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