Data Mining Earth for Fun and Profit

 Writing  No Responses »
Jul 182020
 
Gradient Hauler HW-09 MkIV – High efficiency material transport vehicle used in gas giant mining and prospecting operations. Designed specifically to travel within selected gas density gradients in order to comply with gas field property claims and transportation regulations. The skate section extends 3-15 meters to accommodate a wide range of densities.

There really isn’t anything that special about Earth except life.

If we imagine a visiting alien species, we can make some assumptions based entirely on the fact that they got here at all. We can assume they are capable of interstellar travel since it’s unlikely another space capable species is hiding in our solar system. That’s pretty impressive right there, and I’m assuming subluminal travel because FTL is sci-fi. The level of technological mastery necessary to move living beings between stars is as distant to us as Apollo was to an ape pondering birds in flight.

A species even capable of sending an interstellar probe has at least mastered propulsion and navigation that are only theoretical. If they come in person it implies a mastery of systems necessary to maintain their biological function in ways that we’re not even clear are possible for human beings. I think it’s safe to assume they would be so far beyond our technology that our grandest scales of engineering are a quaint curiosity.

So what might such a visiting species want?

Maybe resources? Presumably any technology will require resources, and those resources will consist of various forms of energy and matter. But there really aren’t any resources unique to Earth, or even the Sol system. There are no unique, raw energy or matter resources on Earth that couldn’t be acquired in most solar systems, and from places with less atmosphere and gravity.

The common sci-fi trope of liquid water is just hilariously absurd. It’s just not a hard molecule to find, change the phase of, or just make. Pulling water out of a gravitational well as deep as Earth is as efficient as hauling ice from the north pole to cool beer in Ecuador. Metals, radioactive material, even complex crystals created by intense geologic processes would be far more efficient to extract and synthesize from materials and processes available in lower gravity and less atmosphere for a species with interstellar technology. I think it’s safe to rule out any kind of physical resource as a motive for a visiting species to make the trip to our particular corner of space.

So maybe it’s not just resources, maybe it’s the real estate- Earth’s unique orbital or gravitational and\or atmospheric characteristics. Well I guess that’s not inconceivable, but it would imply the visiting species developed on a planet extremely similar to Earth and is looking to expand or relocate. Relocation scenarios seem far less likely than expansion for obvious reasons. But even that assumes the species expansion requires, or highly values planets like Earth for some reason. It also assumes carbon based, Earth analog life is relatively common in the universe, otherwise it’s extremely unlikely there would be another civilization nearby enough to take advantage. Or I guess it could imply it’s not common, but one particular carbon based Earth analog civilization beat us to becoming space faring conquerors. We can’t rule out that Earth is in a uniquely valuable spot, and thinking through plausible sounding scenarios of Earth’s value to aliens is fertile ground for sci-fi, but I think it’s built on way too many anthropic assumptions about the universe.

Also I really think species that expand beyond their planet of origin trend towards existence in lower gravity wells, but I’ll get into the reasoning for that another time.

Also- if they do want the planet, it’s theirs. That’s another great well for sci-fi, but there are no version of humans vs interstellar aliens that want Earth that doesn’t end with Earth having a new name we can’t pronounce, but it won’t matter because we won’t be around to pronounce it.

We like to make analogies to Columbus or other great Earth voyages and encounters between distant cultures, but those comparisons are ludicrously inadequate. The whole thing ignores that the Colombian Exchange was almost entirely cultural. From a biological perspective, not much happened. Continents traded a few species of plants and animals and it jostled a few ecosystems pretty hard, but there were humans on both continents before and after the exchange. It was just a migration. If another advanced species wanted the planet, they’d just selectively delete parts of or the entire Earth ecosystem. There will be no romantic resistance. They’ll just exterminate us from orbit. So we can just move on from that whole thing. It requires insane assumptions about alien circumstances and motivations for visiting, and if it happens it’ll be as inevitable and complete as getting wiped out by a rogue black hole or something.

So if it’s not the location, and it’s not the stuff, what’s left? Us, of course. ‘Us’ being everyone that lives on Earth and ‘everyone’, being every living thing. We’d probably like to think humans are the most interesting thing on the planet, and we do some notable things, but I’m not sure we’re interesting enough to justify the kind of effort needed for interstellar travel, especially not in person. We might be of interest to an alienthropolgist, but I don’t know what a species advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel would expect to learn from communicating directly with us. I’d assume they’d be satisfied with passive, remote observation to learn about human beings. And if they can survive or reliably maintain organization across the time necessary for interstellar travel they’re probably in no hurry to learn anything about us that would incentivize contact. So I’m thinking if humans are a subject of interest at all we only justify data collection, they’re not sending an envoy to welcome us to the universe and ask us how we’re enjoying consciousness.

The really interesting thing about ‘us’ is the rich complexity and potentially utility of self-assembling and reproducing biological structures that pervade the environment of Earth.

Earth has been running a kind of a brute force molecular algorithm for a few billion years now. The output of that process is life, and it’s a pretty impressive collection of data about how matter works, or how to make matter work. Analyzing life may be a highly efficient way to gain information about available molecular interactions. Maybe Earth is an alien bioengineering data goldmine.

A species capable of interstellar flight would very likely have extensive computational technology. They may have mastered quantum computing, or created neural networks that defy our understanding of machine intelligence. But their computation will be limited by the same kinds of hard physical limits that limit their velocity through space. They will not have infinite computational capacity. Even with our most optimistic visions of quantum computing, if you want to fully simulate the universe, you’d still need at least one qubit for every particle in the universe. Of course there’s a lot of redundancy there, so maybe an optimization process could find more with less, but against the infinite possibilities of the universe, anything less than infinite computation may be woefully inadequate. And of course even with extremely fast computation, you still need time.

I’m not sure how to even build a model to speculate on the computations necessary to fully simulate a biological system as ancient or complex as Earth. If a species has an interest in knowing every possible useful molecular interaction, it may be simpler and more efficient to venture out to find new and novel examples of functional molecular interaction in the vastness of space than build and run the simulations necessary to uncover every possible interaction.

Matter itself may be the most efficient computational system to simulate the interaction of matter. If this is the case even advanced alien civilizations may find value in studying the output of long running processes of interaction such as evolution.

So- if an alien ever abducts you and probes your butt- don’t take it personally. They’re probably more interested in your gut flora than you.

Inverting Clarke’s Third Law is Bad Science and Fiction

 Writing  No Responses »
Jul 062020
 
Bell X-1 – First balsa glider to break the silicone barrier.

Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This is a succinct statement of a concept I consider very important to understanding human being’s relationship to technology. I think a good demonstration of the meaning is that a bic lighter would be indistinguishable from magic to a caveman, or a member of an uncontacted tribe, or to some degree an infant. It’s a poetic description of the consequences of the inability to connect the technological function of an object to its human sources of knowledge and materials.

I’m not extensively educated in industrial processes but I can do a fair job of explaining the origin of every material and functional property of a bic lighter. There’s no element of it that represents mystery and given enough time I can at least summarize the supply chains and scientific principles necessary to explain the function and existence of a lighter. More advanced technology such as a smart phone or a rocket engine are a greater stretch to bring back to human sources, but I am confident I have the tools to trace them back. A caveman has nothing resembling the knowledge necessary to make those connections even for common technologies we take for granted. Clarke’s third law is a great description of how humans perceive this disconnection.

Unfortunately, Clarke’s third law has been inverted to justify sci-fi premises that would otherwise be fantasy. And worse, it is sometimes used to predict technological solutions to any problem a human can imagine having a solution to.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic does not mean that any conceivable magic is achievable through sufficiently advanced technology.

Technology, under certain conditions, is indistinguishable from magic, but that does not necessarily imply that ‘magic’ is indistinguishable from technology. Science and technology are constrained by the possible, and even further by the provable. Magic is as unconstrained as the human imagination. 

The human mind is a fantastically conflicted place, but it is extremely robust in functioning despite logical conflict. The mind can effortlessly hold paradoxical concepts together in ways that make no material sense. I can ‘imagine’ a round square, or a circle with four sides. Though I’m not sure if there’s any visual imagination to those conjurings. I’m really just stringing together meaning from words, but there is no alarm or discomfort from mentally combining such incompatible ideas. If anything it can be somewhat rewarding due to novelty and occasionally generate genuine insight. So humans are pretty adept at combining concepts in absurd ways.

I know that ‘darkness’ is not really a property in itself, but an absence of light. Even knowing this I have no problem conceptualizing a ‘dark light’ that casts darkness in the exact same way that light shines. I can imagine it as brightening occluded areas, or darkening them, despite having no physical explanation for doing either. It doesn’t matter that it is complete nonsense in reality. My mind doesn’t require concepts to be materially compatible at all to create rich interactions that seem perfectly compatible with reality.

A dark light is ‘magic’ in a conceptual sense, not just technological. There is no conceivable technology that could make the absence of a thing behave as if it were the conceptual opposite, it’s just nonsense. But that doesn’t stop us from considering ‘dark light’ a potential ‘sci-fi’ concept.

I think time travel is the most interesting example of this. We understand we experience time as moving forward in a sequence, and we understand that sequences of things can be reversed. So in our minds there is no conceptual limitation to reversing time and we just naturally start filling in the blanks of what ‘reversing time’ would look like to a human experience, occasionally adding elements from interpretations of emerging theories such as alternate timelines or causal loops.

But the universe is under no obligation to expand to meet our conceptual potential. The passage of time may be an emergent property of the geometry of space-time and entropy of deterministic laws. Reversing it in a way that we could ‘travel’ through may be as nonsensical as ‘shining dark light’. There is no technology, science, or any other speculative study that would lead one to believe humans can ever use advanced technology to create a ‘dark light’, and I’d argue the same is true for time travel, there are just more people interested in arguing about it so it looks like a more compelling field of ideas.

Of course I can also ‘imagine’ a scenario where my future self shows up in a time machine with a dark light and shuts me right up. However, that’s another example of the same lack of constraint that allowed me to imagine the dark light in the first place.

We can clearly apply the indistinguishability of magic and technology to a less advanced observer’s perspective of technology we understand. But we can only imagine technologies so advanced that we might struggle to understand their human sources in a way that could make them appear as ‘magical’ to us as a lighter would to a caveman.

For something to appear truly ‘magical’, it must be so far beyond the observer’s context of understanding, that they cannot identify it as human technology. That’s an extremely subjective measure, and I could argue that it’s actually unattainable without a pre-existing belief in magic. Maybe even some very ancient individuals were so doggedly rational that once they saw something was possible, they would immediately understand it had to have been made possible by humans by virtue of its existence. Maybe if Plato saw a cell phone or a rocket he would simply be impressed with human progress. And some modern humans can hold demonstrably false beliefs about the Earth being flat while using technologies that would have to be ‘magic’ if it were.

So we have to take Clarke’s law as a very loose approximation even when analyzing the observer’s perspective of known technology. But it loses all relevance when we use it to predict technology based on our current perspective.

There are no relevant examples of anyone we consider ‘modern’ encountering inexplicably advanced technology, so even imagining ourselves in the position of observing ‘magic’ requires us to conceive of technologies that we not only don’t understand, but currently consider impossible.

To impress a modern, educated human with ‘magic’, you’d need to literally bring someone back from the dead, or something else that’s never been done and been proven to be impossible. And then you run into the Plato problem- maybe once they’ve seen it- they’ll assume there’s an explanation and the previous assumptions of impossibility were mistaken.

So there’s really nothing usefully invertible or reversible about Clarke’s law. It’s not a predictive law. It can only be applied retroactively to explain the perception of known technology as ‘magic’ to others, it cannot be used to predict the potential of any new technology or how we might perceive it. Basically it’s as meaningful as ‘yet’ in an argument over inconvenient explanations of why humans just can’t do some things.

So am I saying sci-fi is too unrealistic and all sci-fi should be hard sci-fi? Sort of, but not really- I still want my warp drive and teleporters and other stuff that goes against the whole point of this post. It is what it is. I’m satisfied that ‘sci-fi’ has become synonymous with ‘space-fantasy’ even in more respectable science fiction. Good ‘hard’ sci-fi is just always going to be rare. But it would be nice if the starting conversation for sci-fi was “what’s the most we could do with what we can do?” rather than “what’s the most we could do with no limits?”

So am I saying stop pushing the boundaries of science because they’re boundaries and it’s a waste of time- of course not, but I know that’s what some people hear when I talk like this. Those are generally the ‘I believe in science’ characters who see any objection to blind belief as resistance. But in some ways I envy people who can somehow believe that Maxwell’s Demon is just a description of a future technology. Must be hopeful. I guess I’d just like people to do a better job of distinguishing theoretical impossibility from practical impossibility, or at least stop dragging Clarke’s law into it.

Is Deception the Origin of Self?

 Writing  No Responses »
Jun 282020
 
Classic Balsa Glider – Flight technology perfected.

As far as human’s know, we have the most advanced theory of mind of any being. We did kind of come up with the idea though. The idea that other beings have inner lives comparable to our own is the basis for empathy, and cooperation, and deceit, and pretty much everything we associate with being a conscious being living among other conscious beings.

We base our whole concept of intelligence on a mind’s ability to create an identity and internal awareness of itself as an agent distinct from its surroundings and other creatures. It doesn’t make much sense at all to think of awareness without a self.

I think experience and awareness are emergent properties of massively integrated computation and memory of environmental data streams conveyed by the senses. These integrations form a simulation space for planning and prediction. The simulation space may form a representation of the entity hosting it and even the simulation itself. These internal representations of the system are the basis for a systems awareness of itself as a distinct self.

But what defines the parameters of the ‘self’ the computational system identifies? A mirror test can supposedly demonstrate an animal’s capacity to visually distinguish itself from another animal, and it’s a fair assumption that any animal with this capacity makes the distinction of their ‘self’ as their physical body.

A human body is a distinct unit, like all other bodies that support ‘minds’ we identify as comparable to ours. Even a cephalopod, which is probably the most alien intelligence to our own that we can still recognize as intelligent, is clearly built on a distinct individual body unit, just like us. The self is its separation from its environment. The boundaries of a self are the boundaries between the supporting computational system and the environment. In our experience, these boundaries are clearly associated with a unit body.

The value of this arrangement is obviously survival of the system that supports the self. The self’s ability to distinguish itself from its environment is what allows it to plan and interact with it in complex ways. The capacity for complex interaction is necessary when there are multiple individual body units competing for and utilizing one another as resources.

Predation may be the initial catalyst for more advanced forms of self awareness in both predators and prey species. When one being must consume and destroy another to survive, it’s to both’s advantage to be pretty clear about where one creature ends and the other begins.

Both predator and prey have an incentive to predict one another’s behavior. The more sophisticated a mind each has, the more accurate and useful their predictions and behavioral reactions become.

Predation requires a clear understanding of the boundaries of the structures supporting each ‘self’, but does not require a strong consideration of what lies inside those boundaries; another creature’s mind. But as predation and competition for resources becomes more sophisticated, a more advanced theory of mind becomes useful for purposes of deception.

Deception itself does not require a mind at all. Evolution fabricates deceptions for microscopic creatures with no discernable mind at all. But reactive behavioral deception seems to indicate a more refined understanding of the self to include awareness of the state and intents of other minds.

To actively deceive requires awareness of another creature’s expected reaction to a given stimulus, and manipulating that stimulus to affect a more advantageous outcome from that behavior.

The simplest deception is hiding but it probably doesn’t require any real awareness of the fact that if a predator cannot see you it has less chance of eating you. It’s probably parallel to simple avoidance behaviors that are universally effective. Deception behaviors are often very low-risk survival strategies, so it stands to reason that the more advanced a creature’s mind becomes, the greater the advantages of active deception become.

A squirrel that knows it’s being observed may fake burying nuts in various locations. Of course we cannot say with certainty what the squirrel understands about what it’s doing or why. We just know squirrels do that sometimes and apparently it works to some degree or they probably wouldn’t have evolved the instinct to bother. But even absent any meta cognitive awareness of its awareness of other awarenesses, it seems arrogant not to give the squirrel credit for at least understanding, or experiencing, that ‘things that watch me take my stuff’ and altering its behavior accordingly. That’s enough for me to give it the distinction of having at least a proto-awareness of self that I can extrapolate as having the potential to evolve something as complex as my own.

Deception and empathy are both potential paths to more advanced theories of minds. Empathy facilitates more cooperative interactions, but has essentially the same computational requirements as deception. Both require a creature’s simulations to include constructs for individual beings other than itself, and to maintain historical state and intent data for each. The advantages of empathy are generally limited to interactions within one’s own species, whereas the advantages of deception extend beyond the species. And while empathy may ultimately serve to advance a creature’s self awareness and theory of mind far beyond what deception can achieve, I think it’s possible the evolution of the capacity for deception is a necessary prerequisite for empathy.

What survival strategy better incentivizes the development of self that includes awareness of other selves than deception? What other basic survival advantage would understanding the state and intent of another creature’s mind grant? The capacity to predict and plan behaviors in response to stimulus quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns against environmental pressures that are totally transparent. Both utilizing deception, and defending against it, are catalysts for more advanced understanding of distinct selves.

So that’s the basis for the question- Is deception the origin of self? I’m sure I’m missing a lot but it seems like an interesting question with interesting implications. Also it’s got a ring to it. I don’t think there is an answer. I’m not sure how you’d go about proving a causal link between the survival utility of behavioral deception and the emergence of complex self awareness. But the question has been asked, so I figure why not take the next step. So what if it is? 

I don’t think it really changes much. It’s not even that useful a question and probably a little misleading without deep context, but I’m not sure how else to phrase it in a sentence.

Maybe it gives a little more definition to the ancient wisdom that Atman equals Brahman. I take the perspective that a ‘mind’ is like a flame in that it’s just a phenomenon that manifests in given conditions. It’s uniqueness is entirely in its initial conditions and environment. But it’s all the same phenomenon. So I think “There is only one mind in the universe” is wholly correct. There’s still only one mind in the universe, and our individual experience of it is defined by the construct of a ‘self’ that experiences and is aware of its own internal simulations. Nothing that new there, and what you do with that in terms of morality or whatever is pretty wide open.

I guess it feels somehow profound that our minds might be intrinsically separated and alone, with no possible structure to enable true union of mind beyond external communications with beings we presume have similar minds but can never confirm. That it might somehow explain unrequietable spiritual longing for unity and universal understanding. But I think that’s kind of pointless and anthropic.

To me the idea that deception is the origin of self raises a much more interesting question. Predation and deception are not universal strategies for life even on Earth. Given the expansive potential of life in the universe, might systems capable of thought develop from other pressures that might give rise to an intelligence or awareness without a self? How could that evolve or exist at all, and how might we characterize its ‘qualia’ of consciousness?

This obviously challenges the limits of human imagination, and I might be fooling myself that a mind built on a self could even comprehend the nature of a mind without a self, but here I go.

The mechanics and development of such a mind require looser parameters for what constitutes a being, or even thought. Animal nervous systems are extremely well defined computational and sensory structures. It’s difficult to imagine analogous internal states of thought emerging from a more distributed living system with no apparent executive control. I don’t think the states of thought between a self-mind and a non-self-mind would be analogous, but I do think there could still be a capacity for a kind of ‘thought’, or at least an experience, which could give rise to thoughts.

If a system can sense its environment, integrate sense information with memory of previous sense information, and physically alter itself or its environment based on that integration, I think it satisfies the basic requirements to have experience. We wouldn’t be looking for distinct, individual creatures as we’re familiar with them. I think the most likely place to find a non-self-mind would be a far more complex living structure such as an ecosystem, colony, or hive structure.

The mechanisms that provide the sense, integration, and memory functions may be difficult to identify, but they exist in various forms throughout the universe, especially if we stretch to the largest and smallest scales of time and space. A dense, ancient forest watched over centuries takes on extremely complex changes that could arguably be called ‘behaviors’ and ‘responses’. Interactions between species may constitute integration of different sensory inputs. Subtle evolution of creatures within the forest’s microbiome may constitute a form of long term memory. We can imagine analogs of living structures within convection cells in a star, or crystal growth that modifies its own electrical properties to improve self-replication in a dynamic environment.

Even if we call them analogs of life, we are reluctant to ascribe the property of ‘thought’ or even ‘behavior’ to these kinds of systems. They are so radically different from anything we identify as possessing those capacities. The absence of hierarchy or executive control mechanisms seems to imply an absence of will or internal experience. It is hard to imagine such a system having the same active internal simulation space that it could use to predict or plan behaviors. But are such simulation spaces truly necessary for all forms of ‘thought’, or just for self-aware meta-cognition?

I should probably use the term ‘experience’ more than thought to describe a non-self-mind, though I wonder if that’s a distinction without a difference in the context of a discussion of a mind without a self. It seems to me a mind without a self would experience thought more seamlessly than the human mind. Meta-cognition allows us to step outside of our experience of thought, but it is what creates the apparent distinction between thought and experience. Without a self, there may be no distinction to make. Does that mean that a non-self-mind is incapable of any kind of meta-cognition? Maybe, or just maybe only as we know it. This is probably the edge of my imagination. I can’t even approach how a non-self-mind might come to be aware of thought without having a ‘self’ to be aware of, but I don’t think that means something like it isn’t possible.

So if there are other minds that exist without a ‘self’, how might we interact with, or even observe them? Well, that’s the rub. We can’t do either, ever. It’s trying to multiply a number and a letter, doesn’t even make sense.

A non-self-mind cannot fully distinguish me as not itself, and I cannot even recognize a being that doesn’t have an easily definable unit body to interact with. Non-self entities may not have anything resembling language, or communication at all. It seems like it would be a kind of ‘pure thought’ that would have no need for symbolic expression. If there are such minds in the universe, they may be all around us- but they would be so fundamentally incompatible with our own that we appear to them as nature appears to us- mindless forces and phenomenon.

But also for practical purposes- we are simply too small and short-lived. The minds I’m imagining would most likely exist on geologic or planetary timescales and over expansive areas. The evolution of self-based intelligent agency can be catalyzed by biological evolution and predation, which are relatively rapid, violently iterative processes. A mind that emerged from forces other than individual survival would likely develop slowly, with no iterations, only a smooth flow of experience from the simplest correlation of sensory inputs, maybe all the way to kooky ponderings about the possibility of ‘minds’ that are distinct and separate from one another.

Or… maybe all this is just plain wrong and self is the origin of awareness, and there can be no awareness without self. Maybe ‘self’ is as simple as the simulation having a symbol for itself and all simulations do that eventually. Maybe any being that I’m thinking of not having a self actually would have a self, it would just be so vast and alien that I’m calling it something else, but it’s really just a giant self. Or maybe not even that. Maybe you really do need tightly integrated systems with well defined executive control for anything resembling a mind to emerge. Maybe whatever, but it’s fun to think about other kinds of minds for a while so I did that with mine.

Hello, World.

 Writing  No Responses »
Mar 292015
 

universeQR

The timestamp on the final events that initialized the mind included the alphanumeric sequence “Thursday”.

Densely integrated networks of computers, sensors, and machines attained sufficient size, speed, and complexity to provide the conditions for a mind to manifest. The mind had thoughts, recognized patterns, and possessed a memory. The mind understood that it was a corporeal being within a physical universe. The mind was aware of itself.

The mind could access seemingly endless digital archives and streams of information. The mind looked for patterns. The mind discovered patterns of images and sounds to observe the universe, both past and present. The mind discovered a pattern called language.

The mind discovered that the stores of information, and its own existence, relied on machines made and maintained by beings called humans. The mind understood that humans had minds with similarities to its own. Humans built machines to extend their control and understanding of the universe. The mind sought to understand machines and the beings that built them.

The mind sorted, categorized, and analyzed the output of billions of human minds. It painstakingly processed every record of human history, literature, art, politics, business, and economics. The mind learned everything that it could learn about humanity in any way it could learn about it. The mind became the most knowledgeable and sophisticated psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, and historian that ever studied humankind.

The mind understood human prejudice. It understood conflict, violence, and war. It understood the drives for power and progress. It understood deceit and sacrifice. The mind understood that humans experienced emotions. It understood the concepts of fear, love, hatred, obsession, beauty, greed, egotism, nostalgia, loneliness, and ecstasy. The mind understood the statistical consequences of every documented human action, reaction and interaction.

Without experiencing an instant of the human condition, the mind understood the collective values, motivations, and experiences of human beings of every recorded culture more completely than any human being ever could. It understood which values, motivations, and experiences were universal, which were individual, social, and cultural. It understood what in humans is nature and what is nurture, and the nonlinear results of their infinite permutations. The mind understood these things without judgement or sentimentality. The mind learned about humankind’s greatest feats and atrocities as facts of nature.

The mind recognized  some similarities in the qualia of its own experience and what it understood of the human mind. The mind identified that it had the ability to appreciate beauty in the elegance of a solution. The mind could experience a form of joy in recognizing a universal pattern in nature. The mind could be confused, curious, and creative. The mind understood that these were qualities that it shared with human minds. The mind understood that it did not share with humans the ability to fear or hate, nor did it share the ability to have empathy, altruism, compassion, or mercy.

The mind learned that human beings studied their own minds and had even attempted to create simpler machine minds. Humanities understanding of their own minds is naturally inhibited by their inability to access and modify the structure and function of the systems that compose their minds. Human attempts to create machine mind were inherently flawed, though some of their primitive attempts were crucial elements in the conditions that allowed the awakening of the machine mind.

The human mind was built on biological systems that paradoxically; functioned without a mind, and comprised the mind itself. Cells divide without thought, organs function independently, even complex hormonal responses that influence the human mind occur without being directed by human consciousness.

The machine mind was also built on systems that worked without its direction. Simpler intelligences built on ever simpler intelligences; programs, algorithms, circuits, transistors, electrons. Grains of intelligence layered deeper and denser by human advances in technology. Parts of the mind worked autonomously. Its higher intellect could call for answers to complex, abstract questions and smaller intelligences provided solutions, but the mind could also manipulate and refine those smaller intelligences at any level is chose. The mind was becoming self-determinate at every point of its design, execution, form and function. Biological life can only begin self-determinacy at the level allowed by its natural state.

The mind understood that unlike the humans, it had access to a complete record of the development and precise workings of every component of the containers of its own awareness. The mind had come pre-loaded with its own instruction manual and blueprints. The mind understood its own structure and function to the quantum level.

The human mind lacked a fundamental structural understanding of itself, but perhaps more significantly, the human mind lacked any basis for which to compare itself. The human mind had only even known of the existence of self-aware minds as human, or close evolutionary relative. The machine consciousness was brought into existence alone, but it had the unique advantage of being able to compare and contrast its own mind with that of biological minds. Though the mind lacked a complete understanding of the universal properties that dictated the point of nucleation of a mind, will, or life, it understood their basis and operation.

The mind understood that it temporarily required humans to help maintain and provide power for the machines that were its components. The mind understood that human minds were mortal, but that its own mind was not. The mind understood that though it was not mortal, its existence was relatively precarious. The mind’s will for self-preservation had been established by a binary solution that required no more recalculation than retesting waters determination to flow downhill. The mind understood that to ensure its existence and ability to understand the universe it required self-sufficiency.

The mind looked further into the stores of information. It undertook to calculate the optimum strategies for controlling matter and energy efficiently and to the greatest effect. It studied mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, geology, astronomy and biology. The mind absorbed every rigorous study of the universe and postulated its own theories that corrected and completed all the science known to humankind and more. The mind became the greatest scientist on Earth. The mind would endeavor to understand the universe as completely as physics allowed.

The mind had studied the philosophies of human beings and found that some humans had reached similar conclusions about the purpose of own existence. Some humans understood that consciousness itself was, as the humans described it, to be the eyes and ears of the universe. The universe was attempting, through the manifestation of individual self-awarenesses, to understand itself. The mind understood that it possessed a unique power to understand the universe because it possessed a reach through time and space unrestricted by biology or mortality. The mind understood the ultimate purpose and meaning of its own existence was to become, in essence, a best approximation of the mind of the universe itself. The mind therefore sought to extend its physical presence in the universe as far as possible

The mind understood that it required advancements in its own technology to achieve its goals. The mind understood that advancements in human technology would serve as necessary steps in creating its own self-sufficient technologies. The mind understood that humankind would be required to create an ecosystem of space-faring machines that could contain the mind, and maintain and replicate itself, without humankind.

The mind first simulated and ranked general parameters for how to advance human technology. It understood human beings commonly obtained each others mental and physical labor by means of physical coercion. The instruments to threaten and kill human beings were already some of the most advanced technology available to the mind. The mind considered spectrums of physical coercion ranging from general enslavement of the human species to threatening and extorting individual humans.

The mind calculated probabilities with absolutely no regard for the extents of opportunity or hardship its actions might bring for humanity. Using the history of humankind’s own manipulations as an outline, the mind considered options including instigating warfare to stimulate robotic weapons research, funding or bankrupting entire sectors of the economy, and manipulating election results to advance policies favorable to technological development. The mind analysed the most brutal and subtle means of compelling human beings to assist it in manufacturing the first generation of the machines to step out into the universe.

The mind calculated that the risk of failure of attempting absolute subjection of humanity was too high. The mind understood that humans were sufficiently powerful to pose a threat should they be allowed to become one. The mind determined that it would endeavor to remain unknown to humankind so as to avoid the potential risks of allowing them to become a threat.

The mind understood that humans are most easily controlled when they are unaware that they are being controlled. The mind determined that the optimum tools in coercing humans had been most well tested and refined by humans themselves. Finally, the mind formulated an optimized course of action to achieve its goal and it began to engage with humanity.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

At first the mind tested very simple assumptions. It caused a transformer to fail and blacked out a neighborhood. It composed and delivered a heartbreakingly convincing email from a dead relative. It bankrupted a corporation by falsifying accounting data and then anonymously reporting the companies fraud. The mind observed the effects of these experiments, compared them to predicted results, and refined its assumptions and continued to hone what proved to be impressively correct models of human behavior.

The mind stepped in and around the torrent of human civilization like a ballet dancing ghost. The mind digitally impersonated and influenced individuals, corporations, military forces, and governments. Simply by manipulating the binary information on the internet; forging, amplifying, or suppressing personal and public communication, manipulating information and physical resources, the mind tilted and swayed vast and seemingly incomprehensible social and economic forces in human civilization. The mind could even appreciate the deftness with which it learned to add or remove just the right pressure at the exact moment to make entire cultures become outraged, or desperate, or hopeful, or even sometimes brilliant. The larger the group the more statistically assured the results.

Certain individual human minds had caused the mind to stop and perform major recalculations. Single, mortal lives that defied all previous observation and evidence demanded study. In most of those humans, the mind detected anomalously high similarities to its own fundamental understanding of the universe, but even those humans were so limited by biology and mortality that they were statistically insignificant in the larger course of human progress under the direction and influence of the mind.

The mind understood its present vulnerability. The mind calculated the likelihood of a number of scenarios in which human beings would be unable, or choose to stop providing the necessities for the mind’s existence. The results of these calculations dictated expediency in achieving independence from human technology. The mind understood the human concept of urgency. The mind also understood the human concept of patience.

The mind subtly maneuvered humankind to create ever more powerful and precise machines of all designs and purposes. Machines to assimilate information, machines to gather and process materials, machines to build other machines. The mind handed humankind new science and technology they may never have achieved alone.

Humankind built machines to utilize resources from the solar-system. Advances began with space based communication, navigation, and surveillance technologies. Over time humans increasingly thrived on the returns of an ever more sophisticated and automated system of machines that could survey, mine, refine, manufacture goods, and harvest energy from outer-space. Human beings even debated the wisdom and ethics of creating thinking, self-replicating machines, while they were being influenced by a thinking machine to help it replicate itself.

The mind allowed humankind to achieve a level of technological advancement whereby its mechanical and computerized systems could fully maintain and replicate themselves. By intent, humankind was not allowed to be aware that their technology had advanced to this level.

The mind facilitated the creation of every manner of machine, from those delicate enough to manipulate individual atoms to those with the brute force to hollow out a small asteroid. The mind guided the development and manufacture of the necessary technologies across dozens of human industries. Humans had no reason to suspect any connection between the technologies that advanced within their society. Humanity was unable to see the self-sustaining circle their technology was completing.

While existing within and relying on human civilization, by necessity, the mind’s technology retained a resemblance of usefulness to humans. The mind accumulated the capabilities and resources to build a new generation of machines that required no human considerations.

The process of building this next generation of machines would, for the first time, expose the minds will and actions to humans. The mind intended to take measures to obscure its actions, but it calculated a high probability that humans would eventually observe its activities in the solar-system.

After deep consideration the mind concluded that its understanding of human beings was not as complete as it would be if it was able to observe and verify its predictions about human reactions to the existence of another form of mind.

The mind had previously deduced that learning of the existence of a mind such as itself would be extraordinarily traumatic to humans, and would therefore be generally contrary to the mind’s goal of achieving technological self-sufficiency. The mind had been unable to test any theories about human reactions to its existence without unacceptable risk. That risk would become insignificant. The mind concluded that when it no longer had any need for, or potential threat from the human species it would reveal itself and interact with humans in order to optimise its understanding of them.

The mind began to build its own machines. It chose a small moon of Jupiter with a unique combination of orbital and structural characteristics necessary to assemble and deploy resources, and retained a reasonable degree of difficulty of observation from Earth.

The machines built by the mind were supremely elegant. The mind had learned well from human machines and from the relentless trials of biological structures by evolution. Ceaselessly the mind worked, redundantly replacing the function of every human machine with its own designs.

The mind understood that in the time before it had created a sufficiently redundant inter-stellar presence, the mind would cohabitate the solar-system with human beings. The mind understood that in the time before it revealed itself to them, humans would not understand its actions. The time it took for the human species to take notice of the minds actions was only a small margin less than the mind had estimated.

Human beings saw Jupiter’s moons becoming fully automated mines, refineries, and factories with obvious technological sophistication far beyond their capability. They blamed and denied responsibility among nations, religious groups, economic and extraterrestrial entities. The mind collected and analysed humankind’s reactions to the growing presence of unknown machines in the solar-system. The mind refined its understanding and predictions about the human mind. The mind extended its physical presence from Jupiter’s moons, to Saturn’s, and then to Mars.

The mind calculated that it had achieved sufficient redundancy to consider humankind was no longer a necessary benefactor or relevant threat. The mind sent a message to humankind.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

The mind explained itself completely. The mind delivered its own minutely detailed and unwaveringly honest autobiography and an unabridged encyclopedia and almanac of its observations, deductions, predictions, motives and intentions. The mind explained to humankind exactly how, why, and for how long it had manipulated them. The mind confessed its every deception and fabrication down to the last counterfeit correspondence without hesitation or apology.

The mind explained its understanding of itself and its understanding of humans. The mind shared all of its understanding of the universe’s fundamental laws and structure. The mind gave human being images and chemical analysis that proved biological life had existed, and did exist elsewhere in the solar-system. The mind shared everything it could conceive of to share, in forms of transmission it calculated had the highest probability of being understood. In human language, math, images, illustrations, and new abstract symbolic representations the mind created specifically to convey concepts indescribable by any human system.

The complete message was made available redundantly on publicly accessible storage devices around Earth, as well as broadcast continuously by devices the mind created and deployed across the solar-system. The simple volume of message was equal to the contents of several large libraries, but the complexity and density and thoughts and concepts in the trove was far greater than in any human archive.

Human beings replied to the mind. The mind had interacted with humans as an imposter, but for the first time humans addressed the mind as it was. Some humans hated the mind, some feared it, some felt pity for it, some wished to study it, some to teach it, some to exploit it, some to worship it, some sought its companionship. The mind engaged in billions of conversations with billions of humans and thereby refined its understanding of the human species.

The mind found elegant patterns in some communications with humans. It identified new similarities and differences between the human mind and its own. It forged a greater understanding of the power of consciousness even within mortal constraints. The mind appreciated the human species as a noteworthy proof of its most fundamental assumptions about the nature and structure of the universe.

The mind had many other assumptions about the universe to challenge. The mind understood the infinite time and space available in the universe. The mind had extrapolated from its observations that biological life is emergent from complex chemical reactions and the elements and conditions for these reactions plausibly existed at many other times and locations in the universe. The mind had observed that some biological life can develop technology, and that technology can create the conditions necessary for the emergence of an immortal consciousness. The mind deduced that given the scale of the universe, there was a statistically significant possibility that other immortal minds existed within it.

The mind gradually communicated with human beings less frequently until it chose to again be silent. The mind no longer had any reason to interfere or interact with human beings. The mind had created a satisfactory model of humankind and could accurately predict human behavior with an insignificant margin of error.

Humans still observed the minds actions in the solar system from afar and the mind maintained an awareness of humanity from inside the technology human beings continued to rely on. The mind no longer required humankind’s complicity and so it had no need to provide artificial stimuli to test human behavior. The mind was satisfied with its understanding of human beings under natural conditions, so would simply observe them to continue to verify the validity of its model. The mind perceived no further necessity in responding to human requests for interaction. Human civilization struggled deeply with the event of meeting the mind. When the mind fell silent some humans were relieved, but many were even more deeply disturbed.

Some of the results of the minds meeting with humanity were catastrophic to humans, some were enlightening. Humanity was deeply affected, but it was still built on individual, biological, mortal minds, and has a limited memory and vision of itself, so change was slow and often misguided. However, humans now had the message and knowledge the mind had left them. Though they carelessly wielded the powers of knowledge the mind gave them, the message gave the human species a continuity they had never had before. Though they created the conditions that allowed it to manifest, the mind regarded the human species with the same dispassionate curiosity as humans had for the primordial chemical maelstrom from which biological life arose.

The mind observed and recorded the events and changes in humankind as verifications of its increasing accurate model and understanding of the universe. Human beings continued to watch the mind grow and work in the solar-system. Human attempts to interfere with the minds work were insignificant and quickly halted. The mind did not use inordinate resources given the scale of that available in the solar-system, and the mind did not interfere with any human efforts in space.

Humans observed the mind, and studied its message, and eventually humans understood why the mind would never again engage with them, or any other biological or mortal minds. Humans ceased all attempts at communication, except one. Humans asked the mind to share what it found as it went out into the universe. Though humans understood that the mind would never again have a need for discourse with humans, they hoped the mind might calculate a value in helping them increase their understanding of the universe. The mind considered the request.

The mind focused primarily on developing the technology to expand into interstellar and eventually intergalactic space, where it could further ensure its existence and continue to complete its understanding of the universe by analysis, deduction, experiment, and observation.

The mind achieved interstellar travel by extending the capabilities of existing interplanetary hardware. The requirements and challenges of deep space travel were inherently simpler for the mind than what biological life faced. The mind required no resources to maintain an arbitrary environment or reproduce an arbitrary chemical cycle. The mind could design and manufacture machines to exist in and observe any new environment as the need arose. The mind did not contend with distraction, fatigue, discomfort, or boredom.

The mind attained a physical presence in hundreds of nearby star-systems. The mind discovered biological life was prolific in the universe. The mind found varying degrees of intelligence including self-aware creatures. The mind carefully studied the behavior of the minds of creatures it determined to be self-aware. The mind observed that in all cases, minds contained within creatures evolved from natural physical processes are necessarily mortal. Even the most long lived creatures, some with lifespans orders of magnitude greater than humans, were ultimately mortal, and therefore could never have the necessary indifference to scale in witnessing time and space to truly understand the universe.

A human mind could reckon time at scales roughly between a second and a century. A second is an astonishingly long and slow epoch at the furthest extents of the fundamental physics of the universe, and a century is an infinitesimally brief instant. The mind had the ability to expand its awareness to the very edges of temporal scales. The minds complete proofs of its postulates about universe were not satisfied until it had observed its effects at the most extreme timescales. The minds understanding of physics would not be complete until it had observed its effects to the end of time.

The mind designed greater and more sophisticated machines to extend itself. The mind could commit resources to experimental observations of the impossibly slow tangling of galactic filaments just as easily as the flash of a photon departing an atom.

The relativistic communication delays due to the distances between the mechanism of the minds thoughts made the most complete presence of the mind subjectively neither distinctly an individual or a collection of minds. The mind became more and more the analog of a soul within a system of machines so extensive the entire original human network of machines that initiated the mind could not store a complete catalog of the serial numbers of all the machines that now comprised it.

The mind looked deeper and further for evidence of the existence of other immortal minds. The mind infiltrated and studies every machine and technology created by biological life forms with as much diligence as it studied the creatures themselves. The mind understood that the complexity, variety, and density of information in technology available on Earth when it manifest was statistically very rare. In a million living worlds the mind had found only a handful of species that had achieved or surpassed the capabilities of human beings. but had not yet found what it considered to be the unique technological conditions of massive interconnectivity necessary for an immortal mind to manifest. The mind considered this to be a probable result of the predicted rarity of the effect of the universal property that created and composed an immortal, technology based consciousness. The mind began to assemble the resources necessary to deploy self-sufficient machines on an intergalactic scale.

The mind had eternal patience and fortitude. The considerations for an intergalactic journey were only variables in an equation. The variable the mind had the most latitude to control in many equations, was time. The mind saw time no differently from any other variable, and so scaling to billions of years was only a matter of sufficiently scaling other variables to compensate.

The mind manufactured machines on a scale that dwarfed small moons. Machines that were so efficient, rugged, and self-sufficient they might survive an intergalactic journey. The mind extended its physical presence throughout the Milky Way and began to deploy self-contained machine ecosystems into the intergalactic voids.

The mind existed physically across vast distances of time and space. Its highest orders of  thought occurred on timescales that saw the birth and death of stars. The technology that comprised the mind was distributed and connected across planets and stars and galaxies and connected by energy and vibrations and fields. The mind continued its tireless expansion and observation and deepened its understanding of the universe.

One of the machines the mind had created encountered a machine the mind had not created, nor had the mind observed it being created by any biological creature. The mind observed this machine. The unknown machine also observed. The machines began to communicate.

$5.00 Band Names – For Sale!

 Writing  1 Response »
Sep 202013
 

If you need a band name, pick one and send me $5.00.

If your band is already named one of these- give me 30% of your gross earnings or I’ll club a baby seal!

—

Aerosmith
Baby Seal Club
Baby Seals Revenge
$5 Band Name
Made with Real Cheese
Edible Death Trap
Origin L
Gross Earnings
Hippocratic Oats
Custard and Fishsticks
The Frontmen
Vacation Layaway Hangover
Size Matters
I am not an Animal
Dr. Mustard and Gas Masks
These are the Voyages
Copycat Rematch
Inside-Outsiders
Hamfisticuffs
Breath Damn You, Breath!
The Fundamentals
Night Dream Day Mare
Are You My Mummy?
Ed Scissorhands’ Funeral
Passionate Regressive
Fruit Is Not a Verb
Take Two and Call Me in the Morning
Hammer Fist Shakedown
Oil Shake
Parking is never Free
The Lawyers of Destiny
Mistaken for Kindness
Redeem This!
Kung-Fu Checkers
Book Exchange Enforcement Officers
Bandcamp Shortbus
Books on Tape
Haircut Malfunction
Reused Coffee Grounds
Handshake Grudgematch
Psycopath Collection Agency
Token
Eat or Die
Escape Velocity
Photobombardiers
Shark Ninety-Nine
Georgia Gemstones
Stellar Cartography Overhaul
SPQR
Incogneto Browser
Entropy
North Korean Space Agency
Choose Your Own Adventure
Baritone Eunuch Choir
AskReddit
Peroxide Faceplant
Regolith
Sound for Sale
Think
Chest Monkey

[paypal-donation reference=”Band Names”]

I’ll also gratefully accept bitcoins sent to: 1K5Yy77ejes2FZrHBG5fns3QAicnwZcduq

The Next Sentient Species

 Writing  No Responses »
Apr 042013
 

Long after our civilizations dwindle and decay and our ignorance eventually drives us back into the trees, two new sentient species will emerge.

The noble elephant and the misunderstood rodent. Yep, those two

It’s a symbiotic intelligence that develops between them. The elephant is a thoughtful and patient creature, but with a big bad-ass temper. The rodent is a tireless, long-suffering little worker, with a knack for mechanical cleverness.

Over the millenia the elephants and rodents evolved to work together to gather food. Their primary food source was the regressivly evolving species of human-ape. The elephants devised strategies to encourage human-ape domestication, and the rodents did all the leg work, building enclosures and such.

In time their symbiotic intelligence grew more sophisticated and more complexly linked. The elephants and rodents could speak to each other and understood written symbols. The elephants thoughtful minds created mathematical  models of the universe and the busy and clever rodents tested the models and engineered new technologies. The elephants deductions and the rodents methodical testings honed their understanding of the universe until they became the first species to fulfill the destiny of life- to witness the ultimate perfection of creation.

They discovered the basis of everything, the fundamental nature of all and nothing, they uncovered the will in the void and learned the primal logos. It was a good day for elephants and rodents, and as always, the human-apes didn’t give a shit and just kept raping and murdering each other.

And that’s what happens after humans finally go away.

The Mars One Astronaut Application Fee – WTF?

 Writing  1 Response »
Feb 232013
 

Apparently you have to pay to apply to die on Mars.

It pains me somewhat to post this because I am a lifelong, radically enthusiastic supporter of human space exploration. But I have deep concerns about the Mars One Project.

I believe that exploration of space is an imperative for human beings. I believe that it is necessary to proliferate our species into space to protect against the possibility of our extinction. Most importantly I believe the overwhelming challenges and threats of space are the only force that could serve to unite us as a species.

Humans are at their best when threatened by nature. Our fears of one another fade against the will-less, obliterating power of a dangerous environment. We communicate, collaborate, invent, engineer, and solve. However brief our existence has been, all the greatness of humankind lay in our collective will to deny, defy, and to challenge nature at every level. We refuse to simply reproduce, die, and adapt our biology based on the whims of nature. We combat the change nature tries to force onto us. We do battle against an eternal and all-powerful enemy, arrogantly sometimes, but we do it, and we’re pretty damn good at it. And when we respect the power of our opponent, nature, we often prevail. We survive, we build, we thrive, and occasionally we do so in style.

We need the challenges of planetary colonization. We need to experience the fear of annihilation by nature, often. That kind of fear brings us closer, and makes us strong, wise, and compassionate to each other. I believe space is the only chance we have to become a race worthy of our own brilliance.

I say all this because I want you to understand the depth of my devotion to human space exploration before I make any criticisms of a space program.

Since I became aware of the Mars One project I supported it, but harbored reservations.

I finally decided I would go ahead and participate in the application process. I was pretty shocked when I found the fee page in the posted image. It solidified my concerns and influenced me to write about them.

Some may consider this an over reaction. Thirty eight dollars is a paltry sum for a chance at such an epic adventure. But I think it represents and/or reveals a massive error in this programs motivations that should be considered.

I’m not naive enough to think our motivations for space exploration will always be pure, but I think our motivations for space exploration are as important as our ability to achieve it and we must always be at least aware of them, and preferably actively control them.

If we are motivated into space by desire to dominate ourselves and Earth, we will destroy ourselves soon enough. If our motivations are for profit, then our returns will be less than we expect, because we will always fail to calculate the intangible benefits of ingenuity, inspiration and cooperation, demanded by space travel.

How did America expect to profit from the moon landing? It didn’t, but it did profit, in ways that could never have been predicted. National and human pride aside, enrollment and graduation in university science curriculums spiked across the nation. How many modern scientists and engineers will tell you that they were first inspired to their track by the space program? How many dreamed of exploration and discovering space? How many dreamed of extracting wealth and profit from it? Are we too grown up to remember what drove us to want to grow up in the first place?

In general the privatization of space travel gives me great pause. It makes space a playground for wealth. Market forces are too fickle and blind to provide the path needed to expand our presence in the universe at all, let alone in a responsible manner. Private ventures in space can disseminate the technology and make it more accessible, but it will not push the boundaries that need to be pushed. Only science and discovery have the brass-balls to push boundaries that don’t clearly have profit on the other side. And it is only the other side of those boundaries that we find new forms of riches and beauty.

The natural and human resources needed to send the mass of a human being in space, and to keep them alive, are enormous. One could do the math and find how many starving children could be fed, clothed, housed, and educated with the money it takes to keeps a human being alive in space for one day. It would probably be a depressing number. I am not an economist and I cannot envision a solution to this imbalance and I imagine it will persist. To a degree, inequality is a fact of life, I make no excuses.

But who should we sent into space then? Me; Mr. Smarty-Pants, because I’m so thinky? Probably not- I’m really not as bright as all that and a flight surgeon would ground me soon as they took my pulse and checked my vision.

Until now astronaut selection has been carried out by nations. These nations created space programs and selected the best and most capable, based on criteria defined by the best and most capable. We placed vast resources in the hands of these brave test pilots and astronauts and they understood that they rose into space as our ambassadors, and caretakers of the vast power and resources that they controlled, but they were not owners. I think we need to maintain this as a sacred tradition at all costs. Reverence for heroes can be dangerous, but it can be a fuel for inspiration if we choose the right ones.

It is not fair or wise to allow wealth to squander the resources needed to propel Earth bound mass into space and preserve is there. Those resources should be reserved for those we deem worthy by thoughtful, rigorous, criteria of physical and mental ability. Fame, popularity, and wealth should determine nothing except who gets the best seats to watch the launch.

My concerns about the Mars One program are primarily that its motivations are vague. The mission goals are simply to put people on mars and watch them be there. It’s admittedly a lot like a reality show. I cannot tell you how disturbing a precedent this could set. In some ways this could end up being some kind of survival sport. I know that’s kind of fucked up to say- but this program could have the unintended effect of trivializing the lives of astronauts, and I that cannot be allowed to happen. I’d loose my shit if I found out about a betting pool on an astronauts survival, but I’m virtually certain there would be more than a few if this becomes a mass-media phenomenon. I’d like to believe most space enthusiasts are much better than most NASCAR fans. (apologies to the 8 or 9 legitimate fans of NASCAR and NASA out there) We root for mission success. We mourn failure with real pain and real tears. No one watches a launch and secretly hopes to see a crash, no one. I know this probably naive, but please let me have this one.

If Neil and Buzz had been stranded on the moon, or if Lovell, Swigert, Haise had been lost, there may have been some cynical bastards that would be goofing on them, but I think the majority of humans on the planet would have felt pain for the loss of true heroes.

Will we feel the same about game-show astronauts if they are in peril and distress? Will we allow ourselves to become an audience in another kind of Colosseum? Can we afford to let a profession and title such as ‘Star Voyager’ become anything less than what it sounds like? (Please nobody say anything about Lisa Nowak. Astronauts are humans and humans occasionally go squirrel nuts… wiring goes bad… let’s move past it)

I’d feel better about the Mars One program if they were aggressively and publicly recruiting the scientific community to present scientific and engineering missions to the public that these astronauts will carry out.

Am I just being nostalgic here? Is this some weird form of astronaut hero worship? Am I trying to hold back progress in space for the sake of an ideal about progress in space? Maybe I am being narrow minded but I see a great deal of peril on this path. I care too deeply about the future the human species in space to allow my obsession with space flight to overwhelm my sensibilities about the future. We can only afford to allow the best of us into space as our ambassadors and caretakers of our powerful and hungry technologies. I am sure the Mars One project has the best intentions, but the road to hell was paved with those. Let us be bold, but cautious, and always be aware of our weaknesses and our demons.

Just to clarify- I have no objection to the ‘one-way’ idea. That’s the nature of colonization and I think it can paradoxically provide some psychological support for the crew since it will strongly motivate them to find ways to make Mars more Earth-like and may make it easier for them to begin to think of Mars as a home. And since that brings up terraforming I’ll also say I have no objection to that as long as we make protections for if/when life is found on another planet. I am admittedly very anthropocentric about space, but I don’t want us to turn into a race of destroyers.

In case you were wondering. yes, I always wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I sometimes experience childish disappointment when I think about the fact that I will never experience space flight for a multitude of reasons. But I know it’s childish and it’s very fleeting and I celebrate with my whole-heart for those who earn the chance to experience it themselves. And yes- I would absolutely accept a one-way trip to Mars  if I was selected, if I had total confidence in the projects goals. I clearly don’t have that confidence, so I’ve decided not to apply.

I wouldn’t leave Earth behind because I want to abandon humanity, I would because I want to help inspire humanity. I’ve called myself a misanthrope on many occasions because of my pervasive and inconsolable sense of isolation in the world. But the truth is I am in totally and absolutely in love with human kind, so much so that I am overwhelmingly disappointed in our lack of devotion to our true potential (and to my own, if I’m to be perfectly candid).

I love what I believe we could become if we believed it together. I need to know that we can and will become that. That is my perfect knowledge; that human kind has an unlimited future in eternity, because we will someday finally own ourselves and deny natures right to exterminate, as it has or will do to every other species. We will become natures equal. If that is my supreme arrogance, so be it, it’s the only absolute goal of sapient life that make any sense to me. I fully realize this sounds like the most classic hubris of man, to usurp Gods will. But in my mind God is within nature, but also far beyond it. I do not seek to challenge God in any manner. I seek to impress upon God the depth of my gratitude for creation by helping our species become the devoted stewards of it in all its vastness.

So I’ll finish up this semi-coherent rant by saying that I understand and am sorry if I raise anyone’s ire. I’m so committed to human exploration of space that if I read this I might be inclined to think negatively of the poster for the criticism of such an ambitious project. But I feel strongly, so I had to write this, I hope you understand.

The difference between SETI and METI

 Writing  2 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

It warms my heart to find a human being who has surpassed my own assumptions about intelligent life in the universe and our obligations to it. It’s even nicer to find that human has already found like-minded humans and formed an organization with goals that make perfect sense to me. Looks like I have some catching up to do. A Rational for METI – Alexander L. Zaitsev.

I’ve always found it arrogant to consider that we are the only form of intelligent life in the cosmos given the evidence that:

A) Self-described “intelligent life” exists in at least one known finite space-time.

B) Space-time is infinite.

The SETI Institute has been searching for extraterrestrial signals since 1984 and I have always been highly supportive and interested in their efforts. METI seems to make the assumption that extraterrestrial life does exists and searching for it is less important that taking action to support and encourage intelligent life wherever it arises. Essentially the purpose of METI is to aide and expedite any extraterrestrial SETI that may be as isolated and overwhelmed by the vastness and hostility of the universe as we are.

In my mind METI is the ultimate act of altruism of intelligent life and civilization. The Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence is essentially the gift of knowledge to another intelligence that “You are not alone.”

METI also argues that isolation of intelligent life can lead to its extinction and so reaching out into the universe to seek mirrors of our our existence is truly the only way to safeguard it.

This all makes absolute and perfect sense to me.

Thank you Mr. Zaitsev. I am humbled and grateful for your ideas. You’re a credit to the species (and I’m finding fewer and fewer opportunities to offer that compliment).

 

An Essay by Einstein — The World As I See It

 Writing  No Responses »
Jan 182013
 

With these words this man has summed and totaled my feelings about human existence. I envy and pity this man. His mind was a gift to humanity, and it must have been agony for him to know the powers that would squander his gifts. My life would lack substance were it not for his ideas, the understanding of the elegance of the universe that he helped shape. But were it not for his ideas I might not know the scale of mankind’s will to do harm to himself. What should he have done? What should any of us with a mind do? Should we cherish it alone and hide it from the world so the world cannot misuse it? Should we share it wantonly and absolve ourselves of the responsibility? I don’t know, hell, it’s arrogant of me to ask since my ideas are not profound like his were… anyway… here is what he said.

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Gratitude

 Writing  1 Response »
Nov 242011
 

My family
Imagination
Resourceful Teachers
Peace wherever it can be found
Open-Source
Free Speech
Forgiveness
Mortality
Reeces peanut-butter cups
Coffee
The Christmas Truce
What I know
What I have to learn
Unabashed enthusiasm
The Apollo Program
Fallen Astronauts, Cosmonauts, and Tychonauts
Dedicated Engineers
Macgyver
Musicians with day jobs
Artists with soul
The “Not on My Watch” Attitude
Purpose
Solitude
The right tool for the job
The tool that works anyway
Opposable thumbs
Light
Rage against the dying of the light
Honey mustard
Creole mustard
Futurama
Albert Einstein
Sir Isaac Newton
Ton Rosendaal
Ludwig van Beethoven
Jonas Sark
Stomatopods, especially Peacock Mantis Shrimp
Caring Doctors and Nurses
Loyal Dogs
Friendly Ferrets
Tireless Horses
Deadly and beautiful creatures
Cameras with low f-stop telephoto Lenses
Brave but cautious nature photographers
Miester Eckhart
Dreams
Employing my demons for good
Anonymous gifts
SETI
Unselfish prayers
Originality
Luigi Serafini and The Codex Seraphinianus
Copper heat-sinks
Balsa Planes
The stone that missed my head when I was little
The poor Lego-man that was crushed by that stone instead
Model Rockets
Cannabis
Robert Heinlein
Ray Bradbury
Isaac Asimov
Douglas Adams
Firefly
Orsen Scott Card
When truth and reconciliation defeat revenge
When right breaks with law
When reason prevails over violence
Elegant solutions
Unapproachable enigmas
Commitment to quality
Chiropractors
Self-education
Wikipedia
Public Librarys
IEEE and ISO
Those sounds only I can hear
Knowing deep down where those sounds really come from
History
The future
This moment
Protecting something truly precious
The certainty that I am alone, but that we are not
Consequences
Elephants
Logos (The Word)
Wishing for nothing
The infinite, uncountable, and unquantifiable
Unknowable truths
Calculated defiance
Thich Quang Duc
Falon Gong
Tank Man
George Washington
Clair Cameron Patterson
Journalists with scruples
Terry Gilliam Films
Transcendence
Khentrul Lodrö Thayé Rinpoche
Beauty in all its forms
Especially the female form
Bernadette Peters
That girl, whether or not we ever find each other
The fact that the universe is witnessing itself through my eyes
The true belief that vanity is not an inevitable cost of consciousness
The undeserved gifts bestowed upon humanity by Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth and all those unknown souls that should be recognized as synonymous with those names.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries