Total Eclipse Today!
The Nature of Glass
Ancient biodiversity linked to cooling seas
Liquid Lake on Titan
Thin Film Solar Cells
Termites and Biofuels
The Genetics of Schizophrenia
Rocketeer-- not quite
DIY Addiction Cures
Solar Sails
Source of Salmonella Found
Chuck Norris Proves to be Idiot
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Sometimes pride is okay
A common human failing we see regularly is to infer past or other cultures as somehow inferior to our own. This can happen to the point where we view them as somehow less intelligent than we are. "We" being defined as whoever the observing culture is. Western European culture has a particularly obvious pattern here. Englishmen, secure in the center of the vast British Empire, speculated on ambiguous skull patterns as definite proof of the innate cognitive superiority of the English brain.
We do it today. Reading some of the writings from different period of human history it's hard not to say what were they thinking? And then some artifact from the past will just astound us with its sophistication and humble us into realizing that humans have been really, really smart for a very long time.
Nowhere is this more shown than with the Antikythera mechanism. Long story made short: the mechanism was discovered underwater in 1900 and dismissed as just a lump until in 1902 a gear wheel was observed in it. Years go by and studied observation determines it was a mechanism. More recently, modern research technology such as CAT scans and exotic photographic techniques were applied to it to get a true three dimensional picture of it. All of this is in the wikipedia article and more. Go read it.
Nature shows a very nice documentary on it here. A good article on it is here.
The mechanism was used to predict the timing of the Olympic Games.
The Games had to happen every four years on the full moon closest to the summer solstice. Now, let's think about that. This machine related the lunar cycle to the solar cycle-- two cycles that have no natural connection. That is, there is no easy harmonic that could be used to determine a relationship such as four to two or six to three. A solar year is 365.25 days long (remember leap year). The lunar cycle is 29.53 days. The relationship between these two is 12.3772+. This device had to figure out solstices, full moons, etc., in relationship to one another, with nothing but rods and gears. And it does it beautifully.
Now, I've been doing a little machining in the last couple of years. Mostly with a lathe. I covet a mill. The device was made out of bronze. It did all of it in an little box 13 inches high, 6.7 inches wide, and 3.5 inches deep. It was made by hand. And it was intended to schedule an event we pay homage to this August.
Things like this make you proud to be human.
----------------------------------------------------
Links of Interest
Cognitive Science and Moral Philosophy
Toward a Type 1 Civilization
Atheist Rapper
Darwin on the Right
Fact Checking 101
The Mechanicrawl
Zap Gun Moves Ahead
The Drinking of the Shrew revisited
A Robot Perv
Desalination Made Easy
The $10 Microscope (I want one)
Scaphokogia! (Pronounced like it's spelled)
Why elders lose memory
We do it today. Reading some of the writings from different period of human history it's hard not to say what were they thinking? And then some artifact from the past will just astound us with its sophistication and humble us into realizing that humans have been really, really smart for a very long time.
Nowhere is this more shown than with the Antikythera mechanism. Long story made short: the mechanism was discovered underwater in 1900 and dismissed as just a lump until in 1902 a gear wheel was observed in it. Years go by and studied observation determines it was a mechanism. More recently, modern research technology such as CAT scans and exotic photographic techniques were applied to it to get a true three dimensional picture of it. All of this is in the wikipedia article and more. Go read it.
Nature shows a very nice documentary on it here. A good article on it is here.
The mechanism was used to predict the timing of the Olympic Games.
The Games had to happen every four years on the full moon closest to the summer solstice. Now, let's think about that. This machine related the lunar cycle to the solar cycle-- two cycles that have no natural connection. That is, there is no easy harmonic that could be used to determine a relationship such as four to two or six to three. A solar year is 365.25 days long (remember leap year). The lunar cycle is 29.53 days. The relationship between these two is 12.3772+. This device had to figure out solstices, full moons, etc., in relationship to one another, with nothing but rods and gears. And it does it beautifully.
Now, I've been doing a little machining in the last couple of years. Mostly with a lathe. I covet a mill. The device was made out of bronze. It did all of it in an little box 13 inches high, 6.7 inches wide, and 3.5 inches deep. It was made by hand. And it was intended to schedule an event we pay homage to this August.
Things like this make you proud to be human.
----------------------------------------------------
Links of Interest
Cognitive Science and Moral Philosophy
Toward a Type 1 Civilization
Atheist Rapper
Darwin on the Right
Fact Checking 101
The Mechanicrawl
Zap Gun Moves Ahead
The Drinking of the Shrew revisited
A Robot Perv
Desalination Made Easy
The $10 Microscope (I want one)
Scaphokogia! (Pronounced like it's spelled)
Why elders lose memory
Monday, July 28, 2008
Links of Interest
How Anecdotal Evidence Undermines Science
Bat Fungus
Bullet Proof Fish?
Robot Lobster
NASA to provide live coverage of this week's solar eclipse
Ducks Die before the Lincoln Memorial
The Museum of Sex
The Creation of Worlds
Tidal Power
The Boozing of the Shrew
Typhoons cure for global warming
No: The Amazon is the cure for global warming
Recommended Books
Bat Fungus
Bullet Proof Fish?
Robot Lobster
NASA to provide live coverage of this week's solar eclipse
Ducks Die before the Lincoln Memorial
The Museum of Sex
The Creation of Worlds
Tidal Power
The Boozing of the Shrew
Typhoons cure for global warming
No: The Amazon is the cure for global warming
Recommended Books
Friday, July 25, 2008
Links of Interest
Office of Technology Assessment Archives on line and here.
Wordlerizing Science
Solar Sailing in Space
Soy Sperm Death
Drill the Arctic! Now! Now! Now!
Crushing the weak stopped by bicyclist
Celebrity Smackdown: Amanda Peet vs Jenny McCarthy
Practice Really Does Make Perfect
I know what makes the northern lights
The California Car Initiative
TED Talks
The Amazing Keith Barry
Wordlerizing Science
Solar Sailing in Space
Soy Sperm Death
Drill the Arctic! Now! Now! Now!
Crushing the weak stopped by bicyclist
Celebrity Smackdown: Amanda Peet vs Jenny McCarthy
Practice Really Does Make Perfect
I know what makes the northern lights
The California Car Initiative
TED Talks
The Amazing Keith Barry
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Links of Interest
Unscrew America
Snow Bots
Chemical Removal of CO2 and here
The Human to Robot Army and here.
Places to Not Look for Life in Messier 101
And the Two shall become One Flesh
Not octopus: Multipus!
The Euroship
Anti-agathics
Google does walking
Antarctica's Dry Valleys
Crop Circles are Stupid! A Nation Gasps.
Dent Toons
Walking Catfish
The Todd Blair Wall
Snow Bots
Chemical Removal of CO2 and here
The Human to Robot Army and here.
Places to Not Look for Life in Messier 101
And the Two shall become One Flesh
Not octopus: Multipus!
The Euroship
Anti-agathics
Google does walking
Antarctica's Dry Valleys
Crop Circles are Stupid! A Nation Gasps.
Dent Toons
Walking Catfish
The Todd Blair Wall
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The Fermi Paradox
I was at Readercon 19 last weekend and on a panel regarding the Fermi Paradox.
Genius scientist and SF writer Geoffrey Landis articulated the Fermi Paradox fairly neatly in his article (quoted below on Percolation Theory) : "If even a very small fraction of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy are home to technological civilizations which colonize over interstellar distances, the entire galaxy could be completely colonized in a few million years. The absence of such extraterrestrial civilizations visiting Earth is the Fermi paradox."
Fermi pointed out the problem in 1950. If you'll recall, we had just come out of a world war, had exploded bombs in Japan and were conceiving thermonuclear bombs (testing them in 1952). The idea of a nuclear end of civilization was a very real concern. It is my opinion that Fermi's question was just as much informed by that concern than a scientific query. In addition, we were also living in a period where we considered upcoming nuclear to be too cheap to meter. It was a time of optimism and terror.
The above articulation has components that need to be discussed: 1) the probability of technological civilizations arising and 2) the probability they would desire to colonise the rest of the galaxy and 3) longevity required for them to find us.
Some of this was looked at by the Drake Equation, which looks like this as shown in wikipedia:
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
My own feeling is that fc is a complex variable:
ft: develops technology
fr: develops technology that can be recognizable
fd: detectibility of the detectible technology by us
Not to belabor what is already in the wikipedia, but the numbers in the article gave the number of civilizations as 10. I complexified the fc variable by taking their fc value of .01 and using it in above. fr I assigned a value of .5 to give a 50% chance of detectibility and fd a value of .01 as a possibility the signal could be detectible by us. Using these numbers I get a value of .05.
Paradox? What paradox?
What's most interesting about the Fermi Paradox is that it is viewed as a paradox at all. I had a huge argument with a friend over this. The problem is we have no evidence about a situation where we have no knowledge. All we know is we have no contact of any recognizable sort. Consequently, conclusions based on this absence are meaningless. My position was that all we know is we haven't been contacted in any way we can discern. Beyond that, We Don't Know.
But human being don't like those three words. So we speculate.
The links below are fun.
Here are my possible solutions. I hope they're as much fun.
Everything about these solutions presumes that non-relativistic systems are impossible. No FTL drive. No wormholes. We just have to send signals or travel for a really, really long time.
1) We are alone
2) Mechanisms for detection are phase delayed against evolution of technology that can be detected. E.g., comm. systems we would use for detection (radio waves) become finer and less broadcasty over the evolution of the technology: spectrum is a physical limit and the real estate is expensive. Therefore, there is only a brief period where signal detection of another civilization is possible.
3) Alien communication systems do not follow our paradigm of broadcasting low frequency photons in fairly regular patterns. Cephalopods are color based and have no non-visual color communication mechanism. (Some pheromones but not much.) Therefore, intelligent cephalopod comm systems might begin as visible light and never have a non-visual component-- transmitting sound was the first basis for radio. If they jumped to chemical lasers rather than radio and based their communication on that, we would never see it.
4) The probabilities are such that we just haven't had time enough to encounter them.
5) We only think it's possible to communicate/transit interstellar space because we haven't really tried it yet. In actually, it's much, much more expensive and difficult because of inescapable energy requirements. The physics underlying possible technology to do this has inescapable costs no civilization can withstand and survive.
6) There were lots of them a few thousand years ago. There was a gamma burst nearby and they are all dead. We were fortunate enough to have Jupiter in the way when it happened and that's why life on earth survived. But now we're all alone. Boo hoo.
7) There are inescapable cultural consequences for any species to attempt such an expensive undertaking. Species evolve from their heritage of what they were not because of what they wish to be. Therefore, any species that evolves to the point of creating the technology that makes it possible to communicate/transit across interstellar distances has within it qualities that make it impossible to do so. For example, look at how well we're doing at unifying the earth just to properly distribute food.
8) Phase delay of species evolution is against detection. Presuming a relativistic universe, it's unreasonable to expect to detect extra-galactic species. The distances are too great for that level of resolution. It may be unlikely to detect species beyond our spiral arm. Therefore, we must be discussing species that are at most intragalactic and at least intra-spiral. Could be the odds of intelligent life sprouting at all/within our time frame is against us. Or the species life span is against us locally. Or virtual transhumanism. Or build undetectible Dyson spheres. Or they lose interest.
9) What we perceive as universal constants that we use to communicate, such as binary systes, are not in fact universal enough to be used to communicate. We are detecting signal but it's just noise as far as we are concerned. Video patterns based on commercial scan rate. Split of tv signals between FM/AM, etc. (The WOW signal, for example.)
10) There are other civilizations but we're not invited for some reason. (Hm. Resembles my childhood.)
13) We're the first.
14) We're in a simplified simulation of real life. What we see isn't real. (from Nick Bostrom's argument.) The absence is itself evidence of the simulation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuff on the Fermi Paradox
The Great Silence
An Astrophysical Explanation for the Great Silence
Why our search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has Failed
Fifty Ways to Find Your Alien Lover
When Aliens Don't Attack
Percolation Theory
There is no Fermi Paradox
Dyson Spheres
Fermi Paradox: Possible Solutions
Answering the Fermi Paradox
An Overview of the Fermi Paradox
Three Billion Earths
Refining the Drake Equation
Gamma Ray Bursts and the Fermi Paradox
Genius scientist and SF writer Geoffrey Landis articulated the Fermi Paradox fairly neatly in his article (quoted below on Percolation Theory) : "If even a very small fraction of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy are home to technological civilizations which colonize over interstellar distances, the entire galaxy could be completely colonized in a few million years. The absence of such extraterrestrial civilizations visiting Earth is the Fermi paradox."
Fermi pointed out the problem in 1950. If you'll recall, we had just come out of a world war, had exploded bombs in Japan and were conceiving thermonuclear bombs (testing them in 1952). The idea of a nuclear end of civilization was a very real concern. It is my opinion that Fermi's question was just as much informed by that concern than a scientific query. In addition, we were also living in a period where we considered upcoming nuclear to be too cheap to meter. It was a time of optimism and terror.
The above articulation has components that need to be discussed: 1) the probability of technological civilizations arising and 2) the probability they would desire to colonise the rest of the galaxy and 3) longevity required for them to find us.
Some of this was looked at by the Drake Equation, which looks like this as shown in wikipedia:
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
My own feeling is that fc is a complex variable:
ft: develops technology
fr: develops technology that can be recognizable
fd: detectibility of the detectible technology by us
Not to belabor what is already in the wikipedia, but the numbers in the article gave the number of civilizations as 10. I complexified the fc variable by taking their fc value of .01 and using it in above. fr I assigned a value of .5 to give a 50% chance of detectibility and fd a value of .01 as a possibility the signal could be detectible by us. Using these numbers I get a value of .05.
Paradox? What paradox?
What's most interesting about the Fermi Paradox is that it is viewed as a paradox at all. I had a huge argument with a friend over this. The problem is we have no evidence about a situation where we have no knowledge. All we know is we have no contact of any recognizable sort. Consequently, conclusions based on this absence are meaningless. My position was that all we know is we haven't been contacted in any way we can discern. Beyond that, We Don't Know.
But human being don't like those three words. So we speculate.
The links below are fun.
Here are my possible solutions. I hope they're as much fun.
Everything about these solutions presumes that non-relativistic systems are impossible. No FTL drive. No wormholes. We just have to send signals or travel for a really, really long time.
1) We are alone
2) Mechanisms for detection are phase delayed against evolution of technology that can be detected. E.g., comm. systems we would use for detection (radio waves) become finer and less broadcasty over the evolution of the technology: spectrum is a physical limit and the real estate is expensive. Therefore, there is only a brief period where signal detection of another civilization is possible.
3) Alien communication systems do not follow our paradigm of broadcasting low frequency photons in fairly regular patterns. Cephalopods are color based and have no non-visual color communication mechanism. (Some pheromones but not much.) Therefore, intelligent cephalopod comm systems might begin as visible light and never have a non-visual component-- transmitting sound was the first basis for radio. If they jumped to chemical lasers rather than radio and based their communication on that, we would never see it.
4) The probabilities are such that we just haven't had time enough to encounter them.
5) We only think it's possible to communicate/transit interstellar space because we haven't really tried it yet. In actually, it's much, much more expensive and difficult because of inescapable energy requirements. The physics underlying possible technology to do this has inescapable costs no civilization can withstand and survive.
6) There were lots of them a few thousand years ago. There was a gamma burst nearby and they are all dead. We were fortunate enough to have Jupiter in the way when it happened and that's why life on earth survived. But now we're all alone. Boo hoo.
7) There are inescapable cultural consequences for any species to attempt such an expensive undertaking. Species evolve from their heritage of what they were not because of what they wish to be. Therefore, any species that evolves to the point of creating the technology that makes it possible to communicate/transit across interstellar distances has within it qualities that make it impossible to do so. For example, look at how well we're doing at unifying the earth just to properly distribute food.
8) Phase delay of species evolution is against detection. Presuming a relativistic universe, it's unreasonable to expect to detect extra-galactic species. The distances are too great for that level of resolution. It may be unlikely to detect species beyond our spiral arm. Therefore, we must be discussing species that are at most intragalactic and at least intra-spiral. Could be the odds of intelligent life sprouting at all/within our time frame is against us. Or the species life span is against us locally. Or virtual transhumanism. Or build undetectible Dyson spheres. Or they lose interest.
9) What we perceive as universal constants that we use to communicate, such as binary systes, are not in fact universal enough to be used to communicate. We are detecting signal but it's just noise as far as we are concerned. Video patterns based on commercial scan rate. Split of tv signals between FM/AM, etc. (The WOW signal, for example.)
10) There are other civilizations but we're not invited for some reason. (Hm. Resembles my childhood.)
13) We're the first.
14) We're in a simplified simulation of real life. What we see isn't real. (from Nick Bostrom's argument.) The absence is itself evidence of the simulation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuff on the Fermi Paradox
The Great Silence
An Astrophysical Explanation for the Great Silence
Why our search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has Failed
Fifty Ways to Find Your Alien Lover
When Aliens Don't Attack
Percolation Theory
There is no Fermi Paradox
Dyson Spheres
Fermi Paradox: Possible Solutions
Answering the Fermi Paradox
An Overview of the Fermi Paradox
Three Billion Earths
Refining the Drake Equation
Gamma Ray Bursts and the Fermi Paradox
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