Rob Malda, thank you so much for making this site and working so hard to make it the heart of the Open Source Software/Internet Security/Freedom of Information news beat. I can only imagine how stressful it was to maintain quality and balance time/personal life issues with a site of this magnitude. My hat is off to you, Sir.
I've been O.C.D. tailing Slashdot for about 10 years; this site has been the source of much education and a lifelong interest in science, technology, programming, education, freedom of speech, businesses and even government for me. There's nothing quite like hordes of technology masterminds with personality disorders debating furiously until nothing but hurt feelings and rock bare truth remains. The discussions here have been a font of wisdom that I hope remains online forever.
I have a gigantic list of Ask Slashdot threads and various other legendary comments that I will cherish as tomes of barely tapped, limitless technical wisdom. Each thread was sparked by a headline, and then built up by hundreds of deeply interested, knowledgeable, passionate people as well as many times as many fools, whose unappreciated role of making horribly flawed arguments made for golden opportunities to dispense hard-earned real-world understanding. I gleaned much from the sidelines.
They aren't looking for wasteful noise from neo-technological civilizations (but we'll take any unnatural signal we can get!). As you've pointed out, that might occur for a very limited period of time before their physicists move on to better communication technologies. But don't make the assumption that these people are "short sighted," (SETI is 50 years old) or aren't criticizing their own techniques, or actively exploring new ideas. They're looking for broadcast devices, robotic beacons, communications nodes, cross-talk between interstellar routers, gigantic mechanical artifacts, etc. The holy grail would be an alien satellite designed specifically to attract the attention of developing civilizations, like the one in Contact.
There are really good reasons to look in the radio spectrum. The radio range has a noted trough of low noise in 1-10GHz, which is an excellent candidate for communications, if not outright shining a beacon out to the farthest distances. It also penetrates mollecular clouds (and our atmosphere, for that matter) easier than optical and higher frequency light, which scatters easily, and doesn't take nearly as much energy to generate as X-ray and Gamma ray radiation. You will need an EE to further explain.
We may not be prepared to guess at alien biology or sociology, but we do get to project what we know about physics. "They" refers to technologically advanced civilizations.
- Some civillizations may be well beyond anything we can fathom (interdimensional beings, control over gravity, faster-than-light communication). But if they do exist (and that's a big leap), there's very little chance that they are the only other civilizations in the universe. If we make the assumption that "life is out there." We can expect there to be a tremendous variety of life forms and civilizations and some may be within our detection capabilities.
- They all most likely use electromagnetic radiation for communication, since it's the de-facto fastest way to move information through space. Cite wormholes or entanglement if you like, I'm not ignoring the possibility. The algorithms SETI uses pick out general anomalies in known radiation patterns. Even technologies we can't possibly understand have a good chance of emitting some kind of interesting radiation as a side effect.
- They will probably choose communications techniques that are easy to detect against most background sources and will certainly need to be very robust to get through the interstellar medium (charged particles) in the case of an interstellar signal. We might even make assumptions about the kinds of engineering practices another advanced civilization would employ: redundancy, longevity, efficiency. These can help constrain the behaviors we look for.
- If they have at least one outpost beyond their homeworld/star (even a satellite in their own solar system), they will be using directed communication. That means their directed beam is slowly sweeping out a wobbling, circular path across their sky. If we're lucky, and that direction is in line with our star, we might pick up a hint of their artificial signals.
- As the poster above mentions, we are made of some very common materials in the universe and in similar proportions (obviously profoundly more dense on average). That leads to a sound assumption about how life might be elsewhere. At the very least, this is our only/example/ and it's a good practice to focus on planets whose properties are not stupendously hostile to our form of biochemistry.
I don't usually feed trolls (or sock puppets), epsecially not this tired old argument, but I'm feeling saucy.
No, the researchers will declare that they have found an atmosphere on another planet unlike anything we can explain with modern science. They will explain their methods for trying to fit the data to natural conditions and point out where the models don't fit. Then they will posit that life is one possible explanation. Speculations will fly in the scientific community, some credible, some not. The popular science media will decisively pick up on the "we may have found life!" headline, neglect to link to the original paper, and publish the least credible ideas with quotes from dubious scientists not even peripherally involved in the project. Some radio host will learn how federal tax dollars were received by the university funding the research and immediately declare that the government is wasting your money searching for aliens. Then people like you will take your opinion to the internet in legion.
I was actually mixing up two techniques in my knee-jerk reaction to comment after skipping the article, heh. However, Kepler and SETI go together like beer and hot dogs and the groups collaborate (that's what the ATA was supposed to be doing). SETI has been surveying stars in the milky way galaxy all along, but they have had to make speculations about habitability, the presence of worlds, etc. But now they have data as a basis. These are presumably not just stars with planets, but ones with planets in the habitable zone, or planets near the mass of Earth. With JWST they can get spectrographic data which will allow them to be able to isolate rocky worlds, or worlds with interesting atmospheres, narrowing the search further.
You are correct, this project is for doing targeted radio measurements (a broader range of searches than their usual algorithms) on stars with known exoplanets that are good candidates for bearing life.
Kepler is the pioneer for the effort, cataloging good candidates for further study. They have something like 2 more years worth of observations to make before it's done with its primary mission. The reason most of the planets we know about right now are super-jupiters close to their stars (and we're just now discovering super-earths) is because we haven't observed enough transits for the longest orbit candidates. Nearer bodies orbit faster, so we have the data for them early on. More exotic planets will come out of Kepler in the following years.
I thought the Kepler mission had the resolution to capture enough of the detail in the "fuzz" at the edge of the transits, but maybe I'm mixing up theory and a handful of other missions. I do know for a fact that this will be one of James Webb Space Telescope's tasks:
They're going to take a while to capture the data on each planet, since they can't watch continuously with an earthbound telescope. They may only have a window of a few days to capture a transit on some target planets, so it will take multiple transits to get that much data for all of them (the project will last a year). I believe they get the most valuable data when the planet first passes into the star's disk and then again as it leaves, as this gives some sense of differentiation between different parts of the atmosphere.
Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
I woke up this morning and read the news with the blue side of the stereo glasses: "Short-sighted fear-mongering populist pandering pointlessly nationalistic republican running for re-election attempts to derail human progress again."
Then I flipped to the red lens: "National hero fights valiantly to defend capitalism and national security against communist regime seeking to steal American jobs, overthrow American space technology superiority and likely launch weapon of mass destruction into orbit."
After I had my coffee, I took off the goggles and rubbed my eyes. "The United States has moved forward with its planned defunding of an aging method of launching cargo into space, diverting all available funds to more fruitful robotic missions and more complicated manned spaceflight projects. Meanwhile, other nations and even private enterprises are developing their space programs. NASA is looking to avoid spending more of its limited resources by taking advantage of technology which is already under significant development by other technologically capable societies. With cooperation from every advanced space-faring nation, all of Human civilization stands to benefit from shared scientific developments made by each other's civilian and scientific programs."
I've considered the "you don't understand what the Chinese are capable of!" and the "we're funding an oppressive regime!" and the "you really think they're only using this for civilian technology?" angles, and I remain unconvinced that they carry any real weight. I'm willing to be convinced, but I stopped being mystified by big political words in high school, the Red Scare is a sad chapter of our history, the Russians' and subsequent space-faring nations' contributions to our own space exploration ambitions have been fruital for everyone and from the L2 Legrangian point at >60,000 kilometers, we are all just a single, interdependent colony of ants on the surface of a tiny ball of dirt.
Really? These funds aren't your tax dollars. They are Google's private contribution. If congress had decided to give Khan $2m you would have a real position to debate their judgment.
Research is the expansionist force at the boundaries of science. It's critical to understanding the previously unknown. We're talking about a man making instructional videos about foundational math and science and making it available for free to the world with no strings attached. Your position is that this is somehow/dangerous/.
Less-than optimal teaching methods are nothing new to any form of education. That is hardly justification to discourage their use in the absence of better methods, especially when the less-than-optimal methods are vastly more accessible and largely accurate. Research into the human brain's powers of cognition, learning, intelligence and emotion are likely to be an ongoing research area in science for the breadth of human civilization. I wouldn't advise waiting for their resolution to begin making those fruits available for consumption. Reeducation is a small price to pay for elevating minds out of plain ignorance.
I agree that watching lectures online is not the most effective way to gain a true mastery of knowledge. It's also true that there are some subjects which require access to lab equipment and other physically expensive or rare materials. It's worth looking into ways to make it more effective and it will still be a very long time before people such as hiring managers will be convinced of the credibility of self-taught students. But it IS an excellent way to prime yourself for an upcoming class by seeing some example problems, or simply to gain an introductory level knowledge through recorded survey-type courses requiring little technical background (iTunes U has a lot of this kind of material).
Not all learners are trying to replace a traditional university education with online lectures, or to achieve parity with a graduate student. Some of them are middle-aged, career-laden, family-burdened, cash-strapped people who just want to broaden their horizons or professionals who just want to gain interdisciplinary knowledge. And, of course, some learners live in places and situations where they could not dream of getting a college education. Any effort to get knowledge closer to these people and conditions is to be praised.
There is no harm in a private company making a large donation to one of the most prolific individual contributors to the field. The money is partially going towards translating his content into many languages. If anything, that will allow this material to be used as modern teaching aids in places where no free material is available in the most common languages of the region. Much of the internet's undergraduate-level educational resources are still English-centric.
I applaud Khan, the many YouTube channels dedicated to sharing knowledge, institutuional projets like OpenCourseWare and of course Wikipedia for making free knowledge available online. I can find no good reason not to be glad that Google is making a cash contribution and for maintaining YouTube as a free service, without which, Khan might not have been able to get started with hosting and streaming this much video to as many users.
You make a lot of good points about separating the cold, rational side of science as a discipline from what is not its proper domain. But I must steal back some of the soul you have purged from it by abstracting away the person – science does not happen in the absence of a human actor.
It has not been my experience that science offers none of the pleasures and dilemmas you neatly factor from it. There is something to be said for luminaries whose unique insight would have been ignored if they did not have the venue of science to knock heads against hard facts and force cultural change. Hard work, altruism, empathy, controversy, struggle and desire to touch lives are no less evident in the everlasting life stories of many scientists whose names, long engraved on their tombs, can still be found embedded in research papers for novel cures, in their contributions to institutions for human progress and the countless human generations their work will continue to effect.
As for whether science can tell right from wrong, why you are here, your purpose in life, or push you to become a better human being, I doubt that any of these could so easily be factored from the scientist in the person as from the raw, disembodied notion of science. The pursuit of knowledge is a passion that has led to many deeds of both profound and dubious value, but always by the hand of people.
In the spirit of skepticism, I hope that when you met your example of an evolutionist (and chided him for the mistake of simplifying it down to mere randomness), you gave fair thought to the analogously religious man who defers to supernatural authority when justifying earthly violence. We can both agree that any doctrine will not necessarily impart its wisdom in all fullness, to fallible humans, and that humans need guidance of many kinds to be both rational and emotional beings.
Thank you for this rational perspective, which, for the sake of responding to a central point, I shall crudely boil down into “question everything.” At the heart of science is critical thinking, which, even in the presence of mountains of evidence, cannot be suspended. Knowledge is truly illuminating, but just as we might endeavor to shine a light on a dark spot in our mind, we might then turn away in confidence that we have explored enough of its folded surfaces to explain its true nature.
Science builds our understanding of the universe through rationalizing observations of reality and adhering to logic for arguing our conclusions. We may gain a reasonable confidence that our models fit the reality we observe if our data and logic support those models. But “fit” may be the best that we can do in any case. There is no shame in this – all good science acknowledges falsifiable experimentation. Regardless, that perpetually unresolved mystery is the dynamo that fuels young minds to make their life work out of attacking those shadowy folds. A world without that mystery would be very dull to me.
Science could neither be said to be a purely academic exercise of irresolvable and tenuous conclusions, nor does it typically lead to absolute truths. We make use of those models to explain, predict and improve our world through engineering, medicine, commerce and any number of fields for which their application is, for most purposes, to our great benefit. It is not the fault of science that its students often come away with the belief that there are usually absolute truths (they are indeed rare). Not all minds are prepared for or necessarily benefit from filtering all imparted knowledge through intense critical thought. To ignore that and continue on regarding others crudely for their misunderstandings forces us to behave as pedantic jerks and without regard for the very people our science and teaching actually effects.
It is important to recognize that our experts (good scientists) often regard their conclusions with even more scrutiny than we do, and stake their careers on it. Sometimes their motives, methods or deductive powers are suspect, but our protection from that is built directly into the scientific method, to which they must adhere if they are to be respected. Falsifiable experimentation, well documented, repeatable methods and attainable data, as well as adhering to strong logical arguments and mathematics constitute the language of higher order understanding.
It is a question for philosophers whether it is necessary to strictly rationalize everything. I believe science, through critical thinking, is the way to raise rational humans and that doing so will lead to a better plural civilization, but I will defer to understanding little about raising good people.
Well, lack of searching is not a lack of material, you can find several hours of Ray's talks on video at Singularity Summit 2007, 2008, 2009, TED.com, Singularity University and just plain independent YouTube videos. He also has two movies out (I haven't seen either), the Transcendent Man criticisng his esoteric side and The Singularity Is Near (based on his book) supporting his ideas.
All of this talk about his figures being wrong is quite far from the point. To say we'll have conversations with virtual humans in 2030 or that we may have to cope with an AI superintelligence by 2050 is quite far from noting that either of these situations are entirely possible extrapolated from trends and the discussion should be had.
As a computer scientist, I can say that it will be hard to do. As a scientist, it's pretty foolish to say that because something is hard that it will never happen (we did and building a human is pretty hard).
You’re right that the 30000:1 error ratio was pulled out of someone’s ass as a dogmatic argument, it’s the ratio of 90 million to 3000, and it was brought up to espouse the unsupported claim (it doesn’t mesh with my beliefs, therefore there must be something positively wrong with it) that radioactive decay is so inaccurate as to be unusable as a scientific tool, often based on willful denial of scientific experimentation (which is the opposite of dogma).
The rate of radioactive decay is measured in decay activity per second (curie) in experimentation but it is usefully indexed for radiometric dating purposes in terms of half life, which is a period of time in which 50% of a sample will decay to its stable isotope. We don’t have to wait for 50% of a sample to decay (although we can in particle colliders to the tune of picoseconds!). Half life is converted up from its much finer measurement in a far shorter time with a much more accurate instrument (using, say, accelerator mass spectrometry). Imagine the absurdity of presuming to date an object millions of years old accurately in terms of seconds it would be like saying I always get 3% of the way to work in 27,128.395 milliseconds when it is far more useful (and for all practical purposes analogous) to say that it usually takes me 15 minutes to get to work. Note that I am being confidently more accurate than “between a fraction of a second and 313 days.”
How wildly different? In science we almost never get the same answer; instead we get a statistical gradient (yet science still works!). I'm prepared to assume +/- 3% is a reasonable error for accuracy in some experiments, while you might require +/- 0.1%. Or an experimenter might draw false conclusions from the data, or the error might be so large as to invalidate the correlation he or she draws, or the method might be entirely discredited. Either way, the results are rarely glaringly obvious (otherwise we wouldn’t need rigorous peer-reviewing processes) and you must qualify your criticism for it to be anything but speculation.
We do not know for certain if a particular strata was exactly 90 million years old, but a possible error rate of 30000:1 is not being passed off as credible research by any scientist in radioactive decay-based dating. For practical purposes, bell curves serve as a useful indicator of probability by showing a gradient of weight around a mean, not to prove that the leftmost infinitesimally improbable armpit of the curve represents any significant doubt to the central argument.
I agree with your assertion that building a brain is nontrivial. The problem with the blog post is that the guy says Kurzweil believes life processes are trivial, which is completely wrong if you open the damn book, flip to the page with this quote and start reading around it. He's (quite explicitly) making a paper napkin estimate of human brainpower in CPU cycles and plotting it on a linear regression curve of historical data.
But I will take your argument one further and say that a blueprint is a bad example for a genome, because a blueprint implies a 1:1 relationship of data to construction, which is not what we see by observation at all (Dawkins has a section on this in his newest book). It's actually closer to a computer program, because nobody could say that what happens at runtime is correlated absolutely to with what is written in the source (there are users, much to the dismay of many programmers). These days, programmers don't understand what goes on in individual blocks of memory or processor registers, they just call their Date library or some GUI code with an API method that was developed long ago to solve a class of problem programmers typically had to deal with all the time. What's going on in memory is some arcane science packed into a compiler or an interpreter somewhere, having been solved long ago by some anonymous programmer whose code worked well enough to have been considered "a good enough solution."
Nevertheless, we understand the mechanisms that drive that code, even if the programmer is long gone and with enough incredibly difficult and soulcrushing effort, one could actually recreate the source with a hex editor, a stack tracer, a means of monitoring memory, etc.
I’m glad the headline formed an opinion for me, because clearly I’m not capable of making one for myself. If not for such an eloquently worded preface to this wonderfully vetted blog post, I might have had to exercise a few brain cycles to determine what I should think of Ray Kurzweil. I’m also glad the poster has decided to snipe away at a single contextually free quote from Kurzweil’s entire book on estimating a time frame for science to apply information technology to genomics. It’s too bad Kurzweil couldn’t boil his entire research effort into a single sentence like this guy did, because his book is just TL;DR.
Sarcasm aside, I don’t agree that the predictions Kurzweil makes are ludicrous at all if you throw away his estimates (as Kurzweil duly calls them) and start over with the same logic. Don’t make the mistake of accusing Kurzweil’s numbers of being a literal prophecy - the metaphor is cute but only a device of criticism for the critic and useful controversial publicity for the author. Scientists are quite happy to be rational about their assertions if you give them more than a paragraph to make the case (say, the length of a chapter). Simply quote mining for phrases that are easily attacked is a device that preys on the reader, not the actual topic of criticism. This entire chapter is about statistical estimates, not to be confused with irrefutable facts (as he disclaims in the text). Visit a bookstore and read this chapter while being very critical of every premise Kurzweil makes all the way through, then try to come away with the same fixation on this passage as a deal-breaker to his whole argument as this critic does.
The singularity - the point at which AI may surpass the human brain in cognitive capacity, is quite likely to occur in the expanse of time ahead of us as long as technology improves (a more-than-fair assumption from historical data, which is all Kurzweil asserts). I have been aware of Kurzweil’s predictions for quite a while and am happy to throw away specific dates for statistical probabilities, because the idea is rational enough without specifics. A mathematician might extrapolate a trend from data without making hard assertions of future data points (which Kurzweil only does for illustrative purposes) and subsequently tying their entire argument to those assertions like an anchor (sink or swim, as the critic does). The assertion that we will understand the human brain in the next 10 years may fall flat on its face without breaking a conviction that we may some day understand the human brain enough to engineer a virtual copy with improvements.
The critic makes the error of claiming that Kurzweil thinks that life processes are trivial by his discourse on deriving a formula for estimation purposes of human-brain-level computational power for $1000. He then goes on to claim nucleic acids “bootstrapping” into meatspace is such a mystery as to be impenetrable to computer science (what are those guys at folding@home and MIT doing?). He supports this by spicing his article with fragments of complex gene-protein interactions derived from experimentation, which likely could not have occurred without the aide of computer science and will likely have an effect on future genomics work which feeds back into computer science. Kurzweil is quite clear that this a book of predictions of when human beings may achieve such an understanding of genomics as to be able to simulate an organism, not that we have already done so. Once we understand how those interactions take place, we can then iteratively simulate them until our model produces similar results to experiment, building a model of nature (the scientific method). Each step on this process brings us closer to understanding the brain, no matter how complex the brain is or how long it will take (throw away the numbers and logic still remains).
I regret that Kurzweil chose to compress the genome before making his calculation (as there may be no meaningful analog
With a virtual workforce you get to leverage the labor of the entire world. You can be selective, take advantage of competition and people willing to exploit a niche.
If you have a language barrier, you can hire bilingual translators to sit in on your online conversations as a 3rd party. Interview many of them and keep some on retainer, make a list of their available hours, rate them on their rate of translation, clarity and accuracy. Offer more money for sessions if you want better translators. If you’re a company, hire them if you like (they may have other marketable skills), ask them to sign an NDA for sensitive conversations, and even have them translate your company’s materials to become a global company. Hire a second translator to check the first one’s work on a contract basis.
Anyone can make a little money offering their translation services on-call. They could use their cell phones with a high quality headset and make themselves available through an automated scheduling and queuing system. This would work in any country with cellular infrastructure for any bilingual individual of any pair of languages. Rarer language pairings could be valued higher, fluency would be valued over basic conversational language. Different time zones would be valued automatically by the automation system for the minimization of lag between geolocated parties, but generally anyone could get an advantage on others in their region by supporting less popular hours. Recruiters could make a buck finding new qualified translators for less popular segments. It creates a few new markets.
Want your child to have a marketable skill? Teach them another language. Encourage educational programs that get people from one side of the world talking to another through translation. You could even teach second, third, fourth, etc, languages through this system too just by making one-on-one conversation with translators who have flagged themselves as language tutors at an agreeable rate. Maybe it will finally encourage the development of an online A.I. realtime audio-to-audio language translation service to grab up some of that market value.
Finally, why is there a preoccupation with accommodating Western workers? Why must the system conform to the Western lifestyle and not the other way around? Part of the reason we are in this mess is because we have grown accustomed to high wages to pay for outrageous lifestyles for far less work than others are willing to do. I don’t see how that entitles us Americans to greater consideration. Furthermore, the West has always been about Free Enterprise and the best person for the job and I don’t see how a business owner can see a downside in all of this. Virtual operations and worldwide labor pools will lower operating expenses dramatically farther than anything that could be achieved on American soil, allowing the business to make more money. Anyone can start and operate a business or work as a contractor from their home as long as they have a product or service people actually want at a price they can actually afford. It goes both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Rob Malda, thank you so much for making this site and working so hard to make it the heart of the Open Source Software/Internet Security/Freedom of Information news beat. I can only imagine how stressful it was to maintain quality and balance time/personal life issues with a site of this magnitude. My hat is off to you, Sir.
I've been O.C.D. tailing Slashdot for about 10 years; this site has been the source of much education and a lifelong interest in science, technology, programming, education, freedom of speech, businesses and even government for me. There's nothing quite like hordes of technology masterminds with personality disorders debating furiously until nothing but hurt feelings and rock bare truth remains. The discussions here have been a font of wisdom that I hope remains online forever.
I have a gigantic list of Ask Slashdot threads and various other legendary comments that I will cherish as tomes of barely tapped, limitless technical wisdom. Each thread was sparked by a headline, and then built up by hundreds of deeply interested, knowledgeable, passionate people as well as many times as many fools, whose unappreciated role of making horribly flawed arguments made for golden opportunities to dispense hard-earned real-world understanding. I gleaned much from the sidelines.
If you are more than idly interested in learning about SETI, they have a youtube channel here: http://youtube.com/user/setiinstitute/
They aren't looking for wasteful noise from neo-technological civilizations (but we'll take any unnatural signal we can get!). As you've pointed out, that might occur for a very limited period of time before their physicists move on to better communication technologies. But don't make the assumption that these people are "short sighted," (SETI is 50 years old) or aren't criticizing their own techniques, or actively exploring new ideas. They're looking for broadcast devices, robotic beacons, communications nodes, cross-talk between interstellar routers, gigantic mechanical artifacts, etc. The holy grail would be an alien satellite designed specifically to attract the attention of developing civilizations, like the one in Contact.
There are really good reasons to look in the radio spectrum. The radio range has a noted trough of low noise in 1-10GHz, which is an excellent candidate for communications, if not outright shining a beacon out to the farthest distances. It also penetrates mollecular clouds (and our atmosphere, for that matter) easier than optical and higher frequency light, which scatters easily, and doesn't take nearly as much energy to generate as X-ray and Gamma ray radiation. You will need an EE to further explain.
We may not be prepared to guess at alien biology or sociology, but we do get to project what we know about physics. "They" refers to technologically advanced civilizations.
- Some civillizations may be well beyond anything we can fathom (interdimensional beings, control over gravity, faster-than-light communication). But if they do exist (and that's a big leap), there's very little chance that they are the only other civilizations in the universe. If we make the assumption that "life is out there." We can expect there to be a tremendous variety of life forms and civilizations and some may be within our detection capabilities.
- They all most likely use electromagnetic radiation for communication, since it's the de-facto fastest way to move information through space. Cite wormholes or entanglement if you like, I'm not ignoring the possibility. The algorithms SETI uses pick out general anomalies in known radiation patterns. Even technologies we can't possibly understand have a good chance of emitting some kind of interesting radiation as a side effect.
- They will probably choose communications techniques that are easy to detect against most background sources and will certainly need to be very robust to get through the interstellar medium (charged particles) in the case of an interstellar signal. We might even make assumptions about the kinds of engineering practices another advanced civilization would employ: redundancy, longevity, efficiency. These can help constrain the behaviors we look for.
- If they have at least one outpost beyond their homeworld/star (even a satellite in their own solar system), they will be using directed communication. That means their directed beam is slowly sweeping out a wobbling, circular path across their sky. If we're lucky, and that direction is in line with our star, we might pick up a hint of their artificial signals.
- As the poster above mentions, we are made of some very common materials in the universe and in similar proportions (obviously profoundly more dense on average). That leads to a sound assumption about how life might be elsewhere. At the very least, this is our only /example/ and it's a good practice to focus on planets whose properties are not stupendously hostile to our form of biochemistry.
I don't usually feed trolls (or sock puppets), epsecially not this tired old argument, but I'm feeling saucy.
No, the researchers will declare that they have found an atmosphere on another planet unlike anything we can explain with modern science. They will explain their methods for trying to fit the data to natural conditions and point out where the models don't fit. Then they will posit that life is one possible explanation. Speculations will fly in the scientific community, some credible, some not. The popular science media will decisively pick up on the "we may have found life!" headline, neglect to link to the original paper, and publish the least credible ideas with quotes from dubious scientists not even peripherally involved in the project. Some radio host will learn how federal tax dollars were received by the university funding the research and immediately declare that the government is wasting your money searching for aliens. Then people like you will take your opinion to the internet in legion.
I was actually mixing up two techniques in my knee-jerk reaction to comment after skipping the article, heh. However, Kepler and SETI go together like beer and hot dogs and the groups collaborate (that's what the ATA was supposed to be doing). SETI has been surveying stars in the milky way galaxy all along, but they have had to make speculations about habitability, the presence of worlds, etc. But now they have data as a basis. These are presumably not just stars with planets, but ones with planets in the habitable zone, or planets near the mass of Earth. With JWST they can get spectrographic data which will allow them to be able to isolate rocky worlds, or worlds with interesting atmospheres, narrowing the search further.
You are correct, this project is for doing targeted radio measurements (a broader range of searches than their usual algorithms) on stars with known exoplanets that are good candidates for bearing life.
Kepler is the pioneer for the effort, cataloging good candidates for further study. They have something like 2 more years worth of observations to make before it's done with its primary mission. The reason most of the planets we know about right now are super-jupiters close to their stars (and we're just now discovering super-earths) is because we haven't observed enough transits for the longest orbit candidates. Nearer bodies orbit faster, so we have the data for them early on. More exotic planets will come out of Kepler in the following years.
I thought the Kepler mission had the resolution to capture enough of the detail in the "fuzz" at the edge of the transits, but maybe I'm mixing up theory and a handful of other missions. I do know for a fact that this will be one of James Webb Space Telescope's tasks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DsdXWwAkBs&feature=relmfu&#t=048m27s
Here is a talk about some of Kepler's latest findings (1/10/2011)
"Catching Shadows: Kepler's Search for New Worlds"
http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-silicon-valley-astronomy/id213308887
I must be sleepy -- you are correct and I have now RTFA.
They're going to take a while to capture the data on each planet, since they can't watch continuously with an earthbound telescope. They may only have a window of a few days to capture a transit on some target planets, so it will take multiple transits to get that much data for all of them (the project will last a year). I believe they get the most valuable data when the planet first passes into the star's disk and then again as it leaves, as this gives some sense of differentiation between different parts of the atmosphere.
Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
Here's a link to the abstract just to nip all this 3rd and 4th hand speculation about flood myths and Atlantis: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/657397
It's great for bringing public attention but not so great for highlighting the actual science behind the pop sci article.
It was a work of fiction by HP Lovecraft called "The Nameless City"
Cool story - a lot of his stuff can be found fulltext on the internet, but here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nameless_City
I woke up this morning and read the news with the blue side of the stereo glasses: "Short-sighted fear-mongering populist pandering pointlessly nationalistic republican running for re-election attempts to derail human progress again."
Then I flipped to the red lens: "National hero fights valiantly to defend capitalism and national security against communist regime seeking to steal American jobs, overthrow American space technology superiority and likely launch weapon of mass destruction into orbit."
After I had my coffee, I took off the goggles and rubbed my eyes.
"The United States has moved forward with its planned defunding of an aging method of launching cargo into space, diverting all available funds to more fruitful robotic missions and more complicated manned spaceflight projects. Meanwhile, other nations and even private enterprises are developing their space programs. NASA is looking to avoid spending more of its limited resources by taking advantage of technology which is already under significant development by other technologically capable societies. With cooperation from every advanced space-faring nation, all of Human civilization stands to benefit from shared scientific developments made by each other's civilian and scientific programs."
I've considered the "you don't understand what the Chinese are capable of!" and the "we're funding an oppressive regime!" and the "you really think they're only using this for civilian technology?" angles, and I remain unconvinced that they carry any real weight. I'm willing to be convinced, but I stopped being mystified by big political words in high school, the Red Scare is a sad chapter of our history, the Russians' and subsequent space-faring nations' contributions to our own space exploration ambitions have been fruital for everyone and from the L2 Legrangian point at >60,000 kilometers, we are all just a single, interdependent colony of ants on the surface of a tiny ball of dirt.
Really? These funds aren't your tax dollars. They are Google's private contribution. If congress had decided to give Khan $2m you would have a real position to debate their judgment.
Research is the expansionist force at the boundaries of science. It's critical to understanding the previously unknown. We're talking about a man making instructional videos about foundational math and science and making it available for free to the world with no strings attached. Your position is that this is somehow /dangerous/.
I should clarify: "in the absence of better methods available to the student."
Less-than optimal teaching methods are nothing new to any form of education. That is hardly justification to discourage their use in the absence of better methods, especially when the less-than-optimal methods are vastly more accessible and largely accurate. Research into the human brain's powers of cognition, learning, intelligence and emotion are likely to be an ongoing research area in science for the breadth of human civilization. I wouldn't advise waiting for their resolution to begin making those fruits available for consumption. Reeducation is a small price to pay for elevating minds out of plain ignorance.
I should add that there is some degree of absurdity in criticizing this material for its inadequacy at teaching people who do not want to learn.
I agree that watching lectures online is not the most effective way to gain a true mastery of knowledge. It's also true that there are some subjects which require access to lab equipment and other physically expensive or rare materials. It's worth looking into ways to make it more effective and it will still be a very long time before people such as hiring managers will be convinced of the credibility of self-taught students. But it IS an excellent way to prime yourself for an upcoming class by seeing some example problems, or simply to gain an introductory level knowledge through recorded survey-type courses requiring little technical background (iTunes U has a lot of this kind of material).
Not all learners are trying to replace a traditional university education with online lectures, or to achieve parity with a graduate student. Some of them are middle-aged, career-laden, family-burdened, cash-strapped people who just want to broaden their horizons or professionals who just want to gain interdisciplinary knowledge. And, of course, some learners live in places and situations where they could not dream of getting a college education. Any effort to get knowledge closer to these people and conditions is to be praised.
There is no harm in a private company making a large donation to one of the most prolific individual contributors to the field. The money is partially going towards translating his content into many languages. If anything, that will allow this material to be used as modern teaching aids in places where no free material is available in the most common languages of the region. Much of the internet's undergraduate-level educational resources are still English-centric.
I applaud Khan, the many YouTube channels dedicated to sharing knowledge, institutuional projets like OpenCourseWare and of course Wikipedia for making free knowledge available online. I can find no good reason not to be glad that Google is making a cash contribution and for maintaining YouTube as a free service, without which, Khan might not have been able to get started with hosting and streaming this much video to as many users.
You make a lot of good points about separating the cold, rational side of science as a discipline from what is not its proper domain. But I must steal back some of the soul you have purged from it by abstracting away the person – science does not happen in the absence of a human actor.
It has not been my experience that science offers none of the pleasures and dilemmas you neatly factor from it. There is something to be said for luminaries whose unique insight would have been ignored if they did not have the venue of science to knock heads against hard facts and force cultural change. Hard work, altruism, empathy, controversy, struggle and desire to touch lives are no less evident in the everlasting life stories of many scientists whose names, long engraved on their tombs, can still be found embedded in research papers for novel cures, in their contributions to institutions for human progress and the countless human generations their work will continue to effect.
As for whether science can tell right from wrong, why you are here, your purpose in life, or push you to become a better human being, I doubt that any of these could so easily be factored from the scientist in the person as from the raw, disembodied notion of science. The pursuit of knowledge is a passion that has led to many deeds of both profound and dubious value, but always by the hand of people.
In the spirit of skepticism, I hope that when you met your example of an evolutionist (and chided him for the mistake of simplifying it down to mere randomness), you gave fair thought to the analogously religious man who defers to supernatural authority when justifying earthly violence. We can both agree that any doctrine will not necessarily impart its wisdom in all fullness, to fallible humans, and that humans need guidance of many kinds to be both rational and emotional beings.
Thank you for this rational perspective, which, for the sake of responding to a central point, I shall crudely boil down into “question everything.” At the heart of science is critical thinking, which, even in the presence of mountains of evidence, cannot be suspended. Knowledge is truly illuminating, but just as we might endeavor to shine a light on a dark spot in our mind, we might then turn away in confidence that we have explored enough of its folded surfaces to explain its true nature.
Science builds our understanding of the universe through rationalizing observations of reality and adhering to logic for arguing our conclusions. We may gain a reasonable confidence that our models fit the reality we observe if our data and logic support those models. But “fit” may be the best that we can do in any case. There is no shame in this – all good science acknowledges falsifiable experimentation. Regardless, that perpetually unresolved mystery is the dynamo that fuels young minds to make their life work out of attacking those shadowy folds. A world without that mystery would be very dull to me.
Science could neither be said to be a purely academic exercise of irresolvable and tenuous conclusions, nor does it typically lead to absolute truths. We make use of those models to explain, predict and improve our world through engineering, medicine, commerce and any number of fields for which their application is, for most purposes, to our great benefit. It is not the fault of science that its students often come away with the belief that there are usually absolute truths (they are indeed rare). Not all minds are prepared for or necessarily benefit from filtering all imparted knowledge through intense critical thought. To ignore that and continue on regarding others crudely for their misunderstandings forces us to behave as pedantic jerks and without regard for the very people our science and teaching actually effects.
It is important to recognize that our experts (good scientists) often regard their conclusions with even more scrutiny than we do, and stake their careers on it. Sometimes their motives, methods or deductive powers are suspect, but our protection from that is built directly into the scientific method, to which they must adhere if they are to be respected. Falsifiable experimentation, well documented, repeatable methods and attainable data, as well as adhering to strong logical arguments and mathematics constitute the language of higher order understanding.
It is a question for philosophers whether it is necessary to strictly rationalize everything. I believe science, through critical thinking, is the way to raise rational humans and that doing so will lead to a better plural civilization, but I will defer to understanding little about raising good people.
http://www.vimeo.com/siai/videos/sort:oldest
http://singinst.org/media/interviews
http://www.youtube.com/user/singularityu
Well, lack of searching is not a lack of material, you can find several hours of Ray's talks on video at Singularity Summit 2007, 2008, 2009, TED.com, Singularity University and just plain independent YouTube videos. He also has two movies out (I haven't seen either), the Transcendent Man criticisng his esoteric side and The Singularity Is Near (based on his book) supporting his ideas.
All of this talk about his figures being wrong is quite far from the point. To say we'll have conversations with virtual humans in 2030 or that we may have to cope with an AI superintelligence by 2050 is quite far from noting that either of these situations are entirely possible extrapolated from trends and the discussion should be had.
As a computer scientist, I can say that it will be hard to do. As a scientist, it's pretty foolish to say that because something is hard that it will never happen (we did and building a human is pretty hard).
You’re right that the 30000:1 error ratio was pulled out of someone’s ass as a dogmatic argument, it’s the ratio of 90 million to 3000, and it was brought up to espouse the unsupported claim (it doesn’t mesh with my beliefs, therefore there must be something positively wrong with it) that radioactive decay is so inaccurate as to be unusable as a scientific tool, often based on willful denial of scientific experimentation (which is the opposite of dogma).
The rate of radioactive decay is measured in decay activity per second (curie) in experimentation but it is usefully indexed for radiometric dating purposes in terms of half life, which is a period of time in which 50% of a sample will decay to its stable isotope. We don’t have to wait for 50% of a sample to decay (although we can in particle colliders to the tune of picoseconds!). Half life is converted up from its much finer measurement in a far shorter time with a much more accurate instrument (using, say, accelerator mass spectrometry). Imagine the absurdity of presuming to date an object millions of years old accurately in terms of seconds it would be like saying I always get 3% of the way to work in 27,128.395 milliseconds when it is far more useful (and for all practical purposes analogous) to say that it usually takes me 15 minutes to get to work. Note that I am being confidently more accurate than “between a fraction of a second and 313 days.”
Far from ignoring cosmic radiation, I’ll cite research, experimentation and data: http://donuts.berkeley.edu/papers/EarthSun.pdf
How wildly different? In science we almost never get the same answer; instead we get a statistical gradient (yet science still works!). I'm prepared to assume +/- 3% is a reasonable error for accuracy in some experiments, while you might require +/- 0.1%. Or an experimenter might draw false conclusions from the data, or the error might be so large as to invalidate the correlation he or she draws, or the method might be entirely discredited. Either way, the results are rarely glaringly obvious (otherwise we wouldn’t need rigorous peer-reviewing processes) and you must qualify your criticism for it to be anything but speculation.
We do not know for certain if a particular strata was exactly 90 million years old, but a possible error rate of 30000:1 is not being passed off as credible research by any scientist in radioactive decay-based dating. For practical purposes, bell curves serve as a useful indicator of probability by showing a gradient of weight around a mean, not to prove that the leftmost infinitesimally improbable armpit of the curve represents any significant doubt to the central argument.
I agree with your assertion that building a brain is nontrivial. The problem with the blog post is that the guy says Kurzweil believes life processes are trivial, which is completely wrong if you open the damn book, flip to the page with this quote and start reading around it. He's (quite explicitly) making a paper napkin estimate of human brainpower in CPU cycles and plotting it on a linear regression curve of historical data.
But I will take your argument one further and say that a blueprint is a bad example for a genome, because a blueprint implies a 1:1 relationship of data to construction, which is not what we see by observation at all (Dawkins has a section on this in his newest book). It's actually closer to a computer program, because nobody could say that what happens at runtime is correlated absolutely to with what is written in the source (there are users, much to the dismay of many programmers). These days, programmers don't understand what goes on in individual blocks of memory or processor registers, they just call their Date library or some GUI code with an API method that was developed long ago to solve a class of problem programmers typically had to deal with all the time. What's going on in memory is some arcane science packed into a compiler or an interpreter somewhere, having been solved long ago by some anonymous programmer whose code worked well enough to have been considered "a good enough solution."
Nevertheless, we understand the mechanisms that drive that code, even if the programmer is long gone and with enough incredibly difficult and soulcrushing effort, one could actually recreate the source with a hex editor, a stack tracer, a means of monitoring memory, etc.
I’m glad the headline formed an opinion for me, because clearly I’m not capable of making one for myself. If not for such an eloquently worded preface to this wonderfully vetted blog post, I might have had to exercise a few brain cycles to determine what I should think of Ray Kurzweil. I’m also glad the poster has decided to snipe away at a single contextually free quote from Kurzweil’s entire book on estimating a time frame for science to apply information technology to genomics. It’s too bad Kurzweil couldn’t boil his entire research effort into a single sentence like this guy did, because his book is just TL;DR.
Sarcasm aside, I don’t agree that the predictions Kurzweil makes are ludicrous at all if you throw away his estimates (as Kurzweil duly calls them) and start over with the same logic. Don’t make the mistake of accusing Kurzweil’s numbers of being a literal prophecy - the metaphor is cute but only a device of criticism for the critic and useful controversial publicity for the author. Scientists are quite happy to be rational about their assertions if you give them more than a paragraph to make the case (say, the length of a chapter). Simply quote mining for phrases that are easily attacked is a device that preys on the reader, not the actual topic of criticism. This entire chapter is about statistical estimates, not to be confused with irrefutable facts (as he disclaims in the text). Visit a bookstore and read this chapter while being very critical of every premise Kurzweil makes all the way through, then try to come away with the same fixation on this passage as a deal-breaker to his whole argument as this critic does.
The singularity - the point at which AI may surpass the human brain in cognitive capacity, is quite likely to occur in the expanse of time ahead of us as long as technology improves (a more-than-fair assumption from historical data, which is all Kurzweil asserts). I have been aware of Kurzweil’s predictions for quite a while and am happy to throw away specific dates for statistical probabilities, because the idea is rational enough without specifics. A mathematician might extrapolate a trend from data without making hard assertions of future data points (which Kurzweil only does for illustrative purposes) and subsequently tying their entire argument to those assertions like an anchor (sink or swim, as the critic does). The assertion that we will understand the human brain in the next 10 years may fall flat on its face without breaking a conviction that we may some day understand the human brain enough to engineer a virtual copy with improvements.
The critic makes the error of claiming that Kurzweil thinks that life processes are trivial by his discourse on deriving a formula for estimation purposes of human-brain-level computational power for $1000. He then goes on to claim nucleic acids “bootstrapping” into meatspace is such a mystery as to be impenetrable to computer science (what are those guys at folding@home and MIT doing?). He supports this by spicing his article with fragments of complex gene-protein interactions derived from experimentation, which likely could not have occurred without the aide of computer science and will likely have an effect on future genomics work which feeds back into computer science. Kurzweil is quite clear that this a book of predictions of when human beings may achieve such an understanding of genomics as to be able to simulate an organism, not that we have already done so. Once we understand how those interactions take place, we can then iteratively simulate them until our model produces similar results to experiment, building a model of nature (the scientific method). Each step on this process brings us closer to understanding the brain, no matter how complex the brain is or how long it will take (throw away the numbers and logic still remains).
I regret that Kurzweil chose to compress the genome before making his calculation (as there may be no meaningful analog
With a virtual workforce you get to leverage the labor of the entire world. You can be selective, take advantage of competition and people willing to exploit a niche.
If you have a language barrier, you can hire bilingual translators to sit in on your online conversations as a 3rd party. Interview many of them and keep some on retainer, make a list of their available hours, rate them on their rate of translation, clarity and accuracy. Offer more money for sessions if you want better translators. If you’re a company, hire them if you like (they may have other marketable skills), ask them to sign an NDA for sensitive conversations, and even have them translate your company’s materials to become a global company. Hire a second translator to check the first one’s work on a contract basis.
Anyone can make a little money offering their translation services on-call. They could use their cell phones with a high quality headset and make themselves available through an automated scheduling and queuing system. This would work in any country with cellular infrastructure for any bilingual individual of any pair of languages. Rarer language pairings could be valued higher, fluency would be valued over basic conversational language. Different time zones would be valued automatically by the automation system for the minimization of lag between geolocated parties, but generally anyone could get an advantage on others in their region by supporting less popular hours. Recruiters could make a buck finding new qualified translators for less popular segments. It creates a few new markets.
Want your child to have a marketable skill? Teach them another language. Encourage educational programs that get people from one side of the world talking to another through translation. You could even teach second, third, fourth, etc, languages through this system too just by making one-on-one conversation with translators who have flagged themselves as language tutors at an agreeable rate. Maybe it will finally encourage the development of an online A.I. realtime audio-to-audio language translation service to grab up some of that market value.
Finally, why is there a preoccupation with accommodating Western workers? Why must the system conform to the Western lifestyle and not the other way around? Part of the reason we are in this mess is because we have grown accustomed to high wages to pay for outrageous lifestyles for far less work than others are willing to do. I don’t see how that entitles us Americans to greater consideration. Furthermore, the West has always been about Free Enterprise and the best person for the job and I don’t see how a business owner can see a downside in all of this. Virtual operations and worldwide labor pools will lower operating expenses dramatically farther than anything that could be achieved on American soil, allowing the business to make more money. Anyone can start and operate a business or work as a contractor from their home as long as they have a product or service people actually want at a price they can actually afford. It goes both ways.