Accelerating Future

I thought this was interesting.

The recent discovery of super-Earths (masses less or equal to 10 earth-masses) has initiated a discussion about conditions for habitable worlds. Among these is the mode of convection, which influences a planet’s thermal evolution and surface conditions. On Earth, plate tectonics has been proposed as a necessary condition for life. Here we show, that super-Earths will also have plate tectonics. We demonstrate that as planetary mass increases, the shear stress available to overcome resistance to plate motion increases while the plate thickness decreases, thereby enhancing plate weakness. These effects contribute favorably to the subduction of the lithosphere, an essential component of plate tectonics. Moreover, uncertainties in achieving plate tectonics in the one earth-mass regime disappear as mass increases: super-Earths, even if dry, will exhibit plate tectonic behaviour.

Can’t wait until we build a hypertelescope to see if the Super-Earths out there are rock or gas.

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I find such statements inspiring whether they are meant seriously or not, and whether they come true or not.

Elon Musk shows that you can be rich and spend a lot of money without increasing net existential risk. Not increasing it, not decreasing it, just… risk-free behavior.

Space travel does not significantly lower the probability of existential risk because the majority of the probability mass is occupied by human-indifferent superintelligence, which can casually reach into space if it wants to. Also, self-sufficient space colonies are very far off. You need something miles across at a cost of tens of millions of dollars given current technology.

Another point I’ve made in the past is that as everyone becomes uploads and accelerates their thinking speeds, space will begin to seem very far away. Right now, Luna is 3-4 days away. To beings whose brains are made up of molecular computers with 100 GHz switching speeds, Luna is about 3,000,000,000 days away. That’s about eight million years. An eight million year trip to go to an empty wasteland without any art, culture, or much Kolmogorov complexity to speak of beyond geological and mineral patterns?

The near-term future of humanity is to convert the Earth into a “computronium globe” with a web of trillions of simulated worlds within it. In several subjective millennia, we may consume the Moon, but it will be subjective millions of years beyond that until we colonize Mars. In many billions of years, we may be fortunate enough to consume the Sun.

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From here. This space blog seems pretty good, and has nice images. The author is a student from Singapore.

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I’ve transcribed a few pages of Marshall T. Savage’s The Millennial Project (1992), a section specifically on why it seems that there are no aliens in our general vicinity. Here’s a great quote:

There is not a single thread of hard UFO evidence. Nothing I have heard of would even stand up in a court of law, let alone convince a hardened skeptic. The arrival of ETs on Earth would be the single greatest event in human history. By comparison, the discovery of fire, the fall of the Roman Empire, detonation of the atomic bomb, and landing on the Moon would all be reduced to trivialities. How could such an epoch-shaking affair transpire without producing any more evidence than a handful of blurry Polaroids? Belief in alien visitors requires hard evidence; at least a scrap, a smidgen, a particle, one iota, something. Anything! For my part, I would settle for a spliner of alien alloy, a corpuscle of alien blood, a fleck of alien dandruff. I will settle for anything you can actually put under an electron microscope and say of it, definitively: “It is not of this world.” Is that too much to ask as evidence of the greatest thing since Moses? Of course, there is no such scintilla of evidence. And without it, no number of “eyewitness reporters”, duly chronicled by the National Enquirer, will ever make any difference.

When I read this section of the book as a teenager, it really convinced me that attempts to look for aliens locally, like SETI, are just misguided. Here’s another quote that really resonated with me:

Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls.

Seriously! Why would the radio noise of a technological alien civilization sound like a whisper? Once a civilization develops radios, it’s fair to expect it will develop a lot of them. At this very moment, we’re blasting radio energy into space in all directions, in an expanding sphere almost 200 light-years wide.

Please, read the page before you submit a comment!

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George Dvorsky gets it right about aliens. Public intellectuals like Stephen Hawking seem to be at an odd point in intellectual evolution where they are smart enough to think about the possibility of ETs but not far along enough to realize that if ETs wanted to kill us they would already be here.

Dvorsky’s five reasons:

1. If aliens wanted to find us they would have done so already
2. If ETIs wanted to destroy us they would have done so by now
3. If aliens wanted our solar system’s resources, they would haven taken them by now
4. Human civilization has absolutely nothing to offer a post-Singularity intelligence
5. Extrapolating biological tendencies to a post-Singularity intelligence is asinine

The only one of these I might question is #5. In “The Basic AI Drives”, Steve Omohundro argues that artificial intelligences will naturally want to 1) self-improve, 2) be rational, 3) preserve their utility functions, 4) prevent counterfeit utility, 5) be self-protective, and 6) acquire resources and use them efficiently. I would argue that any agent needs to have these features to some degree to perpetuate itself in a hostile universe where even just the weather is a formidable foe. (Unless you are in interstellar space, where the weather is relatively calm.) Therefore, I would not hesitate to extend the biological tendencies listed above to a large category of possible agents, including post-Singularity intelligences.

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The first “skylight”, as in big hole in the ground like the amazing ones on Mars, has been found on the Moon by Japan’s Kayuga spacecraft. They are thought to be the collapsed ceilings of lava tubes. There has not been volcanic activity on the Moon for about 2.5 billion years, but it is volcanic activity that created the maria (“seas”) on the Moon, and at one point the entire Moon was a glowing ball of magma.

“Lunar underground”, lunar subterrane, what could possibly be cooler than that? Not much.

A certain Dresden Codak comes to mind.

The new Lunar X-Prize: “Navigate a robotic probe to that hole on the Moon and bring us back pictures!”

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Holy crap, the Moon has a ton of water. 25 gallons were kicked up by the probe that impacted it a month ago. This is huge, huge news, because everyone thought that the Moon was as dry as a bone. I see that various studies predicted this recently. A pessimistic article from Space.com from a month ago said “one ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water”, but now it’s looking like a lot more.

Now all we need to do is ship nitrogen and other essential nutrients there in huge amounts using mass drivers, a nuclear cannon, or space elevator, put up a few aerogel-insulated domes, and start partyin’! (Well, maybe not exactly, but water does give us huge amounts of oxygen, which we need to breathe, and hydrogen, which can be used as fuel.) This article from LiveScience has more details.

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You can see more at Next Big Future.

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Robin Hanson, economist and author of Overcoming Bias, recently appeared in USA Today talking about SETI. He appears as a counterpoint to Seth Shostak, a guy who I believe is totally out of it. Here’s the relevant section:

But researchers such as Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wonder whether the big picture really looks so promising when it comes to advanced life. Hanson supports SETI but finds it telling that humans haven’t come across anything yet. “It has been remarkable and somewhat discouraging,” Hanson says, “that the universe is so damn big and so damn dead.”

Great quote, love it. To quote Marshall T. Savage, author of that superlative masterpiece, The Millennial Project:

There is a program to actively search for signals from other civilizations in the galaxy: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This is a noble cause, but it seems slightly absurd. Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls. The most cursory radio snapshot of the sky should reveal K2 civilizations as clearly as the lights of great cities seen from orbit at night. That we don’t see any such radio beacons in the skies probably means there are no Kardasahev Level Two civilizations in this galaxy.

Perhaps advanced civilizations don’t use radio, or radar, or microwaves. Advanced technology can be invoked as an explanation for the absence of extra terrestrial radio signals. But it seems unlikely that their technology would leave no imprint anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been compared to the aborigine who remains blissfully unaware of the storm of radio and TV saturating the airwaves around him. Presumably, the aliens use advanced means of communications which we cannot detect. What these means might be is, by definition, unknown, but they must be extremely exotic. We don’t detect K2 signals in the form of laser pulses, gamma rays, cosmic rays, or even neutrinos. Therefore, the aliens must use system that we haven’t even imagined.

The argument, appealing thought it is, cannot survive contact with Occam’s razor — in this case Occam’s machete. The evidence in hand is simply nothing — no signals. To explain the absence of signals in the presence of aliens, demands recourse to what is essentially magic. Unfortunately, the iron laws of logic demand that we reject such wishful thinking in favor of the simplest explanation which fits the data: No signals, no aliens.

The skies are thunderous in their silence; the Moon eloquent in its blankness; the aliens are conclusive by their absence. The extraterrestrials aren’t here. They’ve never been here. They’re never coming here. They aren’t coming because they don’t exist. We are alone.

If Dr. Shostak wants to find some aliens, perhaps he should try ingesting some powerful hallucinogens. Then he will be able to see all the aliens he wants.

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‘Space headaches’ come out of the blue:

Researchers are calling for space headache to be established as a new secondary disorder after carrying out a study of 17 astronauts, published in the June issue of Cephalalgia.

Their study jettisons the theory that astronauts’ headaches are normally caused by space motion sickness, after showing that more than three-quarters of those studied had no connection.

“Our research shows that space flights may trigger headaches without other space motion sickness symptoms in otherwise super healthy subjects” says lead researcher Dr Alla Vein from Professor Michel Ferrari’s Headache Research team at the Department of Neurology, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands.

Space headaches in “super-healthy” subjects! Just great. If you go up there, enjoy your atrophying muscles, cramped rooms, boredom, cosmic rays, micrometeorites, crappy toilets, foliage-free environment, etc.

Big, air-filled bubbles with self-healing membranes and spinning colonies with artificial gravity. It’s the only way.

Launch costs need to be brought WAY down. J. Storrs Hall’s Space Pier or Brian Wang’s nuclear cannon. Our clique has all the answers, y’know?

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Here’s a nicely worded press release that touts research into asteroid deflection:

You may want to thank David French in advance. Because, in the event that a comet or asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth, he may be the guy responsible for saving the entire planet.

French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, has determined a way to effectively divert asteroids and other threatening objects from impacting Earth by attaching a long tether and ballast to the incoming object. By attaching the ballast, French explains, “you change the object’s center of mass, effectively changing the object’s orbit and allowing it to pass by the Earth, rather than impacting it.”

Sound far-fetched? NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 “potentially hazardous asteroids” and they are finding more all the time. “While none of these objects is currently projected to hit Earth in the near future, slight changes in the orbits of these bodies, which could be caused by the gravitational pull of other objects, push from the solar wind, or some other effect could cause an intersection,” French explains.

So French, and NC State Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Andre Mazzoleni, studied whether an asteroid-tether-ballast system could effectively alter the motion of an asteroid to ensure it missed hitting Earth. The answer? Yes.

“It’s hard to imagine the scale of both the problem and the potential solutions,” French says. “The Earth has been hit by objects from space many times before, so we know how bad the effects could be. For example, about 65 million years ago, a very large asteroid is thought to have hit the Earth in the southern Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, and, in 1907, a very small airburst of a comet over Siberia flattened a forest over an area equal in size to New York City. The scale of our solution is similarly hard to imagine.

“Using a tether somewhere between 1,000 kilometers (roughly the distance from Raleigh to Miami) to 100,000 kilometers (you could wrap this around the Earth two and a half times) to divert an asteroid sounds extreme. But compare it to other schemes,” French says, “They are all pretty far out. Other schemes include: a call for painting the asteroids in order to alter how light may influence their orbit; a plan that would guide a second asteroid into the threatening one; and of course, there are nukes. Nuclear weapons are an intriguing possibility, but have considerable political and technical obstacles. Would the rest of the world trust us to nuke an asteroid? Would we trust anyone else? And would the asteroid break into multiple asteroids, giving us more problems to solve?”

The asteroid risk is a great one to get people acquainted with the concept of catastrophic risk in general because it is statistically pinned down very well. However, according to some calculations, the risk of a civilization-ending asteroid hitting Earth in the next 100 years is only 1/5,000, leading to a 1/500,000 annual probability. Say we give a 1/500 annual probability estimate of the end of civilization due to nuclear war. (Seems like quite the underestimate.) According to standard cost-benefit analysis, we should assign roughly 1,000 times more importance to the task of minimizing the chance of catastrophic nuclear war than to deflecting asteroids.

We may see some common miscalculations on this score, as asteroids are new and exciting and nuclear war is the same boring old risk that has been around for over half a century.

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