge the world, where does He keep the data? At what level of detail is the data kept? If a complete recording of every event is taken then the record keeping apparatus has to be bigger than the universe it records. And if a backup of this apparatus exists, it would have to be bigger yet, leaving an infinite recursion of no place to store the data and a universe that is more about logging, than existing, which seems contradictory if you follow this line of reasoning. If a summary is kept instead, then is just the really bad stuff recorded? Or does evolution give us an insight? If mutation, a brute force search for optimal solution is the primary mechanism then the best versions are the ones that are currently alive. Those that are extinct are deprecated. The principal question is whether evolution is a sufficiently powerful mechanism to account for the biological diversity that we observe in the world.

Location 3243

For centuries, the omphalos argument has been roundly ignored.

One thing that mankind has gotten right.

Location 3245

A desire for conflict between religion and science by opinion leaders?

There is a political power part of this and a fact vs. fiction part of this. I happen to believe in God. But I have noticed that leaders at all levels of religious hierarchy are conflicted between their desire to control people for their own ends and their desire to help them. Also, a grand unification of religions seems unlikely since there are fundamental contradictions between them. The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam certainly have much different worldviews - and they rise from a common ancestor. The Hindu, Shinto, and Buddhists comprise a completely different set of world views that are incompatible with the former. As a footnote it seems that God has gone to great lengths to make himself invisible, which is to say that the spiritual realm must be so completely orthogonal to this one as to rarely if ever intrude or coincide.

Chapter Eighteen

In Memory of Daylight Saving Time, R.I.P.

Some years ago OMNI magazine published an article where the author was espousing a "prime number" sort of calendar that would facilitate 24 hour a day functioning of society. I liked that.

Location 3253

In Memory of Daylight Saving Time, R.I.P.

I agree with this completely and there are moves afoot to do just that.

Location 3276

If we were to live in caves our sleep cycle tends to lengthen.

Location 3287

The current Daylight Saving Time rules could be abrogated and replaced with a simpler rule : When the Sun rises, it is 6:00 a.m.

Simple to state, horrific to implement.

Location 3320

Sunrise time should be instituted worldwide.

This would be great in Alaska. A six month nap sounds good about now!

Chapter Nineteen

Science and Destiny

I consider pseudoscience to be one of the greatest obstacles to progress by mankind and therefore it is one of my greatest adversaries. To that end I have written this primer on Fallacies.

Location 3340

Action is the domain of those with the power to act, including government, business, and, in a democracy, the voting public.

As Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square demonstrated on March 20, when he announced that he was hiring cryptocurrency engineers and paying them in bitcoin. If this trend continued, it could end the cryptocurrency winter and lead to obsolescence of the banks. That would be the very definition of disruptive technology. [Insert FB Image Here]

Location 3343

If good science can help society make good decisions, then better science should enable better decisions.

This needs a clarifying example. By 'better" is it meant, 'more thorough'? Is there a continuum of scientific thoroughness? Can it be measured as dollars spent or data generated? Can spending on science bankrupt a nation in a way that is analogous to how military spending bankrupted the Soviet Union? Is there a way to measure the return on science dollar spent in such a way as to optimize them? Two remaining points: Point 1) Nations spend arbitrary amounts of time, talent, treasure and blood when prosecuting wars. Is the science dollar equivalent, that is, would unlimited expenditures produce unlimited returns? I realize this is some asymptotic and difficult to answer. Point 2) Once science equips us with perfect knowledge, does that also map to perfect application of that knowledge, and will that knowledge alone be enough to save us? By 'save us', I mean enable us to not only survive, but also to thrive, as a species, in the entire world.

Location 3355

Solipsists hold that the universe could be merely in the mind and imagination of the observer,

This is a little, 'flat earthy'.

Location 3356

For example, maybe you are just dreaming your life and the universe.

And therefore, like some movies have portrayed, I am just a can of brains, dreaming somewhere. Because of undecidability it is impossible to prove that this is not the case, but it does seem highly unlikely.

Location 3359

If on the other hand you do just imagine everything (even this paragraph), then your mind is a lot smarter and more imaginative than you usually give it credit for!

There is some stuff in my dreams whose complexity I simply have no explanation for. Episodic dramas with comprehensive detail extracted from everything I have ever seen or heard. There is no way that I could think this stuff up. As a friend of mine once said, "Where do you get this stuff?"

Location 3364

So let us agree, as a start, that the larger universe exists.

A useful convention to use.

Location 3377

Science is fundamentally about understanding reality by observing it.

The word 'measurement' needs to be in here somewhere. The act of measurement creates information that did not exist before. I find this extremely profound.

Location 3380

which is what mathematics emphasizes and why mathematics is not a science.

there are those who argue that we 'discover' mathematics rather than 'invent' it.

Location 3389

Observing other planets, stars, and moons orbiting each other falsifies the theory that the Earth sucks and leads to the concept of Newtonian gravity.

The term 'exerts a force of attraction' might be a more delicate way to avoid activating an easily distracted reader's limbic system.

Location 3394

For example, there is no observation that could ever falsify the claim that God exists,

This is not a decidable statement, so not sure what it adds to the line of reasoning here.

Location 3405

When such a revolution occurs, younger scientists tend to commit to the new theory while the old dogs, mostly unwilling or unable to learn new tricks, gradually fade away like old soldiers.

it's important to avoid this phenom...

Location 3409

emphasizes the concept of falsification as the road to truth.

Falsifying a deconstructive philosophy is constructive, so technically by proving the converse one can get constructive things done.

Location 3444

Thus there is in fact no intrinsic conflict between religion and science, and hence no reason to fight over the science of evolution.

If only that were true. If only that were the prevailing attitude. But the social engineering used by many of those who advocate science is to dismiss those who even consider that there is a God. Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson come to mind in this regard. Paradoxically the Book of Proverbs states, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'".

Location 3445

Climate change denialism is another example of pseudoscience because its community lacks critical peer review, is mostly divorced from the technical training that is part of the climatology field, and ignores experiments in data analysis that refute its central hypothesis.

Climate change advocacy suffered similar missteps in its infancy. The term 'global warming' has been replaced by 'climate change' because there is more wiggle room in the latter. This wiggle room is needed when assessing a climactic system so complex it is impossible to analyze in closed-form.

Location 3449

They are generally not members of the public health or dentistry communities.

A more subtle form of pseudoscience can be seen in obsolete notions that Alzheimer's disease was due to aluminum cookware. More recently, 'single-factor' cause or cures for cancer fall into this category. These are seen in statements like, 'Take this Vitamin, or 'Eat more kale' and so on. Yet another great example is what Richard Feynman termed, 'cargo-cult' science. Fantastically interesting, but too long to address here.

Location 3452

scholar of astrophysics by spending years camped out daily in the Columbia University library.

When smart people have psychotic breaks with reality, pseudoscience can be the result. I would say more but someone is following me right now.

Location 3466

All student scientists are taught at least something about scientific methodology, but its philosophical underpinnings are generally taught desultorily or not at all.

A history of science would be useful here, as the story about Leo Szilard's role in "Der Bunde", a scientific brotherhood aimed at helping the world. He was one of the creators of the Atomic Bomb, and his story is excellently told in, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' by Richard Rhodes.

Location 3482

Also, the expression “graduate student slave” should be banished from the scientific humorous vernacular.

Perhaps the expression should remain until the practice ceases. Also, some postdoc positions retain this slave-labor atmosphere, perpetuating the injustice.

Location 3483

reviewed papers.

Many of which live behind a paywall, inaccessible to those who need them.

Location 3486

Such items include negative results;

An excellent TED talk on this topic was given by Ben Goldacre in 2012.

Location 3495

Most scientists spend most of their professional lives not revolutionizing human knowledge or even building the next paradigm shift, but rather, making modest contributions to the march of scientific progress.

This is especially true when funding organizations such as the NIH sentence biochemists to spend their careers exploring the behavior of a single enzyme!

Chapter Twenty

The Teeming Cities of Mars

I have worked the Mars population growth example out analytically and described it here.

I am engaged by the fact that we can talk about nutrient-rich epochs at the
beginning of a life-cycle and saturation/extinction epochs at the end of a
life-cycle.

Location 3510

The law of exponential increase

I have worked a Mars population growth example out analytically and described it here: https://lvwarren.blogspot.com/2019/01/computing-and-future-lecture-1.html. I am interested in nutrient-rich epochs at the beginning of a life-cycle and saturation extinction epochs at the end of a life-cycle.

Location 3511

overpopulating the entire planet with billions of people in a surprisingly short time.

provided that the issues of breathable air, access to water, adequate ambient pressure, adequate ambient temperature, shielding from meteor impacts, and product of food in sustainable quantities is addressed. Any of these alone is a significant technical hurdle, as an ensemble they are a formidable obstacle. So much so, that they lend a structure of predictability to the colonization of Mars. Why? Because there are a limited number of working solutions to each problem, each solution is rate limited, and these limiting rates can be used to estimate the population that a Mars Colony could handle.

Location 3518

For one thing, a 2014 analysis showed that their life support technology is not yet reliable.

yes, like the BioSphere2 disaster, our best terrestrial experiment to simulate long-term colonization of other planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Location 3534

such as glass or plastic for domes to grow crops,

and consider the logistics of bringing essential livestock, goats, cows, pigs, chickens, and keeping them happy and healthy.

Location 3540

Another piece of bad news you should be informed of

To calibrate realistic expectations more writing and move movies need to be made of the hell-on-Mars that will ensue as factions and fighting dominate daily life. People really need to understand that we are exporting a broken species. We need more, "life on Mars is a horror story" efforts to anticipate all that can, and will, go wrong.

Location 3541

If something goes seriously wrong in the colony, it is likely that the folks back on Earth would be unable to help much.

They can help, it will just take the ambulance a couple of years to get there. That's why a Mars egress vehicle is a critical component of a Mars mission. It might never be used, but if it were there, it could provide huge peace of mind.

Location 3546

On the other hand, modern hand-held computers loaded with everything from games to Wikipedia could be brought that would satisfy an unlimited thirst for that sort of diversion.

The internet would still work, via a high speed interplanetary link. The latency would be 2 hours so some buffering would be unavoidable, and real-time conversations with loved ones, completely impossible.

Location 3552

although shipment from Earth of small, lightweight digital components might be a possibility,

this isn't a possibility, it is a requirement. regular packages from home would be a survival necessity, both physically and emotionally. Ideally, that would become a two-way street of exchange.

Location 3555

using simple homegrown electronics.

Many things could be created on mars, but homegrown electronics is likely to be among the last due to the complex infrastructure necessary. Wire would be made from aluminum and iron, doped with impurities that improved its conductance. Aluminum could be used for capacitor plates and wound into inductors around iron cores. Resistors would be made of carbon. All of these would require proximity to aluminum bearing ores in proximity both to the colony and to the water supply that the colony would depend on.

Consider Korolov Crater:
530 cubic miles of water ice-land close to that. Solves five major problems of Mars habitation: 1) no water 2) no food 3) no oxygen 4) no ambient pressure 5) no fuel. At 72 degrees latitude with a 25 degree inclination to the ecliptic, Korolev would be similar to Elson Lagoon in Barrow, Alaska with the seasons being 1.9x as long. Book the flight when the sun is shining there. It would be interesting to see the launch windows for those sunny seasons. Elson could become an important place to train, and Barrow a boomtown of the future. It is a perfect match except for the high ambient pressure. And it would be much better to get the bugs out close to home.

Location 3570

Disease struck frequently,

Plant and livestock diseases could be just as serious for the Mars Colony as human diseases, since they could quickly wipe out the food supply. As for me, I would take my trusty case of PowerBars, and depend on regular deliveries from home. They would always be two years stale though, which is unfortunate. Further they would always have to be in transit because I don't like an interuptions in my daily PowerBar snack.

Location 3571

The second scenario is characterized by few checks on population growth, so population increases rapidly.

This leads to interesting questions, what is the single most enabling tool, substance or process with which to equip colonists. In the jungles of Earth, a machete for trailblazing, a flint for fire, and a jug for water are precious colonization items. But Mars is a completely different beast. Imagine a colonist crying out, "My kingdom for an x!". What would x be? https://phys.org/news/2014-10-technical-feasibility-mars-mission.html

Location 3578

However gravity on Mars is about 38 % of Earth, lower but certainly not negligible.

Basketball would be very popular in 38% gravity and human bone structure would quickly adapt.

Location 3595

Whether human colonization of Earth began 73,000 years ago or at some other time,

Mars colonists would start their race into the future with an enormous technological and literacy advantage, but one that was offset by the hardships of living on a planet we did not evolve on. The evolutionary adaptations to Mars would be most interesting-thin legs, barrel chests and big ears.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Fourth Generation : The Next Hundred Thousand Years

Some people worry about the atmospheric and meteorological consequences of planetary warming. I worry that the loss of the ice caps could change the distribution of mass over the planet and result in changes in the stress distributions over the tectonic and continental plates. This could produce spectacular earthquakes with significant loss of life. Every 400-700,000 years the magnetic poles reverse. This could results in seasons of higher incident radiation and damage to the atmosphere since it is the magnetic field around the earth that protects the atmosphere. Such "Ablation Periods" could be catastrophic. Further, the core of the earth will eventually cool, removing the magnetohydrodynamic field that generates the magnetic field in the first place.

Location 3625

Global warming, if not controlled, will have major effects for hundreds of years to come.

Location 3731

The worst of them are thought to have caused “ snowball Earth ” states, where ice coverage extended clear to the equator. But details about ancient ice ages hundreds of millions, or billions of years ago, are tricky to nail down for sure.

And during these periods it is posited that oxygen levels were around 35% compared to the 20.95% it holds now. Quoting the wiki, "The maximum of 35% was reached towards the end of the Carboniferous period (about 300 million years ago), a peak which may have contributed to the large size of insects and amphibians at that time."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen

Location 3739

The amount of tilt is called the obliquity.

or inclination with respect to the ecliptic plane.

Location 3746

Borrowing the words of Norse myth, “ The congealed venomous streams continued to send out frost. ”

Which is why Loki, the Norse God of Fire, must be brought out from time to time even though he is a compulsive trickster.

Location 3774

Question 2 : The 41,000 year obliquity cycle characterized the glaciation cycle until 800,000 years ago. So why would it stop,

Look at magnetic pole reversals to answer this question. Their history is preserved in magnetic rocks and has been well-traced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

Location 3822

Help in doing this would, logically, come from the many countries that are causing the sea level to rise by contributing to global warming.

not optimistic about that given current climate-change-denial policy.

Chapter Twenty-Two

New Plant Paradigms

New plant paradigms and engineered life will accelerate things much sooner than we might expect. This especially since we have personal supercomputers, even at present, than can help us predict the effects of gene editing using systems such as CRISPR-CAS9 and 12.

Location 3870

Yet genetic engineering could accelerate this process dramatically.

The trouble with short-term genetic engineering is that we don't subject the resulting organisms to millions of years of natural selection and the improvements that come over millennia. This makes the possibility of genetic catastrophe a certainty as unevolved organisms escape from the lab and into the wild.

Location 3875

In the case of plants coming out of genetic engineering labs,

Plants are not as much of a concern as prions, viruses, bacteria, fungi and molds, all of which are airborne and highly mobile.

Location 3876

selective breeding

Selective breeding was safer in the past due to the fact that we always started with organisms that had already passed the tests of natural selection for harmony with an extremely complex natural ecosystem.

Location 3888

Many kinds of spores and spore-like particles exist, from aeciospores to zygospores.

Define these terms for the non-biological reader:

aeciospore: Aeciospores are one of several different types of spores formed by Rusts fungi. They each have two nuclei and are typically seen in chain-like formations in the aecium. Rust fungi are highly specialized plant pathogens with several unique features. Taken as a group, rust fungi are diverse and affect many kinds of plants. However, each species has a very narrow range of hosts and cannot be transmitted to non-host plants. In addition, most rust fungi cannot be grown easily in pure culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(fungus)
zygospores: A zygospore is a diploid reproductive stage in the life cycle of many fungi and algae. Zygospores are created by the nuclear fusion of haploid cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygospore

Location 3895

Seeds thus can carry more nutrition, which is used to sustain a baby plant while it becomes established, or perhaps to feed an animal that eats it.

Coevolution of multiple species at different levels of complexity and organization remains to be fully explored and yet is a rich source of information of how everything came to be. If an advanced life form is to 'seed' a planet, what is the minimal necessary intrusion of DNA and RNA necessary to produce what we see?

Location 3906

But even the mightiest oak, like a tiny blade of grass, is missing a huge opportunity.

But then it would be the mighty oak mushroom, rather than the mighty oak tree. Because it was spongy it could not grow as tall for structural reasons of rigidity, column buckling and resisting bending loads in strong winds. Of course who is to say that a spore like plant could not also have woody outer structure, but there does seem to be a partition in the plant kingdom, that seems to be paying homage to some fundamental architectural constraint.

Location 3912

dust storm of spores.

If we thought oak and pine pollen were bad, imagine entire trees transforming into spores...

Location 3916

Let us ensure — or at least hope ! — that only beneficial plants become such superplants.

Consider the three invasive species:

The Kudzu -Japanese arrowroot plant.
The Asian Carp-a collection of ten species including jumping Silver Carp.
The Lionfish-A venemous and sometimes toxic fish that can be eaten if prepared properly.

These three would seem to mitigate our hope somewhat, since they emerged from evolution and natural selection to start with.

Location 3934

nitrogen need never be a bottleneck to growth again.

Seems like that bottleneck has been largely overcome.

Location 3947

The idea of beans as masters of the Earth may be tough to swallow,

especially if it leads to a more flatulent world...

Location 3950

Thus, there is little risk to plant growth or agricultural productivity in making major changes and improvements in fruit, vegetable, and grain flavors.

This could be a source of unintended consequences.

Location 3959

Potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle sounds good

We should distinguish here between 'tastes-like' and has 'similar biochemical structure'.

Location 3961

So why not grow carrots that taste more like potato chips,

Because potato chips get much of their flavor from salt, and a plant that concentrates salt can have great difficulty surviving since this is the basis of osmotic pressure. Also potatoes get their taste from being starchy, while carrots get their taste from containing sugars. So engineering taste is non-trivial. Interesting idea though.

Location 3971

Genetic engineering, once we can figure out how, could reduce the time required from very long to mere years.

Look at the cultural blowback that Monsanto is experiencing from GMO's. There may be a significant issue of cultural acceptance.

Location 3977

A future sunflower could produce just a few seeds like that, instead of dozens and dozens of smaller seeds like the sunflowers they used to grow back around 2020.

there may be structural reasons and propagation reasons why sunflower seeds are the size they are. If the seeds grow much larger, the already top-heavy sunflowers will fall towards the ground, never to see the light of day.

Location 3984

fruit transgenic hybrids that taste like apple and pear

This is easier to accomplish since most fruity flavors come from esters, and the metabolic cassettes (aggregation of genes that form a specific pathway) are more easily introduced.

Location 3991

Probably easier than those would be the sweetener steviol glycoside, since nature has already shown that stevia plants can make it.

Nature has figured out the synthesis of steviol glycoside, but other non-sugar sweeteners could be a bear, requiring the manufacturer of gene cassettes from scratch.

Location 3994

Fruit with a high alcohol content, just enough to enhance the taste without intoxicating those eating it.

One problem with alcohol content is that when it exceeds a few percent, it pickles and kills the host

Location 3995

Or fruits with M & M-sized pieces of chocolate in them. Or fruit containing a little brandy and some chocolate chunks (yum) at a price anyone could afford.

chocolate that we consume goes through a large number of finishing processes before it becomes the product we recognize. Performing this in vivo would be quite a challenge.

Location 4022

Let us call them “ alternamorphs ” and see where alternamorphism could lead, relatively soon if genetic engineering is developed in time, or over a much, much longer period by natural evolution.

Great imagination with practical applications. Imagine if it was possible to build a transforming vehicle more easily using biological technology rather than mechanical technology.

Location 4026

Now imagine a new kind of corn plant that, in the fall season, alternamorphically chooses to either die, or sink a taproot that lasts the winter and then, in its second spring, sends up a new shoot that grows more slowly than before, but more sturdily.

Corn could be crossbred with bamboo-some species of which can grow three feet in a single day!

Location 4055

there are complex plant-like organisms that also have animal-like capabilities, but not here on Earth.

but then wouldn't we call it an animal? but animals that obtain their energy from photosynthesis is an interesting idea.

Location 4059

What is needed is a solid understanding of programming genetic code sufficient to create radically new biomolecular pathways, thus comparable to our great success at programming computer code. Indeed the language of DNA is a programming language, as computer programming languages are, although very different from current computer languages.

There is an interesting limitation to our understanding of plant characteristics that we might want to engineer and it is this. Even with fast computers, understanding what the end structure and chemistry of a plant would be is a computationally intractable problem at the current time. Why? Each cell is executing a computation whose complexity exceeds that of a current computer. It requires several billion or even trillion cells to know how the entire plant is going to look like and function. So we could invest in the world's current computational resources into reconstructing the look and feel of a single plant, and still not have enough processing time. Also consider the energy expenditure that this simulation would require. I am an advocate of simulation, but I find this one daunting!

Location 4064

Consequently, we’re a long way from understanding how to make radically different new organisms or even arbitrary modifications to existing ones.

One of greatest weaknesses in bioinformatics is understanding 'body plan' the morphological structure that results from the growth and accretion of billions to trillions of cells. And yet it is the property we first and most experience when interacting with any species. Even more astonishing is the varied body plan of the human brain. Our whole genome is a mere 3.2 giga base pairs, and with around 20,000 genes, many of whom are responsible for cellular housekeeping, something is missing. Much of our genome is littered with viral junk, but somehow it is part of a body plan. Here is an accounting I did of this: http://wdv.com/Cancer/images/dnaRepeatFinal.png

Location 4095

are 20 different kinds of amino acids heavily used in building proteins,

22-selenocysteine (Sec) and pyrrolysine (Pyl) are rare amino acids that are cotranslationally inserted into proteins and known as the 21st and 22nd amino acids in the genetic code. Sec and Pyl are encoded by UGA and UAG codons, respectively, which normally serve as stop signals.

Location 4099

Organisms generally contain only the L versions of these amino acids. No one knows why.

This is similar to why the Universe consists primarily of matter, as opposed to antimatter.

Location 4101

their nutritional value to pests (and humans) would be much lower,

it would be zero, since all their cognate sugars and glycosides would be reversed as well!

Location 4106

Call them Frankenplants if you like, but the world risks becoming significantly different — overrun with plants that resist being eaten and, therefore, able to feed fewer animals of all kinds, from insects to humans.

But able to transform CO2 into Oxygen, since diatomic gases would not be imperiled by the levo-dexto enatomierization.

Location 4115

modern pharmaceuticals to intoxicants like tobacco, opium, magic mint, and lactarium;

I can find no reference to 'lactarium'

Location 4145

A biochemical pathway for extracting almost any given metal desired could, in principle, be programmed into the tree’s genetic code.

This is a cool idea, that is hard to implement. It might be better done in a colony of algae or bacteria, than in a macro plant per se.

Location 4149

bio-extraction techniques may make blobs of gold extracted from the soil cheap enough to use for fishing weights.

A very Drexlerian statement. The inherent scarcity of gold makes this seem unlikely, even if it were concentrated en masse.

Location 4151

Either way, bismuth metal is only about twice as prevalent as gold and has been used for fishing weights, so why not gold,

Bismuth is quite cheap from China on Alibaba. Maybe someone will try to corner the market. It sells for $10 kilogram. In contrast gold is $40,000 a kilogram. Why the 4000-fold difference, especially since Pepto-Bismol requires it and there is plenty of heartburn in the world.

Location 4156

deposited in a specific spot (the nugget),

deposited in a specific spot (my bank account)

Location 4158

For every tree, “ berries, ” each containing a nugget of shining and perhaps precious metal, would be there for the plucking.

Like Skittles, falling like Manna from Heaven. This is what I told my kids that our first visit to Crater of Diamonds State Park would be like. This one page story documenting the event is worth a look: http://wdv.com/Various/Writings/diamonds1.html

Location 4162

aluminum can be toxic

this is a myth that has floated around for years in connection with Alzheimer's disease. Slight oral exposure is nonconsequential. Breathing in aluminum dust however can be dangerous.

Location 4166

another few levels of genetic programming and they’ll no longer be misshapen blobs but, instead, shaped like anything from forks to frying pans,

this waxes fanciful so fast. There is a lot of purification, processing and hammering that biological systems may not be particularly good at doing. Take for example the fairly rare occurrence of wheels in nature, much less forks or spoons.

Location 4173

Vast swaths of the Sahara, for example, are plant free because it’s just too dry.

One could dig a pair of parallel rivers, one salt, one fresh across the Tropic of Cancer in Africa. This would transform the continent. Fresh water could be generated and deposited by a solar still, since sunlight is abundant in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Location 4174

because even dry air contains water vapor,

bit of a contradiction here, better to graph the energy requirement vs humidity.

Location 4198

But the Moon has no significant atmosphere so plants are basically out of the question there.

One could argue, that at 1% of Earth's density, Mars effectively has no atmosphere either. However, what atmosphere it has is 95% CO2 which plants like. So we need cold-tolerant organisms, but even cold conduction and adaptation is decreased because of the low density. Mars would thus need its own evolutionary path-which could take awhile.

Location 4218

It would certainly be nice to know when we can expect to be able to grow and eat potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle, pluck nuggets of valuable metals from trees, or terraform Mars.

I don't think it will look that way. Plants will tend to produce the raw materials of food, rather than a chef-prepared meal. Metallic concentration may be better done by bacteria than trees, at least if we take Mercury as an example. The Mercury thus generated is as the methyl and dimethyl forms, which among the most potent known neurotoxins. A 100 mg can kill a lab worker through their latex gloves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury
Finally terraforming Mars will have to be done with CO2-philes, most likely algae or plants. Unfortunately these also require water, so there is a bootstrap problem. Earth evolution has taken place around one atmosphere of pressure for eons and this is baked into the planets genomes.

Location 4232

only genetic modifications to major commodity crops like corn, soy, etc., are cost-effective.

And we recently faced quite a stir when pesticide resistant corn was introduced. To wit: Feb 23, 2019, 1:38 AM
I have been hearing a lot of discussion on this and wanted to know what was really going on technically and how I felt about our food and water safety with regards to Dicamba. A good place to start is to look at the structure of Dicamba. It is a halogenated aromatic hydrocarbon, halogenated by Chlorines. It works by tricking weeds into outgrowing their nutritional supply and as such it is really a growth hormone. Its toxicity, measured as LD50 is 0.75 grams per kilogram ingested. A 100 kg person would have to consume 75 grams, about 2/3 of a cup, which is difficult to do accidentally. By comparison a 0.1 grams of nicotine is fatal. So as far as toxicity is concerned Dicamba isn't bad as pesticides go-Caffeine and Metformin are both more toxic than Dicamba and people consume them everyday. Dicamba is a chemical cousin of benzoic acid, which is in everything.
Another thing I look at is half-life, which for Dicamba is 45 days. This means after one year only 1/2 of 1 percent is still around, a rapid rate of decrease. It someone claimed damage after a year that claim would be difficult to justify scientifically.
One concern is that Monsanto has placed genes in some cotton and soybean crops that makes them resistant to the overgrowth induced by Dicamba. Wild-type crops become resistant in three generations or so. This doesn't make the crops toxic or bad for you necessarily as long as it the gene doesn't code for toxic substances, which it doesn't appear to-it codes for an enzyme that breaks down Dicamba, which is probably a good thing.
My conclusion is while this may not be ideal, it is low-toxicity. Drift is a legitimate concern, but I can think of worse things to spread. In terms of relative risk I am more concerned about exposure to Round-Up (glyphosate) herbicides since they are known carcinogens. Their toxicity is 5 grams per kilogram ingested or about 25 times more toxic than Dicamba. Organophosphates as a class of compounds tend to be neurotoxic and their effects are treated with atropine.
Sources:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicamba
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzoic_acid
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
4) https://goo.gl/tJpYdZ
5) http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/dicamba_gen.html
6) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493390/

Chapter Twenty-Three

Asteroid Apocalypse

I have a personal interest in tracking meteorites using their RF reflectance signature and computing where they are likely to land. I built a binocular telescope with twin 13.2" mirrors for spotting them. Aligning two parallel telescopes proved quite difficult.

Location 4249

Asteroids have slammed into Earth before,

I have a personal interest in tracking meteorites using their RF reflectance signature and computing where they are likely to land. I built a binocular telescope with twin 13.2" mirrors for spotting them. Aligning two parallel telescopes proved quite difficult.

Location 4269

were you to try commuting by asteroid.

this is funny

Location 4270

The drag friction heats and decelerates them so intensely that they explode.

it is likely that the shock wave did as much damage, only the asteroid would still have arrived faster, since it was still going faster than the speed of sound.

Location 4292

Impact craters on Earth tend to weather to the point that it is not obvious to the naïve observer that they are craters.

and the recent discovery of the 19 mile wide impact crater under Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland.

Location 4300

The largest body in our solar system after the Sun is Jupiter.

I would suggested that it is a comet scavenger, necessary for a sustainable solar system, that due to its large gravity protects the Earth from planet-ending impacts like Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Location 4313

You can actually collect micrometeorites yourself from roof runoff and other sources using a magnet, paper, and microscope.

That is tremendously interesting, as we could mine rooftop drainage systems for celestial history lessons!

Location 4328

Does the Earth bear any scars of this cosmic childhood apocalypse,

Heavy elements at the surface, that would have otherwise sunk deep into the Earth as it cooled and accreted.

Location 4437

One problem with the explosion strategies is the risk of merely fracturing an asteroid in place, leaving more or less the same mass on the same collision course with Earth,

But increasing the surface area to volume ratio would let the atmosphere have a much better chance of mitigating the impact effects than if the event was a single object. In the limit, the incoming object could be powdered.

Location 4445

With a lead time of 100 years or more, an impact zone could be gradually evacuated at a deliberate pace,

Because of uncertainty in orbital ephemerides, there is almost no chance of an accurate impact prediction 100 years, or even a decade in advance. NASA could not predict the entry location of Skylab, because a small uncertainty in atmospheric properties, over a periodic function of possibility leads to a complete uncertainty as to landing zone, until the moments before impact.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sic Transit Humanitas — The Transcent of Man

I question whether our evidence of Neanderthal DNA is accurate. RNA degrades in two hours due largely to the substitution of uracil for thymine. DNA is much
more stable in the long term, but is still vulnerable to bacterial contamination, oxidation and photochemical degradation. What is the certainty that we are sequencing Neanderthal DNA and not subsequent contamination? It's a
number, but I haven't seen it published.

Location 4480

Ten million years ago our ancestors were like us in many ways, but were not human.

Is our evidence of Neanderthal DNA is accurate? RNA degrades in two hours due largely to the substitution of uracil for thymine. DNA is much more stable in the long term, but is still vulnerable to bacterial contamination, oxidation and photochemical degradation. What is the certainty that we are sequencing Neanderthal DNA and not subsequent contamination? It's a number, but I haven't seen it published.

Location 4481

Were the Neanderthals human,

Apparently human enough for us to interbreed with them. 23andMe currently provides the percentage of Neanderthal DNA its customers have in their reports. Quoting from their website, "We've identified 260 genetic variants that can be traced to the Neanderthals, ancient humans who interbred with modern humans before going extinct 40,000 years ago." My report says, "You have fewer Neanderthal variants than 71% of 23andMe customers.
However, your Neanderthal ancestry accounts for less than 4% of your overall DNA."

Location 4501

Mr. La Braña 1 (named posthumously by researchers), who was found in a cave in Spain preserved well enough for detailed genetic analysis.

According to 23andMe my maternal line includes Ötzi the Ice Man.

Location 4549

like, Except for the Neanderthals, humans had not yet left Africa.

A mention of the sickle cell trait is worth mentioning here. Individuals with one allele are more resistant to malaria, which confers an enormous survival advantage in mosquito ravaged areas of Africa. However individuals with two alleles frequently die of the tortuous effects of the disease, episodes are initiated by low blood oxygen levels, causing the hemoglobin S in the red cells to polymerize into rods that cause the cells to clog the capillaries.

Location 4555

This will be about 4,000 generations, enough for rather modest selective pressures to cause significant evolutionary changes to the human species.

As we go further back, we have lower populations, evidenced that we don't dig up ancient humans that often. With lower populations there was less variation per capita and humans were more 'standardized'. The question is exactly what is the population curve vs. time that takes us back to humans 0 and 1, and what is the date and place? One clue is in the dispersion of language among peoples as well as the dispersion of ancestral gene lines. It should be possible, combining linguistic and genetic analysis to more accurately provide these origin dates and locations than in previous years that did not have the analytic capability we have now.

Location 4571

(Einstein’s brain, however, is in storage and could actually be checked.)

Alas, contrary to rumor, Walt Disney's head/body was not preserved in liquid nitrogen.

Location 4628

Still, like old dogs, old humans seem to learn less quickly.

This is especially true in language acquisition. Brain pruning creates a higher cost for learning languages later in life, that is, after age two or so.

Location 4637

Can you think of any politician that one might suspect benefits in popularity from possessing neotenously cherubic or “ cute ” physical features,

I can't, but the knuckle dragging description from the previous page summons a fair number of associations...

Location 4646

Getting back to neoteny, a continuation of the trend in that direction suggests a distant future of shorter limbs and longer trunks, baby-faced adults, and more playful, friendly cultures.

Planetary migration could also have huge effects on human body plan, different gravity, different atmospheric composition, different ambient pressure, etc.

Location 4650

In a million years our descendants may be surprisingly aliento present day human understanding.

typo in the kindle version of the book on this line, "aliento" lacking a space.

Location 4655

It is thought that our ancestors of ten million years ago, roughly 400,000 generations,

The further we go back, the more speculative our assertions become due to the paucity of fossil evidence.

Location 4673

Linnaean taxonomy after Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), the Swedish scientist who created this branching map of evolutionary relationships that bears his name and is still with us today.

And which is being radically rewritten today by scientists using comparative DNA analysis to define species branches. One example is the work of Woesce at the University of Illinois. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html

Location 4716

These limits appear to forbid brain size (measured as number of neurons) from increasing at a rapid clip forever.

On this topic it would be good to talk to the women who have to deliver big-headed children.

Location 4724

The more communicating parts, the more neurons need to be devoted to communication (thus acting like the telephone wires and internet cables of the brain).

This is a variant of the, "more copper than silicon" for certain parallel processing hardware architectures such as rings vs. hypercubes.

Location 4747

Applying this concept to brain-related genetic material, unusually intelligent dogs could, for example, come to replace ordinary pooches as “ man’s best friend. ”

Or my genetic engineering pipe-dream, a dog that can talk by gene transplantation of the FOXP2 Cassette.

Location 4769

Far from the old eugenics movement of the decades surrounding the year 1900, which was so scientifically naïve and blatantly racist as to make one doubt the mental fitness of its proponents, a new movement would be aimed at encouraging genetically unusual people to be created and to exist, instead of the discredited and evolutionarily regressive concept of artificially discouraging out groups from reproducing.

good luck on that one. A eugenics movement of any other name is still a eugenics movement, controlled by fallible humans.

Location 4772

How might this new “ benegenics ” approach work,

To quote Shakespeare, "First we kill all the lawyers."

Chapter Twenty-Five

Floating Prairies of the Seas

I like this idea, but I think the time scale may not be as distant as the section of
the book would indicate. Settling of the oceans has been a topic widely
explored since the 1950's and the invention of the aqualung. It seems the best
place to move when land space runs out. We are already using it to hold servers
and telecommunication cables of significant extent.

Location 4822

the extra photosynthesis could remove a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to control global warming.

what if it is operating more closely to capacity than we think? It is in some sense, already saturated when we consider wave action, and gas concentrations and varying temperatures from season to season. A better case might be made for operating below the surface where light is still abundant but wave action is less severe.

Location 4838

Less clear, however, is why the race to grow higher than the competition has not taken over the seas.

Kelp / seaweed grow to significant heights.

Location 4858

If the common water hyacinth grew as profusely in salt water as in fresh, the world’s oceans could be radically transformed. But they only grow in freshwater.

call the genetic engineers for the "desalination gene" found in Arabidopsis.

Location 4870

However, appropriate changes in the plants ’ genomes could potentially produce solutions to all of these problems.

or create ocean invasions worth of a horror movie.

Location 4901

More gold than King Midas ever dreamed of is dissolved in every cubic mile (3 km3) of seawater.

Two remarks:

there is more arsenic than iron in seawater which is surprising given the abundance of iron oxide on land.
gold is the least prevalent mineral - there are thousands of times more silver and uranium than gold, so even with a cubic mile, I'm not sure Midas would have been satisfied. See https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html

Location 4905

Reduced to the basics, the problem is that modern floating seaweeds can access dissolved nutrients only very close to the surface, because that is where the seaweed is.

It would be very interesting to see how the Stanford Mineral Assay mentioned above varies with depth, since denser materials tend to sink.

Location 4909

genetic engineering becomes a branch of software engineering.

or vica versa, or neither if University admins have their way.

Location 4928

Perhaps nature will create ocean prairies in 100 million years.

the distribution of minerals in seawater would seem to be the gating principle, saline hydroponics has a problem, which is salt, which acts as a dessicant and preservative with enormous osmotic pressure that must be overcome. Thus already adapted ocean species would be a starting point for engineering new species. Talking seaweed anyone?

Location 4943

other products, leaving the toxic, wrong-handed protein leftovers to be used as rich fertilizer to help grow the next generation of the same plants.

not a rich fertilizer unless there are wrong-handed bacteria to enrich the soil, which would require wrong-handed antibiotics not to kill humans.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Greenish Revolution

I like this topic. I wrote an article in this vein about what if we could modify
cells in our skin so that they produce drugs that we needed to maintain or
improve our health. It is here.

Location 4966

If food security could be dramatically improved,

Food Security: All agents please report to Food Security. Has a scary futuristic tone to it, doesn't it?

Location 4995

wild plant tissue

Just say, "wild plants" here. 'Tissue' makes it weird.

Location 4995

Less (in fact, no) pesticides would be needed.

Pesticides would still be needed, HERBicides would not.

Location 5003

also had it able to serve as a small bomb by throwing it against a rock or hard wall

this context switch is a little distracting... from food to bombs in one sentence feels abrupt because you have me thinking about food strips until, BOOM.

Location 5005

with a process for converting indigestible cellulose from arbitrary plants into the easily absorbed amylose starch.

this IS a big deal since cellulose is basically a polymer made of sugars. Some sketches to illustrate this might be worth the effort for those readers who are chemically inclined.

Location 5006

it would reduce the need for farming because wild plants on uncultivated land could be harvested and converted into food.

No. Cellulose-rich plant stocks are much different in their biochemical cross-section than general wild plants. Toxicity concerns would still mandate some kind of directed cultivation.

Location 5012

but in which all the growing plants (and animals) are edible.

maybe in the future we eat our dead also, having "dinners for Uncle Joe" rather than "funerals for Uncle Joe"

Location 5014

Variety is a key trait of a healthy diet,

Variety without toxicity that is. How many plant species are toxic?

Location 5024

Simply turn loose a herd of these robots and it won’t be long before general edibility is assured. Such robots would also be quite useful for weeding conventional farms and even edible home gardens, thus providing even more incentive to invent them.

It will be interesting to watch the effect of machine learning on agricultural implements.

Location 5030

Edible landscaping is a step in the direction of the edible ecology paradigm.

What about edible housing? I love Gingerbread. How about edible cars, trucks, bikes and buses. Cellulose, as in bamboo is very strong structural material, which can be turned into food. We don't take our cars to the junkyard, we have them for dinner. Sounds crazy, but it isn't impossible. Then cars would be marked with an "eat by" date.

Location 5032

Another strategy is genetic engineering. It could be used to make wild, inedible plant species more edible, instead of using robots to destroy them to make more room for already-edible species. This would be less disruptive ecologically.

Genetically engineering toxic plants is just asking for a major accident.

Location 5038

This method is in its earliest stages but promises to enable genetic modifications (such as edibility for a currently inedible plant) to spread through a wild population automatically, replacing the previous genes with the modified ones.

This could make Chernobyl and Fukushima look like birthday parties.

Location 5041

called Cas9 whose action is to replace any remaining copy of the old gene in the cells of a plant with the new one.

Penetrance is a problem with Crispr-Cas9, not all cells get the edits.

Location 5071

The chloroplasts are thought to have once been independent organisms that, eons ago, took up residence inside cells of other organisms, where they have lived ever since.

The same hypothesis is asserted for mitochondria in animal cells-that they were once bacteria that got, "assimilated".

Location 5082

People should photosynthesize too !

There may be a surface area problem here. The energy consumption of the typical human is around 200 watts, which is way more energy than can be produced by photosynthesis over a few square feet of skin not to mention the requirement to be largely naked and under bright illumination a large percentage of the time. Plants typically have a much higher surface area to volume ratio, which we humans exploit by eating them, letting them do the hard work in the hot sun!

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Accelerating Evolution

Perhaps evolution is a periodic process. For example it has been suggested that the big bang could have marked the end of a temporal era that was the mirror reverse of the current one.

Location 5108

a unitary bird, with its strong, lightweight, complex feathered surface, on the order of 700 × denser than the air

and for reference water is about 775 times denser than air, and people are about the same density as water. For small birds this figure will be different than for large birds.

Location 5136

The underlying tendency posed by the 62 million year cycle, the current new human-caused climate warming trajectory, and the on-going wave of extinctions presents a bad luck trifecta.

would need the standard deviation of the 62 million year cycle to figure out if it was really a trifecta of concern.

Location 5160

It occurs most commonly through heteropatry and may be mediated genetically by processes like “ reinforcement ” and “ chromosomal inversion. ”

and another method, chromosomal translocation, such as occurs in Chr. 19 in humans e.g. Philadelphia Chromosome. But these mutations can also be lethal.

Location 5165

The divergence proceeds until the two groups are different species.

and in those cases where the species impact the environment or food supply we have a "coupled-field" problem, where both are evolving in time.

Location 5174

improve, the blueprint description language embedded in the DNA tends to improve as well, making some organisms more evolvable than others.

viral integration occupies over half of the human genome. one could ask whether this is an improvement or not.

Location 5178

Thus over long time periods DNA coding strategies with high evolvability

Some parts of DNA coding strategies, like ribosome shape, are highly conserved. They simply don't work if a mutation occurs in that critical protein.

Location 5203

may apply to the human species as well. With about 25,000 genes,

We're down to about 20,000 with 13,000 inactive 'pseudogenes'.

Location 5227

Cold environments could be more densely populated when more organisms there evolve sap and blood that contain better anti-freeze chemicals.

if this optimism about increasing species diversity is justified then Mars should be teeming with life.

Location 5252

Sky-dwelling algae could be useful to humans of the distant future, who might transport them to the high clouds of Venus to play a critical role in terraforming an entire planet by converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, because photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide.

this has legs, although it might take a long time to see the effects.

Location 5294

We don’t know that language very well yet. It is complex and multi-faceted. But we’re learning.

It is also, as pointed out in a previous note, extremely computationally intensive to simulate the effect that a mutation will have on the final form of the fully grown organism, and in extension, its lifespan and life-cycle.

Location 5298

The key selling point from an evolutionary perspective is that it causes mixing of genes, or hybridization. This makes offspring different from their parents.

In the macaw parrots of South America, hybridization makes the birds sterile and unable to propagate past the first generation.

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When GFP is present in a tissue, the tissue glows green when exposed to ultraviolet light.

This change in color from ultraviolet to green indicates that photon-splitting is occurring, an interesting quantum mechanical phenomenon in itself.

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Even more interestingly, intentional duplication might lead to smarter chimpanzees and gorillas, which are already relatively intelligent and human-like in various ways.

See also, 'Planet of the Apes'. Its all fun and games until the chimps get guns.

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But keep in mind that, because of the small number of tests, such a cross is still a real possibility.

There have also been dolphin-human experiments. Huphins anyone?

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A burst of new species may result from deliberate genetic engineering,

I don't scare easily. This is scary. You should make sci-fi horror movie where all the characters, lovingly crafted, die horrible deaths along way, fulfilling Dove Siemens production mantra: "If you want to make money in the movie industry, take 12 teenagers to a cabin in the woods and chop them up."

Chapter Twenty-Eight

If the Universe As We Know It Ends, When Will It Happen?

The Hubble constant is important in this regard as it determines whether the Universe as we know it will end with a whimper or a bang.

Location 5381

In fact vacuum might really be “ false vacuum, ” which could transition to a lower energy state, ending the universe as we know it. If that is destined to happen, it probably won’t be soon. But it might.

There have been some advances in the thinking about this, see Quora for an introduction, specifically the contributions of Victor Toth.

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it is actually full of ephemeral virtual particles that spring into existence and then quickly out again.

the quantum foam, as it is termed, really exists and is an amazing situation

Location 5396

This could happen merely as a result of random quantum fluctuation somewhere in the universe. If such a transition occurred, crazy things would happen fast.

We are already there. The presence of and existence of black holes would seem to produce the seed necessary for that collapse, but it simply hasn't happened. Black holes reradiate and so it goes.

Location 5413

But confirmation of whether the universe is unstable or not awaits more data. In particular, we need to know the precise masses of two subatomic particles. One is the Higgs boson, sometimes called the " Goad particle " to the chagrin of many experts,

Typo, "God Particle" and we know its mass now, 125 GeV, For comparison a proton is a little less than 1 GeV.

Location 5417

Since we don’t know the required masses accurately enough yet,

We do know them.
Top quark: 173.1 GeV (as much as a rhenium atom)
Up quark: 2 MeV
Down quark: 4.8 MeV
Strange quark: 92 MeV

Location 5446

Then, a randomly chosen point within the lifespan of our area has a 50 % chance of being in the first half of that lifespan and a 50 % chance of being in the second half.

The assumptions is that we know that such an event is going to occur at some specific interval of time related to our own. We don't, so one cannot cap the end of the interval. Even if it happens, its date is indeterminate, so we can't do the time splitting trick used with the minute glanced at upon our watch.

Location 5490

first, Here is the straight dope : If the universe as we know it is destined to end at a random and unpredictable time, there is one chance in 100 million

a more deterministic calculation could be done, simply knowing the half life of all the elements. When they all go kaput, so do we. A first order calculation could consider the half life of those essential elements whose half-life is the shortest. There is a problem with this calculation, as I just attempted it;
Hydrogen 1 and Oxygen 16 are called STABLE, they have no decay products or detectable half-life. So that part of us that is made of water is good to go.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

On time and the universe … meaninglessness and meaning.

Questions

Location 5537

One of my questions is this: "Is human drama a generating function for meaning or is it a random occurrence in a capriciously-generated celestial process?" Said another way, ignoring all other debates and conflicts, is the existence of even the Hydrogen in our cosmos purposed and are the rules of the interactions of the elements emergent on their own terms and if so why?

Location 5545

Apparently, we do not know specifically what will happen, but we do know it will be Big.

Recent news indicates the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Further, the two methods used to compute it are at odds, and the upper bound has just increased by a full nine percent!

Location 5551

That our own “ real ” universe could be more likely a simulation than not has been seriously argued in the philosophy field, and experiments capable of providing evidence for or against are described by physicists.

Identifying this, a first step is to show that the universe is quantized, and there is some theoretical evidence to indicate that it is. To unify quantum mechanics and relativity requires it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-quantized-in-othe/

Location 5556

If you believe in UFOs,

UFO's have not panned out, even for those of us that were hoping that they would.

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Those questions are important. Or are they, Their answers have little if any impact on our lives. But, at least the questions have existential importance.

They have more importance than they used to, because we are significantly closer to technology-induced catastrophes.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Computing and the Future - Review of Berleant's: "Human Race to The Future"

The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do