Another Carrington Event?

Despite the click bait headline, this article details the very real threat that solar flares present to our technology. While there is only a one in eight chance that such a flare might happen before the year 2020, it's a certainty long term. One that we really ought to be planning for to minimize its effects when it does happen.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/737882/solar-storm-WIPE-OUT-modern-technology-carrington-event

Space-Faring Dinosaurs and the Scarcity of Intelligence

Over the course of my life, I have seen paleontological research into dinosaurs go through a revolution. When I was a kid reading books on the dinosaurs, they were full of pictures of primitive cold-blooded reptiles plodding around awaiting extinction. Now they're not seen that way. Today they are now seen as dynamic, complex animals. And that makes me wonder. What would have happened if they hadn't been smacked with an asteroid? Might they have gone on to achieve civilization and greatness millions of years before man was even a blip on evolution's radar?

It's difficult to say definitively what might have happened. There is always a chance that conditions might have aligned just so that the dinosaurs, or for that matter any of the multitudes of extinct species in earth's history,  might have eventually developed advanced intelligence and ventured out into space. One can never know for certain what might have been. But we can make informed guesses.

While the dinosaurs are turning out to have been more complex than we previously thought, much of that seems to have been turned towards adapting to their environment in a way very different from our own evolutionary path.

For us, the conditions of the world of the early primates specifically favored increasing levels of intelligence needed for survival. For the dinosaurs, not so much. In fact, in those days complexity may have been a liability. After all, the less complex cold-blooded crocodile co-existed with the dinosaurs and is still around relatively unchanged from those days. In their case, evolution favored simplicity. In other words, if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

That isn't to say that the dinosaurs weren't moving towards intelligence. Predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex most certainly were. But it was a specific kind of intelligence more akin to what you would need to exist as a pack of wolves, which are far smarter and more complex than the dinosaurs were. It wasn't what you would need to eventually build a skyscraper. In short, the dinosaurs were on the slow path to intelligence whereas the mammals were on the fast track.

One of the major factors governing what might have been is a general rule we see in biology. It's not really how big your brain is, whale brains are quite a bit larger than human brains but they're not as smart as us, but the ratio of how big your brain is to your body. And that's where the dinosaurs fall short. They were huge animals but with tiny brains in comparison to their bulk. This makes sense in one way, but presents a mystery in another.

Our planet's oxygen levels appear to have wildly varied in the past, and apparently still are -- the levels are currently dropping and have been for about the last million years and we're not sure why. Oxygen levels during the time of the last of the dinosaurs appear to have been much lower than they are today. So much so that if you had a time machine and went back to those days, your huge human oxygen hungry brain would cause you to quickly pass out and possibly even die.

That meant that small, simple brains that used less oxygen were the rule of the day. That also means that intelligence was not on the table for the dinosaurs, but it also begs a question. Large bodies also use oxygen, what advantage was there for the dinosaurs to have been so huge?

We don't know the answer to that. But we do know that after the dinosaurs were gone, the small sized, but comparatively large brains of the early mammals favored them in the post apocalyptic environment that was earth just after the asteroid hit. But we do know that the environmental conditions that later arose after the dinosaurs independent of the asteroid probably wouldn't have favored the dinosaurs' physiology and while they might not have gone extinct in later ages, they probably wouldn't have become intelligent either.

So, no space colonies for the dinosaurs, at least not for a much longer period than we required to get to that level of intelligence. If they hadn't gone extinct, we'd have never arisen and earth would still be a world ruled by complex, but unintelligent reptiles. But that also begs a question, if reptiles are destined to be simple and slow to develop intelligence, why did mammals develop intelligence so fast? And how did humans outdo all other mammals?

Well, the fact is, human evolution seems have been a fluke that happened under just the right conditions. The first thing that had to happen was the rise of the mammals in the first place, which unfortunately required the demise of the dinosaurs. Then you needed more oxygen in the atmosphere to swell brain sizes, which by chance happened. But you also need something else. Something in your environment must drive evolution for it to occur. Oddly enough, for us, this seems to have been climate change.

About 20 million years ago, geologic conditions were such that a period of climate upheaval ensued. This is thought to have caused chronic food shortages for the early primates meaning that being able to dynamically adapt and analyze became a desirable trait for finding food.

In short, the smarter mammals lived and those that could not cope died off as natural selection occurred. The end result is us, but what I find fascinating is that we weren't the only intelligent species that would result from that period of evolutionary history.

I often opine about the possibility of alien life on this channel and ask the great "Are we alone?" question. But there was a time when we were most certainly not alone. We once shared our world with other intelligences that while they were cousins, they were not the same species. In fact, at one point, there were three separate species that had mastered fire co-existing on planet earth; us, the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus.

The implications of that are profound if you think about it. Three kinds of intelligent, tool and fire using species all living together on one world. And all three appear to have been aggressive. Those must have been crazy days for sure and while we have tantalizing clues about what our cousins were like and how they interacted with us there is one glaring thing missing in both Neanderthal and Homo Erectus societies: art. And that may be why our cousins are no longer with us.

Creativity seems to have been key for survival. While our cousins were far and away more complex than 99 percent plus of all life that's ever existed on earth they just weren't creative enough to compete with us.

We have found no cave paintings or statues that can be attributed to either the Neanderthals or Homo Erectus. Our level of creativity seems to have given us the advantage, but that came about wholly by chance. Our environment dictated who we would become. And, given that Earth's environment has changed so much that might suggest that in the vast majority of cases alien life may have no driver to push evolution towards intelligence. There may be highly intelligent species out there like Homo Erectus, but they may lack creativity and remain forever primitive because of it. A lot like the stagnation of the crocodiles.

In fact, it could be the case that the more stable an earth-like world is, the less likely it is to evolve intelligence in any form. But at the same time, once intelligence does develop on a world, it may tend to happen with several related species at the same time as it did here. As those species compete, the others would likely die off, aggressive is better in such a state of affairs. But if a world has multiple, protected continents then multiple species civilizations could occur. An interesting concept for a science fiction author to mull over indeed.

But that didn't happen here, our cousins are now in the past and we stand triumphantly at the apex of evolution, all other contenders long gone. But will we remain alone? Perhaps the same environmental conditions that favored our development favored other non-primate species and may continue to do so until they reach our level of intelligence. It's well known that octopuses, chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, and certain species of birds aren't dummies by any stretch. Neither are cats and dogs. In fact, at no other period in earth's history has so much diversity of intelligence existed.

That presents the opposite argument. If general intelligence is rising on earth, then does that mean it does so on other planets as a rule? We don't know. But we do know that physiology also plays a role. While animal intelligence can be quite high and may be evolving, most of them have physiological disadvantages. Dolphins and whales may be smart, but try harnessing fire in the depths of the ocean.

Similar challenges face all intelligent animals and that affects the aliens too. You can be as smart as you want, but if you can't physically build a computer, you'll never go anywhere. It seems that we really did get lucky with both our brain and our physiology. Very lucky to the tune that maybe the reason we haven't detected any alien civilizations is because high levels of intelligence is a fluke rather than an end point of evolution. It also seems that useful physiology that can do things like smelt metal is also a fluke. We're a fluke inside a fluke.

And, there's yet another fluke, this time cultural. Even when you have a creative species like ourselves, it still took us tens of thousands of years to hit the bronze age. And we might still be in the bronze age if successive dark ages had occurred repeatedly resetting the clock for civilization, we do live on a planet where there are to this day uncontacted primitive stone-aged peoples. And we ourselves wouldn't be at this level if someone had simply missed something and failed to pursue a key technology.

Case in point, the Roman Empire and the steam engine. They knew about it, but never used it. As socially advanced as they were, no one noticed that Heron of Alexandria's steam engine could save labor and do work. Had someone noticed that at the time and ran with it, we might have been on the moon in the 6th century instead of descending into the dark ages. The ancient world, as great as it was in many ways, fell for lack of ancient equivalents of James Watt and Thomas Newcomen. Cultural conditions have to be just so for a technological civilization to develop at all.

Well, there I've gone and done it and gone off the rails. In a single video I've covered the dinosaurs, early mammals, aliens, climate change and the steam engine. Next thing you know, I'll be reciting a recipe for biscuits. But before I do, I must give a warning.

There is a line now drawn in the sand. Once you have advanced technology, everything changes and the further you go, the harder it is to go back. We have already become the lords of evolution. We are the single biggest factor in the future of evolution on earth dwarfing even the great asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and soon we will be able to tailor the organisms of our world to be smarter as well as augmenting ourselves.

A new age is coming upon us where we must define our ethics and who we are. The awesome power that lies within the mastery of genetics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology awaits us and we must manage it carefully, or some day we may indeed no longer be alone, regardless of whether we find alien civilizations. It may be the case that they emerge here on earth. We must be ready for them if they do.

Thanks for listening, I am science fiction author and futurist John Michael Godier currently feeling naughty because I lied, I don't actually have a good biscuit recipe and use store-bought premix and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for in-depth, regular explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live. 

Build a Moon Colony with Spider Bots!

I thought this proof of concept story was interesting. When we do build a colony on the moon it would make sense to build as much of it with robots as we can.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-25/watch-these-spiderbots-train-to-build-a-city-on-the-moon

New Images of the Strange Bright Spots on Ceres

One major surprise that's coming from NASA's Dawn probe at Ceres is the presence of strange bright spots in a crater on that asteroid. Recently NASA released new images of the spots which are thought to be salts left after the impact melted ice into a salty liquid that then evaporated into space.

See the images here

NASA'S EmDrive Paper Finally Published

It's official, the EmDrive seems to work, but we have no idea how.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3958206/Nasa-finally-publishes-controversial-fuel-free-impossible-drive-paper-t-explain-works.html

A major breakthrough in gene editing

This news story seems to hold a lot of promise. Previously, editing genes inside major organs wasn't possible. Now it is. This will allow us to eventually treat a host of diseases that we couldn't before.

Breakthrough in Gene Editing

The Great Filter

One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is the Fermi paradox. At it's most basic level, the Fermi Paradox asks that if the universe is teeming with intelligent life, then why don't we see evidence of it? While one may be rightly skeptical when claims of finding aliens are advanced, the fact of the matter is that it may be more likely that our galaxy would be teeming with intelligent life than not.

The reason for this is simple. Fermi stated that there are billions of stars in our galaxy that are comparable to our sun. No small amount of these stars are older than our sun. Some of these stars are bound to have planets similar to Earth. Some of those will develop intelligent life like Earth has. If you take that premise, or the related Drake equation that can be used to predict how many intelligent species should be present in the galaxy, you come up with staggering numbers every time in favor of intelligent life being everywhere and easily detected. But it's not.

There is no shortage of solutions for the Fermi Paradox. These can range anywhere from an ocean planet where life is intelligent but can't develop technology because, well,  fins are bad for manufacturing things to the need for a presence of a Jupiter-sized planet to clean out enough asteroids to keep life from going extinct every few million years. But one potential solution stands out.

It's called the Great Filter and it suggests that the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over the place is because something, which could be one of several things, causes those civilizations to go extinct before they ever have a chance of branching out into the universe. More, the idea of a great filter comes along with a rather spooky conclusion. The easier it is for life to evolve to our stage, the worse our chances are for long-term survival.

Part of the reason that the Great Filter is such an attractive solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we know how earth-life behaves on a fundamental basis and we can assume that other life behaves much the same way. One thing we notice time and again about Earth life is that it's unbelievably tenacious. You can drill miles into the earth and take rock samples and still find bacteria living there. Conversely, you can do the same in the arctic. Bacteria have even survived being trapped inside a camera lens on the moon retrieved during an Apollo mission after being there for years.
Knowing that, we can reasonably expect that life will fill any void it can.

Some of that life will eventually evolve intelligence and move out to colonize literally any space it can find to live. That would include earth. But, we have seen no reliable evidence that alien races have ever visited earth at all and the life here all seems to be related. And when we look out into the cosmos, we don't see aliens, at least not yet.

Instead, we seem to be able to explain everything we've observed in the universe using natural physical processes rather than resorting to chalking anything up to the activities of aliens. While certain phenomena such as Boyajian's star or the Wow! Signal might be suggestive of alien activity, they aren't conclusive and as far as we have seen the universe appears dead other than life here. But it shouldn't be, suggesting the Great Filter.

Now one possibility is that the filter is biological. In other words, some aspect of evolution has to happen just so for an advanced civilization such as the human race to form. In other words, earth got lucky. Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be anything in the way for evolution to eventually create intelligent life on literally thousands of worlds in our galaxy alone. That may suggest something else.

That something else is extinction. Let's face it, since 1945 the human race has had the ability to destroy itself in a nuclear war. And while it's encouraging that we haven't yet done that, there is no guarantee that we won't either. We also seem to be able to alter the composition of our atmosphere through our activities, which could also potentially prove fatal. And there will be other dangers to our existence posed by future technologies such as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

While I have confidence that we'll survive our infancy, never underestimate the power of our human self-preservation instinct, with so much seemingly standing in our way, it's not a far stretch to envision that civilizations may more often than not destroy themselves.

So if the Great Filter exists then one of three things must be the case regarding our civilization.

1. We're already past the Great Filter, unlike most other civilizations in the universe which didn't make. This would make us incredibly rare, but with a very bright future.

2. We're early in the game meaning that in most places in the universe life has not had enough time to evolve intelligence. In this scenario, we'll be the great old ones to any new intelligences that crop up.

3. We haven't hit the filter yet. If we find life elsewhere in our solar system such as on Mars, this would not bode well for us. It would mean that life is not rare and that would imply that the filter lies ahead.

But it's also possible that there is no such thing as the Great Filter and that some civilizations may indeed destroy themselves, but it's not a hard rule. It may simply be too expensive for a civilization to colonize the galaxy, or they may simply hide their presence for security purposes, or advanced civilizations don't build huge megastructures and simply exist as a nanotechnological cloud that cannot be easily detected. They may even live in virtual reality and ignore the universe entirely.

Can the human brain be hacked?

Unintended consequences are the rule of the day for technologies that can vastly change human society. A great example of this is the home computer and the internet. While

undoubtedly one of the most important developments in the history of human technology,

it also brought on the advent of hacking, for better or worse.

It can be said that a human, at least in some ways, can be seen as a kind of biological

computer. Computers can do math, but so can we. Computers are programmed, we are

taught. And while there is currently much more to us than there are to computers, there

will come a day when computers will become virtually indistinguishable from their

human counterparts, at least in their abilities.

But at the same time, it seems likely that we ourselves will merge with our technology at some point, eventually using it to enhance ourselves in ways ranging from having a Ph.D. in physics implanted into our brains without having to attend a single class, or direct virtual reality connections to the internet all unfolding due to a chip implanted in our heads, or even telepathic direct mind to mind conversations.

If that's the way things go, then one must wonder what the unintended consequences will be. Among those are the possibility of someone hacking your brain, and that may be possible sooner than you think. More on that in a minute.

Rudimentary forms of these technologies already exist and research into improving them

is moving faster than most people realize. For example, brain to computer interfaces have

existed for some time. They fall into two general categories. The first are medical in

nature. These amazing technologies are already being employed to allow people with

severe spinal injuries to move robotic arms, and even in some cases restoring some amount of sight for people with certain types of acquired blindness. Wonderful, promising technologies to be sure.

But the other class is more recent and presents a dilemma. This is gaming and recreation. Non-invasive interfaces can be used to control and enhance video games. Called Neurogaming, these interfaces use the player's brainwave patterns, heart rate, and other indicators to change how the game is being expressed by its software. This includes adjusting scenery and music depending on the mood of the player. Eventually, this will go much further and potentially allow the player to control the game entirely with their mind, and possibly someday enter it completely in a full immersion brain-interfaced virtual reality mode. 

Other technologies and research expand this even more which include efforts to decode

thoughts. This is an effort which has seen some surprising success, even going so far as to reconstruct and create crude movies of what people are seeing from signals detected in the area of the brain responsible for vision. Another is the successful connection of a biological neuron with a computer chip, termed a neurochip. These are technologies that we already have, and no one is quite sure just how fast this field as a whole is progressing and that opens us up for the unintended consequences.

We will undoubtedly use these technologies to hack ourselves to varying degrees. Neuroscientist Chris Berka has found a method of monitoring the state of the brain where it becomes hyperfocused on a task, think if it as the state you are in when you are "in the zone". This allows Berka's company to inform people when they are "in the zone" helping them "zone in" and improve their performance.

As technology improves, other hacks will become available to us. Current generations of prosthetics, for example, are becoming quite advanced. There will come a day when those prosthetics surpass their biological counterparts. There may come a day, perhaps sooner rather than later, when disabled athletes in the Paralympics outperform biological athletes, no doubt creating ethical dilemmas when people wish to replace their healthy biological limbs with prosthetics. While that may seem a stretch, the human race generally speaking has been no stranger to body modification, and there's no reason to suspect that's going to change.

But what of the possibility of someone else hacking into your brain? The answer to this

question is complicated because we already do have ways of hacking someone's brain, such as brain-washing or propaganda. So it could be said that we've been hacking people's brains for thousands of years. But as to technologically doing so, it may not only be possible, but may come far sooner than most realize.

As technology advances, there seems to be little reason to doubt that eventually it will be able to decipher people's thoughts. Rudimentary forms of that are already being experimented with, in fact one such experiment deciphered parts of people's pin numbers and banking information. In the event that this technology continues to improve, eventually your politics, religious beliefs, and just about everything else that goes on inside a human brain becomes visible to someone else. Disturbing on many levels, hackers may use that technology to blackmail people, or worse.

But if we take all of these technologies a step further, it may some day be possible to not only eavesdrop on people's minds, but change them. Thoughts are just electro-chemical neural phenomena and likely can be changed. If an unethical individual, say a politician, that wanted to rule the world came up with a hacking scheme to hack and change enough minds in order to win an election, then we will live in a very frightening world indeed.

But there is hope, we're still moderately early in this game and people within the industry are actively sounding the alarm. With proper regulation and well-thought out architecture for these technologies, we may dodge this bullet yet.

A fascinating take on the problem of orbital space junk

Anyone interested in human space flight knows that space junk is becoming a serious issue. After decades of space launches, a halo of debris now surrounds earth that consists of everything from dead satellites to paint chips. Space entrepreneur Tom Markusic has a novel answer to this problem: recycle it by capturing and towing it to Mars for use as raw materials for future missions to that planet. Now that's outside-of-the-box thinking at its best!

Read a full article on it here at Space.com

Promising New Technology for Those with Spinal Injuries

Amazing. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/11/09/paralysed-people-could-walk-again-instantly-after-scientists-pro/

The Dangers of Autonomous Weapons

There has been a push, particularly in the UN and among advocacy groups, for a global ban on the development of autonomous or A.I. weaponry arguing that there should always be a human in the chain when operating weapons of war. Regardless of the ethical concerns within the issue, here is a rather chilling article that presents that it may already be too late to enact such a ban. There seems to me to be a chronic problem developing where our all too human governments are now too slow to keep up with regulating the increasingly rapid development of technology.

Is it too late to ban autonomous weaponry?

Another You? Looking Beyond the Observable Universe

One of the major questions in cosmology today is how large the universe really is. While there are indicators that it is at least very, very large, the fact is, we don't know for sure, and it may be the case that the universe isn't just big, it's infinite. And if that is indeed the case, then the nature of our universe starts looking really weird. For example, in an infinite universe, there is in fact other intelligent life in the universe. Statistically speaking, it must be so. But not aliens, per se, rather almost exact copies of earth and the human race.

In fairness, some astronomers suspect that the universe is finite in that it has some special geometry such as a donut shape that allows for no boundaries, but limited volume. But on the other hand, those models of finite universes don't fit the data we have as well as an infinite universe does.

Why can't we tell for sure? The problem is the expansion of the universe. Driven by dark energy, space is expanding. This means that the further you are from an object, say a distant galaxy, the more expanding space there is between you and it.

Ultimately, that cumulative amount of expanding space becomes so great that it cancels out the speed of light and light waves can't reach us from an object because the expanding space in between would require them to travel faster than light, which light can't do. This leads to a sphere of what we can see known as the Hubble Volume, or the observable universe. Beyond the boundaries of this volume, we can't see a thing which means part of our universe is invisible to us.

The trouble is, we don't know how much of the universe lies outside the Hubble Volume. It could be only a small part, or it could be most of the universe. Or, the universe could be infinite and never ends. And that's the kicker, any universe that is infinite would mean that anything that's possible in the universe happens ... somewhere, no matter how unlikely. Infinite is infinite, after all, so if it's possible it's happened.

So long as matter is evenly distributed across the universe, something which astronomical observations support, then that means that past the Hubble Volume there should be exact copies of earth, our solar system and ourselves that vary a bit in the details, but overall are nearly identical.

Your doppelganger would have many of the same memories that you do, share the same likes and dislikes, the only difference being that your counterpart may have eaten pizza for dinner while you had soup. And since it's infinity we're talking about here, then the numbers of these copy planets would be staggering. Think an infinite number of doppelganger you's.

So how far do you have to travel to find such a copy planet? Physicist Max Tegmark has calculated that our nearest, almost perfect twin would be about 10 to the 1028  meters from here. That's an incomprehensibly huge distance, so you probably won't be meeting your doppleganger any time soon. But you will see other, closer, less perfect, earth copies, perhaps ones where the dinosaurs didn't go extinct or life took a completely different evolutionary path.

The infinite universe possibility is actually based on pretty solid physics and statistics making it the least questionable of any of the multi-verse theories. Often termed a level 1 multiverse, this one would simply be the universe at large where an infinite amount of Hubble Volumes exist, some of them being virtually identical to our own, some of them being very different, all of them too distant to see or reach.

The next level of a multi-verse is level 2. This is where there are more than one level 1 multiverses. In other words a potentially infinite amount of individually infinite universes. While not exactly intuitive, there is a very good principle backing this: the anthropic principle. Our universe just so happens to be perfect for supporting human life. Uncannily so, but it didn't have to work out that way. In fact, we have no idea why it did.

But if you've got an infinite amount of universes, then it's no big deal statistically if you just so happen to be in the lucky one. But if there is only one universe, then the odds of it existing just so to allow life are astronomically against it existing. Since it clearly does, or something does, then one must look at alternative theories such as if this is a computer simulation.

But there is a third level, where there theoretically are also many copies of you. The level 3 multiverse is the most controversial of the three, but also the most mind-blowing. This theory suggests that all possible outcomes split off from our universe and become  parallel universes. In one universe, you went to the theater. In another, you went swimming instead. You can't see these other universes, but they would be there hovering just above you.

For me, the most interesting aspect of this thinking is that if we can answer the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite, it would instantly answer the question of whether there is other intelligent life in the universe. If infinite, then statistically speaking it's a certainty. It's just not the kind of alien life we thought it would be, its just other versions of us. But there may be other versions of them too. 

The End of Nightmares?

Scientsts identify the genes involved with nightmares and sleep disturbances