Read moreIngredients:
- 1 cup magnesium
- 1 cup silicon
- 2 cups iron
- 2 cups oxygen
- 1/2 teaspoon aluminum
- 1/2 teaspoon nickel
- 1/2 teaspoon calcium
- 1/4 teaspoon sulfur
- dash of water delivered by asteroids
Blend well in a large bowl, shape into a round ball with your hands and place it neatly in a habitable zone area around a young star. Do not over mix. Heat until mixture becomes a white hot glowing ball. Bake for a few million years. Cool until color changes from white to yellow to red and a golden-brown crust forms. It should not give off light anymore. Season with a dash of water and organic compounds. It will shrink a bit as steam escapes and clouds and oceans form. Stand back and wait a few more million years to see what happens. If you are lucky, a thin frosting of life may appear on the surface of your new world.
Quotes
Read moreAlan Turing, via Benedict Cumberbatch, is getting some attention. When asked in “The Imitation Game” whether machines will ever think like humans, he scoffs – that’s the wrong question. Machines may think, but not “like humans.” Much of the singularity talk doesn’t get this point, but is rooted in anthropomorphism, which makes about as much sense as a golem emerging from a carefully-shaped clay effigy. We like to think there’s no intelligence that ain’t human, but that’s a shadow of anthropocentric hubris. As we get into robotics and AI in a bigger, industrial-strength, way, what will they teach us about intelligence, human and other?
Read moreWe have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
Read moreThe heads of the networks were obsessed, for example, with Neuro-Linguitic Programming (NLP), a form of subliminal influence pioneered in the United States after 1975. The biggest of the Ostankino channels made a pilot for a show based on Lifespring, the controversial U.S. private, for-profit “life training” courses that went bankrupt in the 1990s after former participants successfully sued for psychological damage. Lifespring’s approach, informed by NLP and Gestalt Therapy, was to “reprogram” people—first by confusing them to the point where their critical thinking breaks down, then by frightening and humiliating them with the recollection of past traumas, all before lifting them up with the promise of success and then, when they are putty, implanting key messages to make them pliant to the demands of the Lifespring “trainers.” The pilot program Ostankino produced replicated the Lifespring sessions in a studio, with participants and the audience at home meant to experience the emotional roller coaster, and addictive effect, of the trainings.
As the decade came to an end and as the Kremlin became ever more aggressive and paranoid, I began to notice how Ostankino TV was increasingly starting to reflect, however haphazardly, the underlying principles of a Lifespring training. It’s programs confused viewers with bizarre conspiracy theories and itched at unresolved traumas about Stalin, the collapse of the USSR and the destitution of the 1990s—all before lifting the viewer up with stories of Putin-era triumph. Meanwhile current affairs TV presenters would pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly. It was a powerful technique. As I watched programs where political pundits would lecture to the camera, such as Mikhail Leontiev’s Odnako, or more recently Dmitry Kiselev’s Vest Nedeli, I could tell they were deeply manipulative. But would still find myself nodding my head as I watched them, their paranoid mindset (temporarily) imprinted on my mind.
Read moreThen there was the television, which I never worked on, with a more sinister mission: political-psychological control. The approach could be deeply counterintuitive. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection. Even supposedly “science-based” programs are used for manipulative effect. The most expensive documentary ever shown on Russian television aired in 2009 and was called Plesen (“Mold”). It argued that mold is taking over the Earth—an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease. When the film aired it caused a panic, with people running out to buy anti-mold machines and calling into the network from all over the country, asking for help.
There was another spate of prime-time documentaries about “psychological weapons.” One was The Call of the Void, which aired in 2009 and featured current secret service men who informed the audience about the new psychic weapons they had developed. The Russian military, the program claimed, employed “sleepers,” psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world’s collective unconscious, and from there penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One had entered the mind of President George W. Bush, they said, and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the United States had hatched failed to come off. The message was clear: If the secret service can see into the U.S. president’s mind, they can definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought.
“Fine, I’ll tell you. But I have to warn you, Richard, that your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”
“Why flawed?” asked Noonan.
“Because biologists have already been burned attempting to apply human psychology to animals. Earth animals, I note.”
“Just a second,” said Noonan. “That’s totally different. We’re talking about the psychology of intelligent beings.”
“True. And that would be just fine, if we knew what intelligence was.”
“And we don’t?” asked Noonan in surprise.
“Believe it or not, we don’t. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”
“Yes, that’s us,” agreed Noonan.
“Unfortunately. Or here’s a definition-hypothesis. Intelligence is a complex instinct which hasn’t yet fully matured. The idea is that instinctive activity is always natural and useful. A million years will pass, the instinct will mature, and we will cease making the mistakes which are probably an integral part of intelligence. And then, if anything in the universe changes, we will happily become extinct—again, precisely because we’ve lost the art of making mistakes, that is, trying various things not prescribed by a rigid code.”
“Somehow this all sounds so … demeaning.”
“All right, then here’s another definition—a very lofty and noble one. Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”
Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
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He had never felt this outside of the Zone, and even in the Zone it had only happened two or three times. Suddenly, he seemed to be in another world. A million smells assaulted him at once—smells that were sharp, sweet, metallic; dangerous, caressing, disturbing; as immense as houses, as tiny as dust particles, as rough as cobblestones, and as delicate and intricate as watch gears. The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture … This only lasted a moment. He opened his eyes, and everything disappeared. This wasn’t another world—it was his same old world turning an unfamiliar side toward him, revealing it for an instant, then immediately sealing it off, before he even had the chance to investigate.
Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
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Read moreWe’re getting better and better at dating mass-extinction events, but we’re not having a comparable improvement in our understanding of what caused them.
Measurements from Rosetta’s Rosina instrument found that water on comet 67P /Churyumov-Gerasimenko contains about three times more deuterium – a heavy form of hydrogen – than water on Earth.
The discovery seems to overturn the theory that Earth got its water, and so its ability to harbour life, from water-bearing comets that slammed into the planet during its early history.
Comet 67P is thought to have come from what is called the Kuiper belt, a broad band of frozen bodies that begins beyond the orbit of Neptune. The main asteroid belt contains more rocky objects that circle the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Kathrin Altwegg at the University of Bern said that rather than comets ferrying water to Earth, it may have arrived onboard asteroids instead. Details of the discovery are reported in the journal, Science.
“Today asteroids have very limited water, that’s clear. But that was probably not always the case, said Altwegg. In the earliest period of the solar system, 3.8bn years ago, asteroids are thought to have crashed into Earth regularly in what is called the late heavy bombardment. “At that time, asteroids could well have had much more water than they have today,” Altwegg said.
The Rosina instrument measured water coming off the comet as it flew around the body. Scientists plan to take more measurements as the comet nears the sun and its begins to spew more water vapour and dust out into space.
Measurements from other comets have found water with similar deuterium contents to that on Earth. But the strange composition of comet 67P’s water suggests that the picture of comets bringing water to Earth is too simplistic.
TIRED: comets are the source of water for Earth.
WIRED: asteroids are the life giving, death dealing forces of nature.
Read moreThere are a lot of assumptions here: For one, that alien biology will have comparable physical requirements to our own. If biotic life isn’t limited to Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone—a restriction that precludes the icy moons Europa and Titan—the number of life-harboring worlds could actually be much higher.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 