You have two representations of fact that I have not seen elsewhere. One is that his mother threw his items in the trash. The other that he used stolen detectors. As I have seen the story presented, he may have committed fraud in order to acquire the detectors mainly to mask his age, but he did not steal them.
He both practiced fraud and theft at different times. The account is in Silverstein's book.
The other is you assertion that his mother threw out "most" of his items. The story as presented is that he was pulled over by a policeman and some items were found that led to the complete excavation of the family's yard. Now perhaps his mother threw out items prior to the discovery by authorities.
That is more or less correct. What Hahn had in the trunk of his car appears to be the materials from smoke detectors and gas mantles - americium and thorium. It was months before the shed was investigated.
No, they are not, meaning you can't find a banana that emits statistically different amount from the background, unless maybe you manage to grow one near that reactor in Chernobyl.
We test some every year (students invariably bring them to our nuclear physics lab), and we've never seen anything but the background.
True (I just checked this my Ludlum 2221). A banana has only about 0.4 g of potassium in it which would produce 11 decays per second. It would be difficult to pick this out of background. But if you test a jar of NuSalt, or other potassium chloride salt substitute, which contains 100 g of potassium or so, the radiation is very easy to detect.
Addendum: another thing that stands out is how ignorant Hahn was, and remained, about the basics of the relevant physics.
Silverstein is easily impressed by this "precocious" kid (IIRC, actually 17 when he got himself busted). But if you were ever a precocious kid yourself, interested in science (as many people who read this site undoubtedly are) then the account is not at all impressive. Hahn remains woefully misinformed to the very end, apparently never really reading a single good text on the subject (like the ubiquitous and excellent Sourcebook on Atomic Energy by Glasstone found in libraries everywhere).
No you have never seen an exact level and this whole story is greatly overblown (because it is so darn colorful, with a catchy title).
The entire account known to the public is based solely on the book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" by Ken Silverstein. The only reason why anyone has ever heard of this case is because of Silverstein. No statements about actual radiation levels are found anywhere in the book, what you are reporting is pure rumor. And if you actually read the book several things become clear.
First, there is little physical evidence for Hahn's claims. His whole "reactor" assembly, such as it was, was reportedly thrown in the garbage and disposed of without any outside party ever examining it, so his claims about it are without any substantiation.
Second, Hahn was a rather unstable character, and was prone to lying and stealing (by self-confession) so his accounts must be viewed with some skepticism. The whole affair came to law enforcement attention because of Hahn acting strangely late at night in public, drawing the attention of police, whereupon he started to tell them his bizarre tale. They took him at his word, called in the Feds, and once the investigative snowball starts rolling it tends to keeps rolling.
Third, yes, the EPA did come and dismantle his shed in hazmat suits, but the use of such suits is standard procedure so it in itself proves nothing about any actual hazard, and indeed the fact they did it all also does not prove any substantial hazard - CYA is a real thing. The incident itself does not show up as a significant action in their records (in fact the incident cannot be located at all in on-line government regulatory actions for that time and area).
Fourth Silverstein had a book to sell, and he flogs the story mercilessly. Most of the claims made about his case are actually made by Silverstein himself, which he puts into the mouths of people he interviews by asserting things without evidence (other than Hahn's questionable word), and getting them to discuss it based on the premise that what Silverstein tells them is true. Thus the story gets a veneer of having verification which it actually lacks. There is basically no corroboration available for Silverstein's (or Hahn's) claims.
The thing with the Hubble telescope mirror is that engineers at Perkin-Elmer did double-check the mirror with accurate instruments and knew that it was flawed after the figuring was complete. But refiguring it would have cost a lot of money, and delayed delivery (already late), and the improperly assembled null corrector test instrument that was used to figure the mirror was also the contractual acceptance test. So managers and execs and Perkin-Elmer decided to deliver the mirror to NASA anyway, in conformance with contract, without conveying the internal information that the mirror didn't work.
This echos the situation with the Challenger disaster when management at Thiokol decided (after hours of complaint from a very unhappy NASA) to authorize the cold weather launch despite knowing that disaster was almost certain.
If we accept the Wikileaks transcript is taken as being accurate, then Clinton's "weird anecdote" is nothing less than a completely accurate statement of what she actually said. Does no one here bother to check facts?
CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]
It's nice to have someone to blame, but it doesn't change the content of what was leaked.
But you are totally ignorant about "the content of what was leaked" since you did not bother to look it up (and the media has been happy to repeat a misleading paraphrase, not a quote of what she actually said). See my post below where I present the actual content.
Amazingly, nearly 400 posts on this thus far, and nobody has posted or linked to the actual Wikileaks dump on Clinton's comment. I know this is/. but checking facts before bloviating does have its merits.
CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]
So Clinton's characterization of her remarks in the debate last night are completely accurate, and the out-of-text paraphrase (not an actual quote) that is usually repeated is an intentional misrepresentation about what she really said.
And yet the western has Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian. Horror has Lovecraft, who was admired by the 20th Century's greatest writer Jorge Luis Borges (yes, my opinion, but I am hardly alone on this). Fantasy has many great works, LOTR, Earthsea, etc. (also Borges himself, but he gets the "Spanish language" exemption I mention in my other post on this thread below). Science Fiction has The Book of the New Sun. Mystery writing has actually become broadly accepted by critics in recent years (Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, etc.). Great literature is definitely to be found in these genres.
Peter S. Beagle and Ursula K. LeGuin have each written a number of superb essays on the clear discrimination of English speaking critics (at least) against science fiction and fantasy -- which strongly overlap (although hard SF and sword-and-sorcery fans often disagree with this).
A good resource on this is Beagle's The Secret History of Fantasy which contains an nice forward by Beagle about this, as well as an excellent essay by LeGuin and David Hartwell on the subject. I can't lay my hands on his best essay on this at the moment though.
It wasn't always this way. Fantasy and science fiction literature from the 19th century and before are well regarded ("The Faerie Queene", "Frankenstein", for two random examples). Fantasy literature, if written in Spanish ("magic realism"), is adored by English speaking critics.
Part of this can be traced to one extremely influential critic - Edmund Wilson - who hated fantasy literature in all forms with an undying poison pen passion. He had a very restrictive notion of what constituted "literature" and most of English speaking criticism has absorbed his personal preferences as core principles of literature. Wilson dominated U.S. criticism for about 50 years, until 1972, which has yet to recover from his opinions.
"This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?"
This find raises no such question. Proteins have nothing to do with cloning.
For that you need DNA. We can reconstruct genomes of some ancient animals, that died within the last few tens of thousands of years and were preserved in frozen strata. Clever reconstructions are necessary to put the fragments back together, but still here are usually errors and gaps that must be filled in with modern related organisms. Older DNA is probably hopeless for organism reconstruction, though the fragments can be used for taxonomic work.
.. when it was first published in Science last week, and I was surprised they were devoting any space to it.
The physicist had no insights to offer, just opinions about far off fanciful speculations unconnected with any current real science. The same interview could have been given by most any SF fan, and many SF authors could have offered far more substance and insight.
Here is Gros's original paper which was the hook on which the interview hung. Not a terrible paper at that, providing some interesting summaries about the evolution of the Earth and about planetary stability. But the "Genesis mission" seeding stuff is just SF hand-waving, even in the full paper. And the whole notion is based on the very questionable premise that organism-ready planets are common that do not already have their own biology established ("The objective of the Genesis mission is after all to give life the chance to prosper in places where it has not yet a foothold..."). Life on Earth may have become established within 300 million years of its formation - i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed.
Absolutely. And companies like Uber are recruiting real live people to devote their actual working lives and resources to supporting the company's profit-making business, with specific promises of the terms of work and pay. Then changing them (always in the negative direction) without warning, or appeal.
This is why company's everywhere need regulation. Crazy abuse of workers for profit will happen unless standards are imposed and enforced, otherwise it is always a race to the bottom. Uber sounds like it is turning into a sweatshop on the street.
As I commented above, as far as I can tell - based on all the evidence you provide - this project you are part of is just you typing up web pages describing your project concept.
Let us know how much money this project currently is funded for, how many people are on its staff, and its timeline for building the first self-bootstrapping Seed Factory. Can you show us any actual equipment designs or prototypes, or tell us who is preparing same? Anything real?
It's not. That's why we are building the first self-bootstrapping automated factories here on Earth
We are? When is the first self-bootstrapping automated factory going to be completed? Where is it? Who is funding it?
All you linked to are a few web pages you wrote yourself, which simply describe your very, very high level concept for a program to do this with, despite the numerous bullet points, no actual details, just concept verbiage.
Building an actual self-bootstrapping automated factory on Earth is absolutely essential before we can start talking about putting on the moon - for reasons that should be obvious to anyone. Until such a thing exists this is just fiction. As far as I can tell, at the moment all plans for building a self-bootstrapping automated factory on Earth, much less the actual operating factory, are fiction also.
There is less to this "self-bootstrapping automated factory" you allude to than even the Mars One fake project (which at least has a staff and collects real money).
The "Great Filter" is a very poor answer, IMO. A Great Filter before where we are now is bad science on the level of thinking we're at the center of the universe: no, sorry, we're not special.
Could there be some future hurdle that many civilizations fail to jump? Sure. But there no reason to expect an alien civilization to think the way we do about anything, really. To propose that all civilizations would be blind to some danger is absurd.
Remember the uncertainty in the Drake equation is many orders of magnitude, and even so it doesn't much matter for the Fermi Paradox. A Great Filter that takes out 90% or even 99% of civilizations doesn't solve the paradox. It only take one civilization that built von Neumann probes.
Good post. You hit the salient points pretty nicely.
Agreed that invoking a purely speculative it-always-happens-no-matter-what genuine, permanent extinction event for advanced civilization is basically a magical solution for the Fermi Problem.
It has been argued that in fact we have the history of many (most?) societies that reached a high level of organization and have collapsed - and so I seen a "civilization lifetime" parameter calculated from historical societies used in the Drake Equation. And that is a fair point. But none of the collapses were permanent, new ones have always arisen after, so it does not really support the extinction filter idea at all.
As I wrote on this thread below, extreme improbability of an advanced technological civilization arising in a biosphere is at least a partial explanation, since there the historical evidence is consistent with this idea. I did not mention though that the industrial revolution itself seems something of a fluke, it was completely unexpected and even with more than two centuries to study it, and abundant records and evidence, it is still not clear why it happened.
Also I did not point out the research about the habitable zone of the Universe, the region of space and time where the conditions permitting technological civilization could arise. This requires a very benign stable biosphere for half a billion years, since minor perturbations (on a cosmic scale) still bring about great extinction events. What with quasars and other active galactic cores, exploding stars, migrating planets and colliding bodies, necessary concentrations of heavy elements, etc. it turns out that a fairly small volume of cosmic history contains the necessary conditions. When you have enough "extremely unlikely" events in the chain, even the vast Observable Universe is perhaps not vast enough.
Then too, how far do we think a Von Neumann probe society would end up sending probes? The two major galaxies in the Local Group are 2.43 million light years apart. The next closest galaxy group is 10 million light years. At that distance even a 1% c probe takes a billion years. The closest galaxy cluster to ours is 53 million light years away. That's a billion years even at 5% c. And then there are the great voids in the Universe, separating super clusters, which are 200-600 million light years across. Even at substantial fractions of c the Universe is probably not old enough for a civilization to arise and send a probe to cross those. So at some scale distance does become a true barrier that technology and time cannot cross.
Good summary. You read the original paper I see. I was going to prepare a summary myself, but you beat me to it, and I don't think I can improve upon it.
By observing the patterns of evolution of life in Earth one can conclude a large part of the solution to the Fermi Problem - there is no general trend in evolution toward human-style intelligence with its complex symbol manipulation, communication, and complex tool making.
Examples of evolutionary trends that show up repeatedly include convergent evolution, and the filling up of ecological niches, which happen quite predictably. If the specific adaptations leading to human style intelligence are at all likely we should see them appearing repeatedly, independently in the evolutionary record.
But in the history of life on Earth the appearance of human-style intelligence appears to be a real fluke, which only very, very recently seems to have give our species and marked survival advantage.
There are about 60,000 vertebrate species today (lets assume that this is the only class of organism that can develop intelligence). If we take the estimate that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, then this makes a history of 60 million evolutionary experiments over a span of 525 million years. Yet only the Simian branch of the Primates developed the dexterity adaptable to complex tool making - 60 million years ago.
Once the simian pre-adaptations were set toward manual dexterity, binocular vision, really all of the evolutionary tool-kit that hominids eventually exploited, do we see any trend within that family toward tool-using? Are there multiple independent branches with the simians that start using tools? No there are not, only one branch leads to that, the Apes (Hominoidea), and that sub-family emerged 20 million years ago. Is there a trend within the Hominoidea of multiple branches showing developing complex tool using? Again there is not. Orangutans for example split off 20 million years ago, but their adaptation pattern appears stable over that time, behaviorally orangutans today seem similar to their distant ancestors. This pattern is observable in each such branch of the Hominids (Great Apes). The Great Apes have existed for at least 8 million years, but none of the branches that split off from Homo has shown any tendency to follow the pattern of tool making and brain growth that Homo did. The other Great Apes have been stable in their brain size and propensity for simple tool use, but not tool making, for millions of years.
It is only within the genus Homo, which arose 2.8 million years ago that we start to see multiple experiments in tool making species with rapid brain growth appearing, this trend seems a real evolutionary fluke.
And finally intelligence has not really show to provide any marked survival advantage for the species possessing it until very recently. Within the last 70,000 years modern humans (who have existed in their present form around 250,000 years) appear to have undergone a population bottleneck where the entire human race shrank to about 2,000 individuals - a close brush with complete extinction.
Humans remained a rare species until about 40,000 years ago, when the first population surge occurred, bringing human numbers up only to levels similar to many other large mammal species (hundreds of thousands to the low millions) by 13,000 years ago. And only then did the intelligence help humans to start out-performing all other mammal species in success.
So this whole pattern suggests that the stable pattern of the last half-billion years, with many tens of millions of large complex animal species, and no trend toward human-style intelligence is the norm, and could be expected to continue indefinitely. But a long series of freak events (which we are still in the early stages of revealing and unraveling) seems to have led just one species to have civilization, and even there is was a late emergence and might not have happened at all if the species had not made it through that bottle-neck.
Industrial Revolution counting is a bit of a problem. The first two Industrial Revolutions are pretty much agreed on. The First (of course) from 1770 to 1850, when factories and steam power revolutionized the textile industry and transportation, and the second with the rise of the chemical industry and assembly line production from 1870 to 1914. Widespread use of electricity and the internal combustion engine after 1920 is often considered the Third Industrial Revolution, but some people consider it an extension of the second.
Then we have the advent of computers, the "Digital Revolution." It seems clear that this was, indeed revolutionary, but this is not usually called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, because while important, it seems less profound than the first three which utterly transformed civilization beyond recognition. So just giving it it's own name seems appropriate.
Similarly, I think we should call what is happening now the "Cybernetic Revolution", rather than trying to decide whether this the Third, or Fourth, or maybe even Fifth IR. It is truly revolutionary, harnessing the cumulative power of the digital revolution to bring about truly unprecedented levels of task automation. And it will, I believe, resemble the First IR more than the other two in a very important way - large numbers of jobs are going to be eliminated rapidly, with nothing to replace them. The FIR threw almost 20% of Britain out of work between 1770 and 1800, creating a wave of petty crime, a huge population of paupers, Dickensian slums, and poor houses - essentially prisons for people who had committed no crimes. The new industrial economy did not provide enough jobs to restore full employment until 1840, or even later, 70 years of destitution.
Slashdot Mirror
You have two representations of fact that I have not seen elsewhere. One is that his mother threw his items in the trash. The other that he used stolen detectors. As I have seen the story presented, he may have committed fraud in order to acquire the detectors mainly to mask his age, but he did not steal them.
He both practiced fraud and theft at different times. The account is in Silverstein's book.
The other is you assertion that his mother threw out "most" of his items. The story as presented is that he was pulled over by a policeman and some items were found that led to the complete excavation of the family's yard. Now perhaps his mother threw out items prior to the discovery by authorities.
That is more or less correct. What Hahn had in the trunk of his car appears to be the materials from smoke detectors and gas mantles - americium and thorium. It was months before the shed was investigated.
No, they are not, meaning you can't find a banana that emits statistically different amount from the background, unless maybe you manage to grow one near that reactor in Chernobyl.
We test some every year (students invariably bring them to our nuclear physics lab), and we've never seen anything but the background.
True (I just checked this my Ludlum 2221). A banana has only about 0.4 g of potassium in it which would produce 11 decays per second. It would be difficult to pick this out of background. But if you test a jar of NuSalt, or other potassium chloride salt substitute, which contains 100 g of potassium or so, the radiation is very easy to detect.
Addendum: another thing that stands out is how ignorant Hahn was, and remained, about the basics of the relevant physics.
Silverstein is easily impressed by this "precocious" kid (IIRC, actually 17 when he got himself busted). But if you were ever a precocious kid yourself, interested in science (as many people who read this site undoubtedly are) then the account is not at all impressive. Hahn remains woefully misinformed to the very end, apparently never really reading a single good text on the subject (like the ubiquitous and excellent Sourcebook on Atomic Energy by Glasstone found in libraries everywhere).
No you have never seen an exact level and this whole story is greatly overblown (because it is so darn colorful, with a catchy title).
The entire account known to the public is based solely on the book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" by Ken Silverstein. The only reason why anyone has ever heard of this case is because of Silverstein. No statements about actual radiation levels are found anywhere in the book, what you are reporting is pure rumor. And if you actually read the book several things become clear.
First, there is little physical evidence for Hahn's claims. His whole "reactor" assembly, such as it was, was reportedly thrown in the garbage and disposed of without any outside party ever examining it, so his claims about it are without any substantiation.
Second, Hahn was a rather unstable character, and was prone to lying and stealing (by self-confession) so his accounts must be viewed with some skepticism. The whole affair came to law enforcement attention because of Hahn acting strangely late at night in public, drawing the attention of police, whereupon he started to tell them his bizarre tale. They took him at his word, called in the Feds, and once the investigative snowball starts rolling it tends to keeps rolling.
Third, yes, the EPA did come and dismantle his shed in hazmat suits, but the use of such suits is standard procedure so it in itself proves nothing about any actual hazard, and indeed the fact they did it all also does not prove any substantial hazard - CYA is a real thing. The incident itself does not show up as a significant action in their records (in fact the incident cannot be located at all in on-line government regulatory actions for that time and area).
Fourth Silverstein had a book to sell, and he flogs the story mercilessly. Most of the claims made about his case are actually made by Silverstein himself, which he puts into the mouths of people he interviews by asserting things without evidence (other than Hahn's questionable word), and getting them to discuss it based on the premise that what Silverstein tells them is true. Thus the story gets a veneer of having verification which it actually lacks. There is basically no corroboration available for Silverstein's (or Hahn's) claims.
Im curious, how does the craft obtain power with its solar pannels? Being in the L2, it will be in earths shadow...
It is not in L2. It orbits it with a 250,000 mile radius orbit, and thus never gets close to the Earth's shadow.
Did they double-check the mirror this time?
The thing with the Hubble telescope mirror is that engineers at Perkin-Elmer did double-check the mirror with accurate instruments and knew that it was flawed after the figuring was complete. But refiguring it would have cost a lot of money, and delayed delivery (already late), and the improperly assembled null corrector test instrument that was used to figure the mirror was also the contractual acceptance test. So managers and execs and Perkin-Elmer decided to deliver the mirror to NASA anyway, in conformance with contract, without conveying the internal information that the mirror didn't work.
This echos the situation with the Challenger disaster when management at Thiokol decided (after hours of complaint from a very unhappy NASA) to authorize the cold weather launch despite knowing that disaster was almost certain.
No, she simply stated with 100% accuracy what she actually said in the speech that has been hyped by a false paraphrase.
And no, the "uranium scandal" has been thoroughly debunked. Do try to keep up AC.
Note above, she remembers her words with impressive accuracy. The out-of-context paraphrase that is circulating is a misrepresentation.
If we accept the Wikileaks transcript is taken as being accurate, then Clinton's "weird anecdote" is nothing less than a completely accurate statement of what she actually said. Does no one here bother to check facts?
CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]
It's nice to have someone to blame, but it doesn't change the content of what was leaked.
But you are totally ignorant about "the content of what was leaked" since you did not bother to look it up (and the media has been happy to repeat a misleading paraphrase, not a quote of what she actually said). See my post below where I present the actual content.
Amazingly, nearly 400 posts on this thus far, and nobody has posted or linked to the actual Wikileaks dump on Clinton's comment. I know this is /. but checking facts before bloviating does have its merits.
Here is is:
CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]
So Clinton's characterization of her remarks in the debate last night are completely accurate, and the out-of-text paraphrase (not an actual quote) that is usually repeated is an intentional misrepresentation about what she really said.
And yet the western has Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian. Horror has Lovecraft, who was admired by the 20th Century's greatest writer Jorge Luis Borges (yes, my opinion, but I am hardly alone on this). Fantasy has many great works, LOTR, Earthsea, etc. (also Borges himself, but he gets the "Spanish language" exemption I mention in my other post on this thread below). Science Fiction has The Book of the New Sun. Mystery writing has actually become broadly accepted by critics in recent years (Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, etc.). Great literature is definitely to be found in these genres.
Peter S. Beagle and Ursula K. LeGuin have each written a number of superb essays on the clear discrimination of English speaking critics (at least) against science fiction and fantasy -- which strongly overlap (although hard SF and sword-and-sorcery fans often disagree with this).
A good resource on this is Beagle's The Secret History of Fantasy which contains an nice forward by Beagle about this, as well as an excellent essay by LeGuin and David Hartwell on the subject. I can't lay my hands on his best essay on this at the moment though.
It wasn't always this way. Fantasy and science fiction literature from the 19th century and before are well regarded ("The Faerie Queene", "Frankenstein", for two random examples). Fantasy literature, if written in Spanish ("magic realism"), is adored by English speaking critics.
Part of this can be traced to one extremely influential critic - Edmund Wilson - who hated fantasy literature in all forms with an undying poison pen passion. He had a very restrictive notion of what constituted "literature" and most of English speaking criticism has absorbed his personal preferences as core principles of literature. Wilson dominated U.S. criticism for about 50 years, until 1972, which has yet to recover from his opinions.
Here is the link to the study.
"This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?"
This find raises no such question. Proteins have nothing to do with cloning.
For that you need DNA. We can reconstruct genomes of some ancient animals, that died within the last few tens of thousands of years and were preserved in frozen strata. Clever reconstructions are necessary to put the fragments back together, but still here are usually errors and gaps that must be filled in with modern related organisms. Older DNA is probably hopeless for organism reconstruction, though the fragments can be used for taxonomic work.
Keep in mind that by sending earth microbes we're giving life there a 3.8 billion year head start.
No we aren't. There is chemical evidence that life existed as soon as 300 million years of planet formation (i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed). We have actual fossils of life that formed 950 million years after planet formation.
.. when it was first published in Science last week, and I was surprised they were devoting any space to it.
The physicist had no insights to offer, just opinions about far off fanciful speculations unconnected with any current real science. The same interview could have been given by most any SF fan, and many SF authors could have offered far more substance and insight.
Here is Gros's original paper which was the hook on which the interview hung. Not a terrible paper at that, providing some interesting summaries about the evolution of the Earth and about planetary stability. But the "Genesis mission" seeding stuff is just SF hand-waving, even in the full paper. And the whole notion is based on the very questionable premise that organism-ready planets are common that do not already have their own biology established ("The objective of the Genesis mission is after all to give life the chance to prosper in places where it has not yet a foothold..."). Life on Earth may have become established within 300 million years of its formation - i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed.
Absolutely. And companies like Uber are recruiting real live people to devote their actual working lives and resources to supporting the company's profit-making business, with specific promises of the terms of work and pay. Then changing them (always in the negative direction) without warning, or appeal.
This is why company's everywhere need regulation. Crazy abuse of workers for profit will happen unless standards are imposed and enforced, otherwise it is always a race to the bottom. Uber sounds like it is turning into a sweatshop on the street.
Like "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" it is fiction, written to entertain.
As I commented above, as far as I can tell - based on all the evidence you provide - this project you are part of is just you typing up web pages describing your project concept.
Let us know how much money this project currently is funded for, how many people are on its staff, and its timeline for building the first self-bootstrapping Seed Factory. Can you show us any actual equipment designs or prototypes, or tell us who is preparing same? Anything real?
It's not. That's why we are building the first self-bootstrapping automated factories here on Earth
We are? When is the first self-bootstrapping automated factory going to be completed? Where is it? Who is funding it?
All you linked to are a few web pages you wrote yourself, which simply describe your very, very high level concept for a program to do this with, despite the numerous bullet points, no actual details, just concept verbiage.
Building an actual self-bootstrapping automated factory on Earth is absolutely essential before we can start talking about putting on the moon - for reasons that should be obvious to anyone. Until such a thing exists this is just fiction. As far as I can tell, at the moment all plans for building a self-bootstrapping automated factory on Earth, much less the actual operating factory, are fiction also.
There is less to this "self-bootstrapping automated factory" you allude to than even the Mars One fake project (which at least has a staff and collects real money).
The "Great Filter" is a very poor answer, IMO. A Great Filter before where we are now is bad science on the level of thinking we're at the center of the universe: no, sorry, we're not special.
Could there be some future hurdle that many civilizations fail to jump? Sure. But there no reason to expect an alien civilization to think the way we do about anything, really. To propose that all civilizations would be blind to some danger is absurd.
Remember the uncertainty in the Drake equation is many orders of magnitude, and even so it doesn't much matter for the Fermi Paradox. A Great Filter that takes out 90% or even 99% of civilizations doesn't solve the paradox. It only take one civilization that built von Neumann probes.
Good post. You hit the salient points pretty nicely.
Agreed that invoking a purely speculative it-always-happens-no-matter-what genuine, permanent extinction event for advanced civilization is basically a magical solution for the Fermi Problem.
It has been argued that in fact we have the history of many (most?) societies that reached a high level of organization and have collapsed - and so I seen a "civilization lifetime" parameter calculated from historical societies used in the Drake Equation. And that is a fair point. But none of the collapses were permanent, new ones have always arisen after, so it does not really support the extinction filter idea at all.
As I wrote on this thread below, extreme improbability of an advanced technological civilization arising in a biosphere is at least a partial explanation, since there the historical evidence is consistent with this idea. I did not mention though that the industrial revolution itself seems something of a fluke, it was completely unexpected and even with more than two centuries to study it, and abundant records and evidence, it is still not clear why it happened.
Also I did not point out the research about the habitable zone of the Universe, the region of space and time where the conditions permitting technological civilization could arise. This requires a very benign stable biosphere for half a billion years, since minor perturbations (on a cosmic scale) still bring about great extinction events. What with quasars and other active galactic cores, exploding stars, migrating planets and colliding bodies, necessary concentrations of heavy elements, etc. it turns out that a fairly small volume of cosmic history contains the necessary conditions. When you have enough "extremely unlikely" events in the chain, even the vast Observable Universe is perhaps not vast enough.
Then too, how far do we think a Von Neumann probe society would end up sending probes? The two major galaxies in the Local Group are 2.43 million light years apart. The next closest galaxy group is 10 million light years. At that distance even a 1% c probe takes a billion years. The closest galaxy cluster to ours is 53 million light years away. That's a billion years even at 5% c. And then there are the great voids in the Universe, separating super clusters, which are 200-600 million light years across. Even at substantial fractions of c the Universe is probably not old enough for a civilization to arise and send a probe to cross those. So at some scale distance does become a true barrier that technology and time cannot cross.
Good summary. You read the original paper I see. I was going to prepare a summary myself, but you beat me to it, and I don't think I can improve upon it.
By observing the patterns of evolution of life in Earth one can conclude a large part of the solution to the Fermi Problem - there is no general trend in evolution toward human-style intelligence with its complex symbol manipulation, communication, and complex tool making.
Examples of evolutionary trends that show up repeatedly include convergent evolution, and the filling up of ecological niches, which happen quite predictably. If the specific adaptations leading to human style intelligence are at all likely we should see them appearing repeatedly, independently in the evolutionary record.
But in the history of life on Earth the appearance of human-style intelligence appears to be a real fluke, which only very, very recently seems to have give our species and marked survival advantage.
There are about 60,000 vertebrate species today (lets assume that this is the only class of organism that can develop intelligence). If we take the estimate that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, then this makes a history of 60 million evolutionary experiments over a span of 525 million years. Yet only the Simian branch of the Primates developed the dexterity adaptable to complex tool making - 60 million years ago.
Once the simian pre-adaptations were set toward manual dexterity, binocular vision, really all of the evolutionary tool-kit that hominids eventually exploited, do we see any trend within that family toward tool-using? Are there multiple independent branches with the simians that start using tools? No there are not, only one branch leads to that, the Apes (Hominoidea), and that sub-family emerged 20 million years ago. Is there a trend within the Hominoidea of multiple branches showing developing complex tool using? Again there is not. Orangutans for example split off 20 million years ago, but their adaptation pattern appears stable over that time, behaviorally orangutans today seem similar to their distant ancestors. This pattern is observable in each such branch of the Hominids (Great Apes). The Great Apes have existed for at least 8 million years, but none of the branches that split off from Homo has shown any tendency to follow the pattern of tool making and brain growth that Homo did. The other Great Apes have been stable in their brain size and propensity for simple tool use, but not tool making, for millions of years.
It is only within the genus Homo, which arose 2.8 million years ago that we start to see multiple experiments in tool making species with rapid brain growth appearing, this trend seems a real evolutionary fluke.
And finally intelligence has not really show to provide any marked survival advantage for the species possessing it until very recently. Within the last 70,000 years modern humans (who have existed in their present form around 250,000 years) appear to have undergone a population bottleneck where the entire human race shrank to about 2,000 individuals - a close brush with complete extinction.
Humans remained a rare species until about 40,000 years ago, when the first population surge occurred, bringing human numbers up only to levels similar to many other large mammal species (hundreds of thousands to the low millions) by 13,000 years ago. And only then did the intelligence help humans to start out-performing all other mammal species in success.
So this whole pattern suggests that the stable pattern of the last half-billion years, with many tens of millions of large complex animal species, and no trend toward human-style intelligence is the norm, and could be expected to continue indefinitely. But a long series of freak events (which we are still in the early stages of revealing and unraveling) seems to have led just one species to have civilization, and even there is was a late emergence and might not have happened at all if the species had not made it through that bottle-neck.
Industrial Revolution counting is a bit of a problem. The first two Industrial Revolutions are pretty much agreed on. The First (of course) from 1770 to 1850, when factories and steam power revolutionized the textile industry and transportation, and the second with the rise of the chemical industry and assembly line production from 1870 to 1914. Widespread use of electricity and the internal combustion engine after 1920 is often considered the Third Industrial Revolution, but some people consider it an extension of the second.
Then we have the advent of computers, the "Digital Revolution." It seems clear that this was, indeed revolutionary, but this is not usually called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, because while important, it seems less profound than the first three which utterly transformed civilization beyond recognition. So just giving it it's own name seems appropriate.
Similarly, I think we should call what is happening now the "Cybernetic Revolution", rather than trying to decide whether this the Third, or Fourth, or maybe even Fifth IR. It is truly revolutionary, harnessing the cumulative power of the digital revolution to bring about truly unprecedented levels of task automation. And it will, I believe, resemble the First IR more than the other two in a very important way - large numbers of jobs are going to be eliminated rapidly, with nothing to replace them. The FIR threw almost 20% of Britain out of work between 1770 and 1800, creating a wave of petty crime, a huge population of paupers, Dickensian slums, and poor houses - essentially prisons for people who had committed no crimes. The new industrial economy did not provide enough jobs to restore full employment until 1840, or even later, 70 years of destitution.