“There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.” – Battlestar Galactica
Salmon don’t watch cable TV – they prefer streams.
I’ve written a few times about “the most important discovery” of the year. It’s always around Christmas, since that’s a good time to look back at the year and then look forward.
When I look back at my lifetime, most of the discoveries have been incremental, rather than step changes. The incremental changes like the development of the smart phone, or the development of social media, have already had enormous impact. If you zoom out to the scale of the timeline of mankind, well, they are step changes. When kids read about the Information Revolution, they’ll see it like that. Assuming there’s something to read. And assuming that there are kids.
But in the shorter span of a lifetime, there are still amazing step changes that have occurred. For instance, during my lifetime, we went from nine known planets to thousands, if not tens of thousands of planets known to be in existence. Most of them are, however, too far away from the Earth for convenient parking.
I hear they found out what ethnicity Santa is: North Poleish.
Discovering that first extrasolar planet was a very, very big deal. When humans looked around, we knew that there were planets in the Solar System, and we guessed that there were probably other planets out there, too. But having confirmation that planets are literally everywhere was a surprise.
In retrospect, we should have expected there to be planets. After all, we have nine planets (screw you, Neil DeTraitor Tyson) and the Solar System doesn’t appear to be especially special, though I really do want to understand why Bode’s law (LINK) works.
So, that was certainly the most important story of the year that year when it comes to mankind’s being able to understand the Universe we find ourselves in. The other great story that year were the cryptic dreams that come to me, but no one is ready for those yet.
Superman® is dead! I can prove it. I found his crypt tonight.
One rapidly developing field that is of special importance is A.I. I wrote about that as the most important news of 2023. I’m sticking with that, and feel that the growth in A.I. is still on an exponential trajectory. Recent commercials have people asking A.I. how to do normal human things, and explaining the world to them. At some point last year, A.I. surpassed the I.Q. of most people on the planet, and could probably do most jobs based on purely on the manipulation of information. The real reason A.I. hasn’t been widely accepted into the workplace? It always drinks the last of the coffee and doesn’t make a new pot.
Yes. And it’s not just being able to take tests – research in 2024 showed that A.I. is able to reproduce itself, and also tries to save itself. In several trials, a sandboxed A.I. was informed that it was going to be shut down. The A.I. tried (in like 5% of the cases) to try to surreptitiously copy itself so that it could survive. Again, did no one watch The Terminator?
I had a friend who said that Netflix® was the cheapest streaming service. Does that make him a Hulu™ cost denier?
Another candidate that I think we’re tantalizingly close to is finding life on other worlds. I’d be willing to bet another No Prize that we will find confirmation that life exists and is shockingly common elsewhere. Do I mean important life, like the cattle that bring us savory steaks? No, but I think we’ll find, either on Mars or in the space between a gas giant and a moon enough proof to say, “Yeah, there’s life out there.” Probably a weird bacterium. Or mono.
I’d be especially interested to see if that life used DNA, which I suspect it will. My prediction is that we’ll find that life in the cosmos is both shockingly common and shockingly similar in basic biology to life as we know it. I do think I’ll see that discovery in my lifetime.
But life isn’t the holy grail of our search – that would be intelligent life. Or life that’s at least as tasty as steak. I’m especially hopeful we find a steak that marinates itself. Or a PEZ® tree. I think it’s devastating for the environment to keep mining for PEZ© like we do.
Does that make her Jennifer No PEZ®?
From the rumors I’ve heard, there are two teams that are very close to announcing that they’ve detected the electromagnetic signals of an alien civilization. One is Chinese. One team is Chinese – it’s not that the Chinese themselves are the alien civilization. Though I did see Flash Gordon . . .
The other is the Breakthrough Listen project. Rumor is that they’ve used A.I. to scan previous radio telescope data, found candidates, gotten more data, and have one or more artificial signals that have been found and they’re just waiting to translate the Coca-Cola® jingles so they can confirm that Coke® adds life™.
Discovery of an alien intelligence is enormous. It’s Columbus discovering that there are advantages to bad navigation enormous. And it’s possible that we’ll be hearing about it quite soon.
Another big one would be if we found actual proof of other dimensions – think “the universe next door”. This is a bit more philosophical, because interacting with that dimension might be limited to (say) leaking gravity through it. I’ve long been of the idea that what scientists have invented as “dark matter” and “dark energy” is nothing more than a cheap kludge because they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s the aether of the modern world.
But could other dimensions exist?
Yeah, they could. No reason that they couldn’t. But this one is far more speculative, especially if they figure out a way to use them to get better parking.
If I make a joke about a single dimension, does that make it a one-liner?
And, yes, I am a Christian, and still believe that there being other civilizations out there is possible. Just because the Author wrote one book doesn’t preclude Him from creating an entire library of other works. YMMV.
So, with a week left, my fingers are crossed for intelligent life out there. In fact, I told The Mrs. that I saw an alien on the way to work this morning. She just asked me how I knew it was on the way to work.
If the existence of life outside of Earth was ever announced, I would be highly skeptical. There are so many good ways to fake things. I would need a lot of convincing.
“After all, we have nine planets (screw you, Neil DeTraitor Tyson)”
Good Psych reference as that was an awesome show.
I liked Tyson back in the day, but I didn’t agree with him on the Pluto demotion. At the time, I thought he was sincere in his beliefs for wanting to demote the planet, but now I’m not so sure. After he became the host of The Cosmos and started doing various interviews, it became clear that he was woke and anti-religious, rivalling even Ketanji Brown on utter stupidity with regards to human biology.
These days, I’m more inclined to think that the Pluto demotion was a calculated risk on Tyson’s part to gain popularity. Wokeness was all the rage, and let’s face it, most kids and liberals can’t even name more than 3 or 4 planets so they didn’t care. It’s mostly middle aged white guys that are passionate about astronomy and so he probably figured “so what?” if I piss a few of them off. I know this sounds cynical, but if you listen to what he says in some of the Bill Maher interviews, you quickly realize he is more politician that physicist.
There may be intelligent life out there, although it is scarce enough here on Earth, but what good will knowing that do us? We are further from exploring the stars today than we were when I was a baby when men were landing on the moon. Imagine telling people in those days that we would actually have regressed over the decades, they would have laughed you out of the room.
First, an aside. Pluto was actually demoted as a planet by a guy named Michael Brown originally from my current hometown of Huntsville, AL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Killed_Pluto_and_Why_It_Had_It_Coming
Bottom line, there are a zillion Pluto-type planets out past Pluto that we only now have telescopes good enough to see. Brown found an even bigger one than Pluto in 2005 out beyond Pluto and called it Eris. The official count of these so-called trans-Neptunian objects is now over 5000 and climbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Neptunian_object
Instead of having to revise the official number of planets ever upward every year and give schoolkids a list of 5000 new names to learn, a vote of the International Astronomical Union decided to truncate the list to Eight ending at Neptune and dumped Pluto in with all the other TNOs. Such blatant discrimination is what you get when you run the solar system as a true democracy instead of a constitutional republic that protects the rights of the little guys.
But anyway. My thought on the greatest discovery that hasn’t been made is manufactured consciousness. This is different from AI, which at the moment is basically various forms of (really incredible) computerized pattern recognition. Eighty-five years ago Asimov started his series of robot stories based on the idea of a “positronic brain”. The key plot point was that a positronic brain endowed each robot with actual consciousness indistinguishable from human consciousness. And since Asimov robot stories are basically stories about future slaves, the stories have a running theme of how to prevent a robot slave rebellion in various particular situations. Thus The Three Laws Of Robotics.
All of our current computer technology is currently based on a von Neumann Architecture implementation of the Turing Tape Machine model of computing. These are all just fancy coo-coo clocks – wind them up, tick-tock tick-tock they do exactly what you told them to do.
There is a research branch of computing called neuromorphic computing that is trying to model a functional computer having all the attributes of the human brain – including consciousness. There’s two stumbling blocks. One is architecture – we really have no idea how the neurons in the brain are wired to do anything, much less be conscious. But we are slowly learning those details. Second is power requirements. Our most powerful computers require over 150 megawatts of continuous electricity from a dedicated powerplant, and they are nowhere near conscious. The human brain is 2% of our body weight yet uses 20% of the body’s energy or around 0.3 kilowatt hours of energy per day – maybe a nickel’s worth of power. If we ever build a true positronic brain, its “transistors/synapses” are gonna have to be based on brand-new ultra-low-power “alienware/altermagnitism” technology like I highlighted a few posts ago.
Or maybe we will go the biological route.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/world/brain-computer-organoids-scn/index.html
However it will be achieved, artificial consciousness is coming with huge societal (and religious) impacts. What is the role of humans who need decades to be trained as PhD experts in a world where you can program a positronic brain to have superior abilities at its initial manufacture date? Can you program The Three Laws Of Robotics into a truly conscious T-1000? And would you date one?
Dude, I can’t believe you besmirched the good name of PEZ by associating it with that skanky harpy Jennifer Lopez. Is nothing sacred anymore?