Why Not Mars?

Funny, brilliant and insightful piece:

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude[6], while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8] to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972[9]).

The imbalance between human and robot is so overwhelming that, despite the presence of a $250 billion[10] International Space Station National Laboratory, every major discovery made in space this century has come from robotic spacecraft [11]. In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it’s not going to get any work done.

As for that space station, the jewel of human spaceflight, it exists in a state of nearly perfect teological closure, its only purpose being to teach its creators how to build future spacecraft like it. The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves. At 22 years old [12], the ISS is still as dependent on fresh meals and clean laundry sent from home as the most feckless grad student.

[---]

If the head of NOAA Ocean Exploration (budget: $25 million) or the U.S. Antarctic Program ($350 million) held a press conference announcing a plan to fulfill human destiny, they’d be carrying their belongings home in a cardboard box before sundown. But our space agency is held to a lower standard.

All this would be fine if it was just talk. But NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the total budget of the National Science Foundation. And in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing.

Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.

The whole thing is getting weird.

[---]

The chief technical obstacle to a Mars landing is not propulsion, but a lack of reliable closed-loop life support[48]. With our current capability, NASA would struggle to keep a crew alive for six months on the White House lawn, let alone for years in a Martian yurt.

The technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular, with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping. The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold[49] and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free.

I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.

What makes life support so vexing is that all the subcomponents interact with each other and with the crew. There’s no such thing as a life support unit test; you have to run the whole system in space under conditions that mimic the target mission. Reliability engineering for life support involves solving mysteries like why gunk formed on a certain washer on Day 732, then praying on the next run that your fix doesn’t break on Day 733. The process repeats until the first crew makes it home alive (figuratively speaking), at which point you declare the technology reliable and chill the champagne.

Unlike the medical research, there’s no way to predict how long these trials might take. A typical exploration profile[50] needs two different kinds of life support (for the spacecraft and the surface) that together have to work for about 1000 days. The spacecraft also has to demonstrate that it can go dormant for the time the crew is on Mars and still work when it wakes up.

Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.

 

How Geology Resolves The Fermi Paradox

Given the diversity of voices that have weighed in on the possibility that other civilizations may be out there, it is surprising that few geoscientists—people who study the one planet known to host life—have weighed in on the cosmic conundrum. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” has long lacked a geological perspective. 

That’s what Earth scientists Robert Stern and Taras Gerya offer in a recent paper published in Scientific Reports. Earlier speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were based primarily on astronomical and technological considerations like the number of planetary systems in the galaxy and how long it might take an intelligent species to discover and begin using radio waves. That left little attention for the specific attributes of potential host planets—other than the presence or absence of water. 

Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare.

[---]

Bringing a geologic perspective to the problem, Stern and Gerya propose to resolve the paradox by adding two more factors to the already unwieldy Drake equation: the fraction of habitable planets with distinct continents and oceans; and the fraction of those planets with a plate tectonic system that has operated for at least 500 million years. The values of these terms are very small, they argue, because the development of distinct landmasses and water bodies, and the tectonic habit of crustal recycling—characteristics of Earth that we take for granted—are unlikely outcomes in the evolution of rocky planets. 

With these new factors, the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy that might communicate with us falls to … almost zero.

- More Here

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars.

I have been saying this for 2 plus decades and finally, there is a book exposing this fantasy and pure bullshit. 

Max and I came from earth and will go back to earth. Not because we "lived" on earth but we are part of earth and -- "we are earth".   

Review of the new book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

Living on Mars, which has no birds or rain, gets less than half the sunlight per area that Earth does, and is often plagued by dust storms that further blot out the sun, could be a soul-deadening experience.

The book spends several chapters covering space law and governance, which, in the Weinersmiths’ hands, is more interesting than it sounds. They explore the philosophical question of “who owns the universe?” and shoot down a common argument “that all law is pointless because if Elon Musk has a Mars settlement, who’s going to stop him?” (“One of your authors has a brother who makes this argument. His name is Marty and he is wrong.”)

In fact, there are already frameworks that could guide space law, and the book covers them, and their alternatives, in detail. They use Earth-bound examples, like the breakup of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the governance of Antarctica to explore how various governance scenarios might play out on other planets.

[---]

They also run through a list of “Bad Arguments for Space Settlement,” which include “Space Will Save Humanity from Near-Term Calamity by Providing a New Home,” and “Space Exploration Is a Natural Human Urge.” These detailed examinations of the stark realities regarding space travel and habitation serve as a foil to the breathlessly optimistic accounts that are so ubiquitous in popular media.

Despite often sounding like a couple of Debbie Downers, they somehow succeed at keeping the narrative upbeat and interesting. They do this with humor, frankness, and Zach’s fun sketches. Even as they shoot down a long list of space fantasies, they explore a lot of really interesting research and anecdotes (“Did you know the Colombian constitution asserts a claim to a specific region of space?”), so there’s rarely a dull moment.

The Weinersmiths view themselves not as “barriers on the road to progress” but as “guardrails” who want us to go to Mars as much as anybody. The trouble is that these self-professed science geeks (who watch late-night rocket launches with their kids) “just cannot convince ourselves that the usual arguments for space settlements are good.”

But they also assert, rather earnestly, that “If you hate our conclusions here, we have excellent news: we are not powerful people.”

And listen to the excellent interview with Zach on Russ's EconTalk.

I saw people "troubled" for wearing masks and staying home during Covid and these are people "excited" to depart to Mars - prepared to live (and poop) with 100 a pound suit in an underground bunker! 

Please depart and leave us alone. Adios!

The Overview Effect

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.

- Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

What is the overview effect? Psychologists have described the overview effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.”

But it’s so much more than that.

The overview effect is the sense of oneness astronauts feel when they marvel at Earth from space. It’s grasping the miraculous improbability of one’s existence. It’s seeing the world and its inhabitants unified and whole rather than wretched and divided. It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s connectedness.

[---]

Paradoxical, isn’t it? In the universe’s endless proportions, Earth is a deeply lonely planet. But strangely, looking at it doesn’t make us feel lonely. It’s quite the opposite: we transcend into communion with the cosmos. As astronaut Sam Durrence said: “You’re removed from the Earth, but at the same time you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before.”

We were all born on this speckle of life within a dead universe. What a privilege.

Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

From an orbital viewpoint, all borders, norms, and egos disappear. What remains is a sense of transcendence, oneness, and awe. 

- More Here

To state the obvious; Max gave me the overview effect and much more. 

How To Discover Aliens

This is the simplest pictorial representation I have every seen plus Lisa Kaltenegger's explanation and her passion is contagious. 

The goal at the time was to compare spectra from rocky, temperate planets to what Earth’s spectrum would look like from far away, seeking conspicuous signals like a surplus of oxygen due to widespread photosynthesis. Kaltenegger’s objection was that, for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, its atmosphere had no oxygen. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to build up to high levels. And this biosignature hit its highest concentration not in Earth’s present-day spectrum, but during a short window in the late Cretaceous Period when proto-birds chased giant insects through the skies.

Without a good theoretical model for how Earth’s own spectrum has changed, Kaltenegger feared, the big planet-finding missions could easily miss a living world that didn’t match a narrow temporal template. She needed to envision Earth as an exoplanet evolving through time. To do this, she adapted one of the first global climate models, developed by the geoscientist James Kasting, which still includes references to the 1970s magnetic-tape era it originated in. Kaltenegger developed this code into a bespoke tool that can analyze not only Earth through time but also radically alien scenarios, and it remains her lab’s workhorse.

Loving Laika, 65 Years Later

National Vivisection Society (NAVS) is one of the first organizations I started supporting when Max was a puppy.  If you don't know what Vivisection is then check wikipedia. 

What could be more cruel than opening up the internals of a living being when they are alive? 

But yet, many universities still do this in the name of science. 

This is so important that I have copied below the entire content of NAVS latest newsletter: 

On November 3, 1957, Sputnik 2 became the second manmade satellite to orbit earth; however, unlike its predecessor, Sputnik 2 carried a passenger: a small dog named Laika.

You may have heard of Laika. You may have even seen pictures of the little dog in books, in artwork and in popular culture. But who was Laika? And 65 years later, what can those of us who fight for the end of animal experimentation learn from her story?

Selected from a group of hardy Moscow street dogs, Laika underwent weeks of training for her space mission during which she captured the hearts of the Sputnik 2 research team. She earned many affectionate names like Kudryavka (Little Curly), Zhuchka (Little Bug), and Limonchik (Little Lemon) before being dubbed Laika (Barker) when she became very vocal during a radio broadcast. The evening before Laika’s flight, one researcher brought her home to play with his children while another went against protocol and snuck her a final meal before launch, both recounting that they had wanted to do something nice for the little dog. When they went to close the hatch, technicians took turns kissing her goodbye on the nose.

Laika was loved. Laika was sent to die.

By design, Sputnik 2 was launched with no mechanism for return. The plan was to send Laika up with enough food and oxygen to last her seven days before remotely euthanizing her. However, an extremely rushed building schedule meant that Sputnik 2 was poorly constructed, and when thermal insulation tore loose during launch, the capsule quickly overheated and Laika died just a few hours into the flight.

But death did not slow the tide of love for Laika. If anything, her adoration was magnified as she was transformed into a doggy pop culture saint: her orbit of earth branded a miracle and her death re-painted as martyrdom. In the decades following her death, Laika’s likeness began to appear on monuments, postage stamps and cigarette boxes. Today, we read our children sanitized picture books that either conveniently omit her ending or fully rewrite history to include a heroic return to earth. We get misty eyed over art depicting her floating haloed above the earth, and nod along solemnly to articles that recount her “noble sacrifice.”

There is a flaw in loving Laika this way, as surely as there was a flaw in the love shown to her by those who signed her death warrant.

The modern framing of Laika’s death paints her as a willing and necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of great knowledge. In reality, of course, Laika had no agency over her involvement in the Sputnik 2 mission, and the value of the information attained by her journey is questionable at best. Soviet researcher Oleg Gazenko recounted his involvement with the Sputnik 2 mission, saying:

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it … We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

We are faced with a similar truth 65 years later, when we look at the tens of thousands of dogs who are harmed—and who go unwillingly to their deaths—in pursuit of scientific “knowledge” that is at best flawed and at worst harmful to advancing human science. Most dogs used in research today are used in pharmaceutical testing, even though upwards of 95% of drugs tested on animals fail when they move to human clinical trials. Whatever it is we “learn” from harming dogs has little or no useful application for humans.

So how should we love Laika? Not by building another statue or writing another song in her honor. Instead, we should fight to make sure that no other animal is allowed to needlessly suffer and die in the name of science like she did.

There are currently 60,000 dogs just like Laika being used in research labs in the US—not to mention uncounted millions of other animals. We may not know their names, and their stories may not be immortalized in literature, but they are just as deserving of the love we feel when we remember Laika.

I am sorry Laika. Even after 65 years your sacrifice is not properly heeded. 

A Marvel comic addict, who could spend 55 billion dollars in a heart beat to buy a toy (albeit useful in the hands of responsible people) to convert into another bullshit payment mode and could proudly pound his chest to migrate sapiens where they cannot survive even for a micro second - but yet he happily follows the centuries old protocol of torturing monkeys in the name of neuralink. 

The problem is not him but the billions who mindlessly cheer him. This is a systemic problem rooted in the DNA of Sapiens. 

I am so sorry Laika. I couldn't offer you more than the solace of this little ordinary love of Max and I. And someday soon my life.

Billionaires Who Never Grew Out Of Marvel Comics (& No Understanding Of Complex Systems)

Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, admits that sometimes he refuses to watch feats of virtuoso spacefaring from the new space barons, lest he get sucked in by their superficial glamour. It is not just sour grapes about the cool things they get to do with their wealth. It’s about the scientific, social, and philosophical implications of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

[---]

Anyone who thinks that Musk’s priorities align neatly with the needs of space science should ask astronomers what they think of his 1,500 or so active Starlink satellites that are now obstructing the view of telescopes with bright streaks and raising concerns about radio-signal interference. Starlink has filed plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites in total—about five times the total number currently orbiting Earth—and competing services like Amazon’s Project Kuiper plan to add thousands more. There are already 1,600 close encounters in space (within 1 kilometer) a week from Musk’s satellites, risking collisions that could strew debris in low Earth orbit.

“There was a time when I was enthusiastic about commercial space because I saw it as a possible way we could conduct more science,” Porco says. She now concludes that this is not the way it will work. “When you put science, and the way science needs to be conducted, up against commercial interests, the two make very bad bedfellows.”

“People get so wrapped up in wish-fulfilment fantasies about living on Mars that they lose context completely, as if you can just fly away and leave all our troubles behind. It doesn’t solve any problems by going to Mars,” McCaughrean adds. For the goal of survival, we would be much smarter using our knowledge and resources to keep Earth habitable in the face of the inadvertent geoengineering we are already conducting here.

[---]

We might plausibly extend that approach to an international, crewed research base on the moon. But we don’t need space tourism and private industry to get it. This doesn’t mean that big commercial ventures should be banned. But we should be more clear-eyed about their motives and priorities and consider how much we want their already ubiquitous presence in our lives to expand into the heavens too, with barely any regulation to constrain them.

Even if you feel in your marrow that our human destiny lies in the stars, you might want to look closely at what the space billionaires have done down here. Then ask yourself whether they are the best people to take us up there.

- More Here

One of my guilty pleasures is to live long enough to read the obituary of these self proclaimed omnipotent  sapiens. 

And to state the obvious, I will never leave this beautiful planet where Max and I shared precious time together. My last breathe will be in the same place where Max took his last breathe. 

Abraham “Avi” Loeb & UFO Project

Abraham “Avi” Loeb got the idea to hunt for aliens from cable TV. In June 2021, Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, was at home, watching NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on CNN talking about recent UFO incidents involving U.S. Navy pilots. “Do you think we have been contacted by extraterrestrials?” the CNN interviewer asked. Nelson hedged, then said he was “turning to our scientists” to find out what the pilots saw.

UFOs were big news at the time. Outlets from The New York Times to 60 Minutes had run stories on shadowy objects that appear to dart and dance in grainy video clips taken by Navy jet pilots. On 25 June, shortly after Nelson mused about the footage on CNN, the Pentagon issued a report on nearly 2 decades’ worth of the “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—the government’s preferred new term for UFOs. It said the objects were likely to be drones, weather-related phenomena, or artifacts of sensor glitches. On the other hand, it said that, in some cases, the objects “appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center poll that month found that half of Americans believed aliens were steering the UFOs.

Loeb, already obsessed with a mysterious interstellar object that whizzed through the Solar System in 2017, sensed an opportunity. Immediately after seeing Nelson on CNN, he emailed NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen to propose a government-funded UFO study. Later that day, the two spoke over the phone, and Loeb says Zurbuchen was “supportive” of the idea. But Loeb never heard back after that. He quickly pivoted to private funding. His first lucky strike came when Eugene Jhong, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Harvard alum who had heard Loeb talking about aliens on a podcast, offered up $1 million, no strings attached.

In July, Loeb unveiled the Galileo Project, which he says was designed in the spirit of the revolutionary Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. (The tagline is “Daring to look through new telescopes.”) The overarching goal of the $1.8 million project is to search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and one branch is traditional: analyzing possible interstellar objects spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories. More controversial is the construction of a network of rooftop cameras designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth’s atmosphere. After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project—as well as some notorious nonscientists—Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. “Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,” Loeb says.

- More Here (Galileo Project Website)

Panspermia Theory

Hitch-Hiking Life!

UFO's, Animals, Self Deception, Adaptation & Sapiens ! (Wow)

Wow! What a column! it was like reading my thoughts. I often said, the one person I want to meet in the world is Robert Trivers (ironically, he lives few miles from me in NJ) who is the uncrowned father of self deception research. 

Sapiens trait of self deception is grossly underrated and in the upcoming centuries, tackling that will be one of the biggest challenges if anyone "likes" to work on changing sapiens (btw., good luck with that). 

Ezra Klein has a brilliant column on - hold your breathe, most people are NOT interested in UFO's although tons of documents have been already released by CIA last year. Along the similar lines, people already have become "immune" to our world being turned upside down since last year because of COVID. They just "go-on" with their lives and accept the "new normal" (whatever crap that means). Sapiens adapt to whatever the reality unleashes on them with a caveat - they don't change their minds and retro-fit their magical beliefs to the new knowledge. 

Ezra Klein asks us - Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out:

The way I’ve framed the thought experiment in recent conversations is this: Imagine, tomorrow, an alien craft crashed down in Oregon. There are no life-forms in it. It’s effectively a drone. But it’s undeniably extraterrestrial in origin. So we are faced with the knowledge that we’re not alone, that we are perhaps being watched, and we have no way to make contact. How does that change human culture and society?

One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? Certainly not the academics who’d laughed them off as nonsense, or the governments who would now be seen as liars.

“I’ve always resisted the conspiracy narrative around U.F.O.s,” Alexander Wendt, a professor of international security at Ohio State University who has written about U.F.O.s, told me. “I assume the governments have no clue what any of this is and they’re covering up their ignorance, if anything. That’s why you have all the secrecy, but people may think they were being lied to all along.”

The question, then, would be who could impose meaning on such an event. “Instead of a land grab, it would be a narrative grab,” Diana Pasulka, author of “American Cosmic: U.F.O.s, Religion, Technology,” told me. There would be enormous power — and money — in shaping the story humanity told itself. If we were to believe that the contact was threatening, military budgets would swell all over the world. A more pacific interpretation might orient humanity toward space travel or at least interstellar communication. Pasulka says she believes this narrative grab is happening even now, with the military establishment positioning itself as the arbiter of information over any U.F.O. events.

One lesson of the pandemic is that humanity’s desire for normalcy is an underrated force, and there is no single mistake as common to political analysis as the constant belief that this or that event will finally change everything. If so many can deny or downplay a disease that’s killed millions, dismissing some unusual debris would be trivial. “An awful lot of people would basically shrug and it’d be in the news for three days,” Adrian Tchaikovsky, the science fiction writer, told me. “You can’t just say, ‘Still no understanding of alien thing!’ every day. An awful lot of people would be very keen on continuing with their lives and routines no matter what.”

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

[---]

Slaughter went on to make a point about the difficulty of uniting humanity that I’d been contemplating as well. “After all, we are facing the destruction of the planet as we know it and have inhabited it for millennia over a couple of decades, and that does not even unify Americans, much less people around the globe.” If the real threat of climate change hasn’t unified countries and focused our technological and political efforts behind a common purpose, why should the more uncertain threat of aliens?

And yet, I’d like to believe it could be different. Steven Dick, the former chief historian for NASA, has argued that indirect contact with aliens — a radio signal, for instance — would be more like past scientific revolutions than past civilizational collisions. The correct analogy, he suggests, would be the realization that we share our world with bacteria, or that the Earth orbits the sun, or that life is shaped by natural selection. These upheavals in our understanding of the universe we inhabit changed the course of human science and culture, and perhaps this would, too. “There are times in science when just knowing that a thing is possible motivates an effort to get there,” Jacob Foster, a sociologist at U.C.L.A., told me. The knowledge that there were other space-faring societies might make us more desperate to join them or communicate with them.

There’s a school of thought that says interplanetary ambitions are ridiculous when we have so many terrestrial crises. I disagree. I believe our unsolved problems reflect a lack of unifying goals more than a surfeit of them. America made it to the moon in the same decade it created Medicare and Medicaid and passed the Civil Rights Act, and I don’t believe that to be coincidence.

A more cohesive understanding of ourselves as a species, and our planet as one ecosystem among others, might lead us to take more care with what we already have, and the sentient life we already know. The loveliest sentiment I came across while doing this (admittedly odd) reporting was from Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. “You also asked how we should react,” she said over email. “I guess my preferred reaction would be for the knowledge that someone was watching to inspire us to be the best examples of intelligent life that we could be.”

I recognize this is a treacly place to end up: evidence of extraterrestrial life, or even surveillance, reminding us of what we should already know. But that doesn’t make it less true. Callard’s words brought to mind one of my favorite science fiction stories, “The Great Silence,” by the writer Ted Chiang (whom I interviewed here, in a conversation that explores this fable). In it, he imagines a parrot talking to the humans managing the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, for more than 50 years the largest single dish radio telescope on earth. There we are, creating technological marvels to find life in the stars, while we heedlessly drive wild parrots, among so many others species, toward extinction here at home.

“We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them,” the parrot muses. “Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?”

Breakthrough Starshot, CIA's UFO Papers & The "Lonely" Sapiens

 Look up into the sky some clear, starlit night and allow yourself the freedom to wonder.

- In Search of Ancient Astronauts with Rod Serling

Stephan Hawking, Yuri Milner & Marc Zuckerberg founded the Breakthrough Starshot project in 2015 looking for answers to questions such as: 

Where is everybody?

So wondered the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The Universe is ancient and immense. Life, he reasoned, has had plenty of time to get started – and get smart. But we see no evidence of anything alive or intelligent in space. In the last five years, we have discovered that planets in the habitable zone of stars are common. Based on the numbers discovered so far, there are estimated to be billions more in our galaxy alone. Yet we are still in the dark about life. Are we really alone? Or are there others out there

Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million program of astronomical observations and analysis, the most comprehensive ever undertaken in search of evidence of technological civilizations in the Universe. The partners with some of the world’s largest and most advanced telescopes, across five continents, to survey targets including one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical frequency bands.

Where can life flourish?

In August 2016, a potentially habitable Earth-like planet was discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri – the Sun’s nearest neighbor. Based on the most recent astronomical data, it is likely that there are other such planets in our cosmic neighborhood. With technology now or soon available, it will be possible not only to find them, but to analyze whether they have atmospheres – and whether those atmospheres contain oxygen and other potential signatures of primitive life.

Breakthrough Watch is multi-million dollar Breakthrough Watch is an Earth- and space-based astronomical program aiming to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth, in search of oxygen and other potential signatures of primitive life. The program is run by an international team of experts in exoplanet detection and imaging.

Can we reach the stars?

Life in the Universe does not only mean extraterrestrials. It also means us. No other beings have yet visited us – but neither have we stepped out to the galactic stage. Are we destined to belong to Earth for as long as we survive? Or can we reach the stars?

If we can, the natural first step is our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri – four light years away.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for a new technology, enabling ultra-light uncrewed space flight at 20% of the speed of light; and to lay the foundations for a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation.

Thanks to COVID-19 (yes, really!), the CIA declassified 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents starting from 1976. How convenient! it seems like the "world" didn't exist prior to 1976 for them. 

I don't believe they released everything. Although I haven't started reading/analyzing the documents, I believe it is probably full of fluff that would raise more questions than giving us any answers. You can download the non-user-unfriendly documents via the Black Vault website. 

I love this little blue planet. I love Max. I love Fluffy, Garph, and Neo. In my little world and in my little time, I was able to interact with only 2 other species. I learned and still learning so much from them every day. Given my shelve life, I will die without learning anything from most species on this planet. That will be my greatest regret. 

If given a chance, I would love to learn from other beings outside of earth. I am all for the search for other life forms. My only disagreement is packing Sapiens and shipping them to inhabit other planets and stars without understanding and then mending human nature. As a counter-argument to my own disagreement, what if the tools for understanding and mending human nature lies outside of earth? 

In the meantime, we should spend an equal amount of time and money in understanding non-human animals on this planet. It goes without saying that eliminating the sufferings we cause our non-human friends doesn't cost anything. So let's do that first and we will never feel lonely. 

 

What I've Been Reading

Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems. 

What is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner. 

This is one of the most important books you will read in your life. Developing even a rudimentary understanding of the complexity and complex systems will make one look at life differently (for good) plus it will help develop a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have without believing in magic and conspiracies. 

The complex system helps in understanding things such as how animals sufferings in factory farms will lead to a pandemic that could wipe out our species. 

Ladyman and Karoline attempt to "unpack" complex systems by avoiding biases put forth by existing researchers and keeping it open-ended as humanely as possible. They have also kept math and technical details to the minimum.  

They have done an enormous favor to a common reader by defining some of the salient features of the complex systems (not all always applies to all complex systems):

1. Numerosity: complex systems involve many interactions among many components. 
2. Disorder and diversity: the interactions in a complex system are not coordinated or controlled centrally, and the components may differ. 
3. Feedback: the interactions in complex systems are iterated so that there is feedback from previous interactions on a time scale relevant to the system's emergent dynamics. 
4. Non-equilibrium: complex systems are open to the environment and are often driven by something external. 
5. Spontaneous order and self-organization: complex systems exhibit structure and order that arises out of the interactions among their parts. 
6. Nonlinearity: complex systems exhibit nonlinear dependence on parameters or external drivers. 
7. Robustness: the structure and function of complex systems is stable under relevant perturbations. 
8. Nested structure and modularity: there may be multiple scales of structure, clustering, and specialization of function in complex systems. 
9. History and memory: complex systems often require a very long history to exist and often store information about history. 
10. Adaptive behavior: complex systems are often able to modify their behavior depending on the state of the environment and the predictions they make about it.

We argue that a system is complex if it has some or all of spontaneous order and self-organization, non-linear behavior, robustness history and memory, nested structure and modularity, and adaptive behavior. These features arise from the combination of the properties of numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. We argue that there are different kinds of complex systems because some systems exhibit some but not all of the features. 

Chaos is not always complexity:

Complexity is often linked with chaos, and it may be conflated with it, but the behavior of a chaotic system is indistinguishable from random behavior. It is true that there are systems that exhibit complexity partly in virtue of being chaotic, but their complexity is something over and above their chaotic nature. Furthermore, since chaotic behavior is a special feature of some deterministic systems, any dynamical system that is stochastic is by definition not chaotic, and yet complexity scientists study many such systems. 

Measuring Complexity:

Ideas such as "logical depth" measure not complexity but order. Complexity is a multifaceted phenomenon and that complex systems have a variety of features not all of which are found in all of them. This implies that assigning a single number to complexity cannot do justice. 

A variety of different measures would be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by complexity. 

- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann

In summary: 

There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales.  The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures. 

Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum. 

When we think about complex systems in the right way, we can abstract from some of their features and understand the simplicity that underlies the wonderful complexity!

Do We Really Want To Spread Human Bullshit In Space?

Sun will burn itself in a billion years, so we really have time to "fix" the genesis of non-stop bullshit via humans which evolves into pure evil. The trick is we will be capable of colonizing space before finding ways to instill humility and gratitude in humans. One doesn't need to be a genius to predict if former happens before the latter, Earth will be gone long before its's shelf-life.

A great piece warning the same - Why we should think twice before colonizing space?

In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”

But this yields some problems. First, extreme differences like those just listed will undercut trust between species. If you don’t trust that your neighbor isn’t going to steal from, harm, or kill you, then you’re going to be suspicious of your neighbor. And if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you might want an effective defense strategy to stop an attack—just in case one were to happen. But your neighbor might reason the same way: she’s not entirely sure that you won’t kill her, so she establishes a defense as well. The problem is that, since you don’t fully trust her, you wonder whether her defense is actually part of an attack plan. So you start carrying a knife around with you, which she interprets as a threat to her, thus leading her to buy a gun, and so on. Within the field of international relations, this is called the “security dilemma,” and it results in a spiral of militarization that can significantly increase the probability of conflict, even in cases where all actors have genuinely peaceful intentions.

[---]

The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy entire civilizations?

Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that turn out to be shallow.

And I would never ever leave planet Earth no matter what happens. This is the home where Max and I lived. This where I will die, period. 

We Need To Talk About UFOs

After over 60 years of speculation, now that there are so many "official" documents coming out but yet no one is bothered to talk about them. People are willing to believe in insane conspiracies about viruses while continuing to eat meat but not interested in the "fattest of fat tails" namely UFOs. This is a mass case of ignorance and laziness by the people and mass rebuttal of liberty by the government. Mike Solana has a great piece on this: 

In 2019 the New York Times broke its next story, this time with Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves. Lt. Graves provided context on a series of UFO sightings from the summer of 2014 through March 2015. The objects had no discernible method of propulsion, as per the Navy trend, and could reach 30,000 feet at hypersonic speeds, accelerating near instantaneously. After they appeared, the objects did not immediately vanish. They hung out with our Navy for hours. Lt. Graves said one pilot “almost hit” an object that passed directly between two jets flying in tandem, a mere 100 feet apart. It was “a sphere encasing a cube.” 2020: two more stories from the New York Times. The 2017/2018 videos they previously released had been acquired by Blink 182 singer Tom DeLonge, a seismic figure in the UFO community who no doubt cast a shadow of doubt on the footage — a singer? Doing something other than singing? Impossible! Now, two years later, the Pentagon was confirming what we already suspected after the government’s failure to comment on the initial leak: these videos were authentic.

[---]

Thinking back on paradigmatic shifts in my own worldview — from liberty to Marxism to anarchy, from God to atheism to [redacted, redacted, DANGER] — the process of thinking deeply has always been roughly the same. On the cusp of what I could feel as, if I kept pushing, some actual, fundamental shift in my core beliefs, I became reluctant to further explore. There has never been an essential belief of mine I wanted to give up, which strikes me as a kind of quality any “essential” belief must probably have. My experiences in change were all-consuming, and I was not always immediately better for them. I read. I debated (fought, really). I alienated myself from friends, and sometimes from my family. I self-radicalized, in a way. I think that’s always how I’ve learned. I think that’s how we all learn, and the prospect of an experience so intense is intimidating. Adjusting our conception of reality may bring us closer to the truth — or not, which is another danger — but the process isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t feel good. You only push because you know you have to, and a sufficiently curious person almost can’t control it. But the process is also exhausting, and we are a notoriously lazy species.

[---]

I don’t have an explanation for UFOs. I only know there’s something here we need to look at. I want transparency from the government, and I want the topic taken seriously long enough for us to figure out what’s happening. Because what are the options, really? Are these objects intelligent, or operated by some intelligence not human, and technologically advanced in ways a galaxy beyond us? That would obviously be a huge deal. Or are these objects evidence of some other government, on this planet, so far beyond the United States in terms of covert technological ability that many of our own pilots believe what they’re seeing is alien? Because that would also be a huge deal. And what if it’s not true? There are hundreds of reports from the military, and private contractors working with the government. Ignoring the well-documented and spectacular naval accounts for a moment, and addressing the footage alone, do we honestly believe not one of our Pentagon officials has considered the possibility of a distant jet, or weather balloon? An institutional idiocy so staggering can almost not be fathomed. So have the stories all been fabricated? Has the footage been created by the government for some secret, inscrutable purpose? And does our media have, truly, no pulse of a lie this enormous? Or do we now venture so far as to consider that our free press may be working with the government they otherwise relish in attacking on a daily basis? Because it is worth mentioning that this, rather than the notion our government is concealing a secret UFO program that we now know exists, would today qualify as the conspiracy. There is no version of the UFO story that does not fundamentally change the way we think about the world, and there are serious, at times existential implications to each possibility. It almost doesn’t matter which is true, we just have to look at it.

- More Here

This is life. Precious

I quit eating animals for the same reason I didn't kill myself after Max.

Life is precious and rare. You live no matter what and see it through the end. Protect and honor it. You can learn so much from plants.


Bloom from Emily Johnstone on Vimeo.

The Great Silence

Many scientists were skeptical that a bird could grasp abstract concepts. Humans like to think they’re unique. But eventually Pepperberg convinced them that Alex wasn’t just repeating words, that he understood what he was saying.

Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who came closest to being taken seriously as a communication partner by humans. Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.”

If humans are looking for a connection with a nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?

[---]

Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.

And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that’s why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species who can build such a thing must have greatness within them.

My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.

The message is this:

You be good. I love you.

- More Here

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

In short, only the duration of transmission matters in steady-state, which is the final L term in Drake’s famous equation. Start time does not matter.

Regarding Andrew’s predicate “given that we haven’t hard any such signals so far” in the OP: despite the high profile of SETI, almost no actual searching has occurred because the field is essentially unfunded (until Yuri Milner’s recent support). Jill Tarter analogizes the idea that we need to update our priors based on the searching to date as being equivalent to saying that there must not be very many fish in the ocean based on inspecting the contents of a single drinking glass dipped in it (that’s a rough OOM, but it’s pretty close). And that’s just searches for narrowband radio searches; other kinds of searches are far, far less complete.

And Andrew is not wrong that the amount of popular discussion of SETI has gone way down since the ’90’s. A good account of the rise and fall of government funding for SETI is Garber (1999).

I have what I think is a complete list of NASA and NSF funding since the (final) cancellation of NASA’s SETI work in 1993, and it sums to just over $2.5M (not per year—total). True, Barnie Oliver and Paul Allen contributed many millions more, but most of this went to develop hardware and pay engineers to build the (still incomplete and barely operating) Allen Telescope Array; it did not train students or fund much in the way of actual searches.

So you haven’t heard much about SETI because there’s not much to say. Instead, most of the literature is people in their space time endlessly rearranging, recalculating, reinventing, modifying, and critiquing the Drake Equation, or offering yet another “solution” to the Fermi Paradox in the absence of data.

The central problem is that for all of the astrobiological terms in the Drake Equation we have a sample size on 1 (Earth), and since that one is us we run into “anthropic principle” issues whenever we try to use it to estimate those terms.

The recent paper by Sandberg calculates reasonable posterior distributions on N in the Drake Equation, and indeed shows that they are so wide that N=0 is not excluded, but the latter point has been well appreciated since the equation was written down, so this “dissolution” to the Fermi Paradox (“maybe spacefaring life is just really rare”) is hardly novel. It was the thesis of the influential book Rare Earth and the argument used by Congress as a justification for blocking essentially all funding to the field for the past 25 years.

Actually, I would say that an equally valid takeaway from the Sandberg paper is that very large values of N are possible, so we should definitely be looking for them!

- More Here

Quote of the Day

We’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding. We’re searching for intelligent conscious, tool-making, communicative beings that live in social groups (so they can reap the benefits of civilization) and that develop the tools of science and mathematics. We’re searching for ourselves . . .

- Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life 

Wisdom Of The Week

The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.

- Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

Quote of the Day

The bigger problem, according to Shostak, is that the money shunted into the Pentagon program went primarily to a company founded by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire aerospace mogul whose company builds inflatable space modules and who has long believed in alien visitation. Initiated after conversations between Bigelow and then-Nevada senator Harry Reid, the program garnered at least $22 million in funding over five years (it’s not yet clear whether it survives under a different guise after its supposed termination in 2012).

- What We've Learned From 60 Years of U.S.-Funded UFO Probes