The Geek & Pagan Hierarchies

These were too funny to pass up:

The Geek Hierarchy

The Pagan Hierarchy.

Finite and Infinite Games: How to Live

Via Kevin Kellys Cool Tools.

The wisdom held in this brief book now informs most of what I do in life. Its key distinction--that there are two types of games, finite and infinite--resolves my uncertainties about what to do next. Easy: always choose infinite games. The message is appealing because it is deeply cybernetic, yet it's also genuinely mystical. I get an "aha" every time I return to it.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
*
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
*
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
*
The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.
*
I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over.
*
Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will play by initiating their own.
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Evil is the termination of infinite play.
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No one can play a game alone.
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There is but one infinite game.

Finite and Infinite Games
A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
James P. Carse
1986, 180 pages
$7
Ballantine Books
Amazon

Trippiest Trip Report

Below is one of the most descriptive, far out and cosmic trip reports I've ever read. Originial report on Erowid.

DOSE : 50mg synthetic DMT in a glass pipe on a small bed of dill, three large, hot, plasticy tokes:

Upon inhalation, the trembling darkness before me crystallized instantly into a shimmering vortex of lime-colored tessera and began a meticulous implosion in upon itself. Pulses of sinuous electric energy shot along it from behind me and I could see them disappear down its infinite corridor. Each one came faster and faster and faster until this typhoon like tunnel was throbbing with supple, supernova pulsations. It was then that I began to accelerate, an auditory drone that seemed to flange at the edges of my being propelling me along. I couldn't believe the breakneck speed with which I was beginning to move, like a proton in a hyperspatial supercollider. The breathtakingly ecstatic sensation of being literally shot out of the confines of my corporeal body was overwhelming, and already my mind was grasping wildly about for some semblance of familiarity. No previous DMT journey had ever moved this fast. The vortex started coiling then, curling and cycling into its cylindrical self, and I became aware that it was but one strand in a warping and wefting dimension which was now materializing and taking on a thousand outlandish forms all around me. Ahead was an entirely ludicrous, tensile, concentric, mandala-like disco-medusa that wore about it a technicolor dreamcoat of fibrillating antennae, surrounded by an ultraviolet aura. Instantly I could tell it was alive: some sort of a sentinel. Then seemingly out of nowhere and from every direction at once came these freakish tentacles of liquid lapis lazuli. They began moving together with an almost orchestral hyperprecision, and I was completely mesmerized - it was like nothing I had ever seen. I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at - there must literally have been thousands of them - I was utterly flabbergasted. I knew I must find a way past this creature though, as extraordinary as she was. We were still cruising along at the speed of light, now descending backwards together through an amoeboid, octahedral gallery of iridescent vaults. It was at this moment that I became suddenly aware we were not alone. The vaults seemed to zoom explosively outward then and the gallery expanded ad infinitum into a gargantuan, labrynthine, almost interstellar space, and through every vault poured the miraculous and zany imps who make the tryptamine hyperdimension their home. The tentacles of lapis lazuli gathered these capricious, multi-colored enigmas in towards the center, and became the architectonic scaffolding of their new multi-dimensional reality, a world which I found myself dab smack in the middle of. It was like a liquid mind ecology of staggering and alien complexity, the mind as it crosses over into quantum warpdrive and migrates ever further out into the oceanic beyond. At this point the glorious geometries transcended what is even vaguely feasible in this three dimensional mundane, constantly concrescing into new and varigated permutations, exfoliating out of themselves what might be called hyperspherologies of the divine, and to look anywhere was to be shot clean through with scintillating amazement. Crowding and cramming themselves into my field of vision were thousands upon thousands of beings of every imaginable sort and many that were completely unimaginable. They were everywhere jabbering in indecipherable tongues, juggling incandescent neon microworlds of dancing beings, and morphing with a zen-like, diaphanous fluidity that remains a primal miracle no matter how often you lay your all too human eyes on it. The primordial intelligence being manifest before me was palpable, undeniable, transcendently amazing - it shook me to my core in a more-than-real gleeful profundity. All I could do was sit there in divine liquid awe, my soul gaping wide open, and stare at the incalculable proportions of bizarreness and the down right weird that lay before me. It was like being entertained by the 76,000 piece orchestra of an alien civilization in whose classical music each note is not merely a musical tone, but an entire world, each just as intricate and nuancical as our own. You have a sense of being swarmed by the whimsical mastermind artforms of an extremely eccentric Boolean contortionist, a diabolical merry go round of linguistic Rubix cubes, 13th dimensional millipedes saying themselves to themselves as they make love, and impossible Gordian knots dancing the jitterbug at a lyrical lightspeed: a gelatinous ballet of endlessly self-juxtaposing pirouettes. You realize all at once you have arrived and are now having darshan with this gigantically insectoid, otherworldly Oz.

They came at me again and again, a more than possible tsunami of opalescent combobulations, like rivers of music and miracles and clowns, the flood gates of my soul thrown wider than wide with the sheer magnitude of this dazzling, world-devouring spectacle. It was the primal, otherworldly bewilderness of the Andalusian gardens that grow in the antipodes of the mind, the crystalline vegetal perplexity of its delectable ecologies spilling and dripping and pouring like liquid diamonds from my eyes. The presence of what is awesome, what is wildly and passionately and numinously alive, filled every meridian in the vast continent of my expanded being, an intensity of joy and love and life coursing like heavenly ambrosia through my electrified veins. It was as though I myself was god, moving through liquid ecologies of god, the self-crystallizing emerald labyrinths of the tryptamine dreamtime, a marvelous infundibulum of plasmoidal calisthenics. What occurred was a total meltdown of everything I know and hold dear, utter surrender into the honeycomb lovewomb of the universe reborn, born anew in a thousand unendingly magnificent eyes, and Maya and Lila handheld spinning in sundream dandelions, my five senses spinning like a zillion gyroscopes round the centripetal amethyst of this all and everything.

I was there, and then I was back - zap like before - I was back before I even knew I was back, the dimensions subsiding very quickly within me as the last few molecules of DMT were cracked wide open and gone. The room before me buzzed and shimmered like the most unlikely dream. The world? Oh yes - I remember - I like it there. Hello people. You look so normal and good. But wait, something just happened. What was that thing? Oh YES, OH MY LORD YES.....everything was still a shimmering mindmirage or bliss and joy and awe. WOW...... I think I said that: WOW......

To think that we all spend hours there every night, after *we* have been metabolized away that is, and that every day the collectivity of human consciousness looks upon that miracle for over 50 billion hours, is more than any of us can even begin to begin to understand. Seven minutes spent in that dimension, the primal furnace of our being, is enough for most people to think about for the rest of their lives. How miraculously absurd and awe-inspiring is our situation as humans then, that we are somehow built around this certain little molecule, only four atoms away from serotonin, the neurotransmitter which mediates and colors every aspect of our waking lives. It is like the human body is a door, a portal, and DMT is the key that opens our experience to the all-possible, the everything dimension, which surrounds us on all sides though we see it not. That the simple quantum difference of four atoms can open this for anyone to see is, and will remain, the greatest, most mysterious enigma in this life. The day we unlock its secrets we will for the first time awaken from the dream.

** A reader pointed out to me that DMT, a substance found in the Amazon may have an anolog from a substance call phalaris in North America. You can read more about it here.

Into The Realm Of The Imagination

Here's a bit from a Terence McKenna lecture in '93 which has been archived on Levity.org:

History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal--does this sound familiar to you? It's the neighborhood, right? [laughter] That's because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you seen, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening, and that what the-- It's as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies.

Psyop: Terror Warning

I'm sure you've all heard about the new terror warning. I've been predicting something like this since 9-11. The fact that this terror warning is happening now right before a pivotal election for Bush comes as no suprise to me. The timing seems way too convenient in light of Bush's plummeting popularity in the wake of the abuse scandal. And have you ever noticed that we always get such warnings right before a holiday? Such a tactic is textbook psyops, deliberately timed to maximize the "effect" of the psyop on the American psyche, while travelling Americans are most apt to think about it and feel vunerable to it. As Bush used to say, "Make no mistake", we are being psychologically prepared. It's long been my guess that if there is another strike, and unlike most everyone who keeps thinking it's inevitable (it isn't!!!), it will be perpetrated by our own elite.

Possibly with the help of the Israeli Massad, who for some very WEIRD reason has been caught twice in the last 3 weeks attempting to break into nuclear power plants in Georgia just miles from the upcoming G8 summit. If this doesn't raise your eyebrows I don't know what will! You can read all about it here, here and here.

You do the math. Even if they are telling the truth THIS time, I just can't bring myself to believe anything they have to say anymore. As far as I'm concerned this whole War on Terror is phony.

John Shirley has this to say over at his blog,

I think of General Franks saying that the Constitution might have to be suspended if there were a large enough terrorist attack. I think of his saying this in context of Bush being at risk of not being elected. Spikes of paranoia in my mind. WOuld the neocons detonate a small nuke and say the terrorists did it, just so Bush can declare martial law and suspend the election? Probably not--but people will say they did, if a bomb *is* set off. And you and I will probably never know for sure...

I think of indications that the draft is coming back. Legislation to make it happen--with fewer exemptions. Notoriously WOlfowitz, Rove, Bush, and Cheney all got out of the draft through exemptions...that won't be available to young people when they're in charge, if my hearsay info on that is right.

So there's Franks' warning, there's plans for the draft, there's a warning about a major terrorist attack. There are warnings from Bush to Syria and Iran...

Meanwhile Bush would be empowered to invade those countries perceived as allies of Muslim extremists...and that's called World War Three...

Of course, I deeply, sincerely hope none of this ever comes to pass. It wouldn't make any economic sense for the elite to precipitate such a disaster. But then again, those in power seem to be getting more afraid all the time, and fearful people can do really stupid things.

Me, I do my best each day to remain positive, to love the people in my life, to spread cheer and good will everywhere I go. Perhaps positive thoughts and actions from enough of us can make a big enough difference to move us back on the path to survival and prosperity.

Dreams of Liberty? Or of Control?

Dale Carrico has written a brilliant critique of "negative" libertarianism. Regardless of where you fall on the "free market" issue, his critique brings up many salient points worth addressing.

Here are the concluding paragraphs from a longer essaylet, “Trouble in Libertopia,” over on Amor Mundi:

“Lately, I have begun to suspect that at the temperamental core of the strange enthusiasm of many technophiles for so-called "anarcho-capitalist" dreams of re-inventing the social order, is not finally so much a craving for liberty but for a fantasy, quite to the contrary, of TOTAL EXHAUSTIVE CONTROL. This helps account for the fact that negative libertarian technophiles seem less interested in discussing the proximate problems of nanoscale manufacturing and the modest benefits they will likely confer, but prefer to barrel ahead to paeans to the "total control over matter." They salivate over the title of the book From Chance to Choice (in fact, a fine and nuanced bioethical accounting of benefits and quandaries of genetic medicine), as if biotechnology is about to eliminate chance from our lives and substitute the full determination of morphology -- when it is much more likely that genetic interventions will expand the chances we take along with the choices we make. Behind all their talk of efficiency and non-violence there lurks this weird micromanagerial fantasy of sitting down and actually contracting explicitly the terms of every public interaction in the hopes of controlling it, getting it right, dictating the details. As if the public life of freedom can be compassed in a prenuptual agreement, as if communication would proceed more ideally were we first to re-invent language ab initio (ask these liber-techians how they feel about Esperanto or Loglan and you will see that this analogy, often enough, is not idle).

“But with true freedom one has to accept an ineradicable vulnerability and a real measure of uncertainty. We live in societies with peers, boys. Give up the dreams of total invulnerability, total control, total specification. Take a chance, live a little. Fairness is actually possible. Justice is in our reach. Radical technological development regulated to ensure that costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared can emancipate the world. Liberty is so much less than freedom.”

Immortalist Utilitarianism

By Michael Anissimov from original article at Accelerating Future.

Step 1: Seeking Peak Experiences

Ever have a moment in your life that was just so great that you felt like jumping for joy, or crying in happiness? Many claim that these are the moments that make life worth living. The moment you finish writing a book, receiving a promotion, or sharing an intimate moment with someone special. How many "typical" days would you give for a single moment like that? Some might say 1, others 10, others even 100. Think about that - in a usual day, we're conscious for around 14 hours. Let's be conservative and suggest that the average John Doe would trade 5 typical days in exchange for a peak experience that lasts 5 minutes. The time ratio is about 1000:1, but many would still prefer the peak experience over the same old stuff.

This would imply that most people value life not only for the length of time they experience, but for the special moments that, as I mentioned earlier, "make life worth living". As the stereotypical quote goes, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Ethicists sometimes quantify such satisfaction as "utility" for the sake of thought experiments; we might say that each 5 minute peak experience is worth a thousand utility points, or "utiles". Correspondingly, each 5 days of typical activity would also count as roughly a thousand utiles, because one would trade one for the other. Although it may makesome of us uncomfortable to quantify utility, our brain is unconsciously performing computations accessing the potential utility of choices all the time,and the model is incredibly useful in the psychology of human decision makingand the field of ethics.

Following is an example of a typical human's lifelong utility trajectory. It plots utile-moments (u) against time (t). Let's say that the maximum u value reached is around 200 utiles/minute, or 1000 utiles for the 5 minute peak experience described above. For the sake of simplicitly, let's assume about 100 5-minute peak experiences per lifetime, and assume no other such experiences. Since peak experiences are so fun to have, much of the activity on "typical" days probably entails setting the groundwork for these experiences to happen; ensuring that one does not starve and so on.

The curve rises as the agent has a series of interesting new experiences, plateaus throughout most of adulthood, and subtly falls off in later years, until death is finally reached. It punctuates through peaks and valleys. Some might strongly associate utility with wealth or frequency of sexual activity, others might not.

Total utility: around 6,000,000 utiles, if we figure a lifespan of 80.

Step 2: Avoiding Premature Death

In life there is sometimes the danger of death. Death implies an immediate dropoff to the utility curve, a profoundly negative event. That's why people say stuff like "I'm too young to die!", or "I can't stop fighting, I have so much to live for". Humans despise death, because death is almost always a bad thing morally. People are willing to go out of their way to avoid it, and rightly so.

Let's introduce another aspect into the model. Say event X occuring at the
20-year mark has a probability 10% of eliminating all future experiences, which adds up to a risk of 4,000,000 utiles. In emotional terms, this would translate into arguments like those quoted above. There are some things that people would be willing to sacrifice those future experiences for. Just not too many of them. Death is a horrible thing if it stands in the way of living a fulfilling life. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to take actions to avoid event X if at all possible. Actions and thoughts leading to the avoidance of X have high utility; there are desirable in the same way that setting the groundwork for the occurrence of a peak experience is desirable. That's why we are so grateful when someone saves our life, and why we never drive under the influence after that one nearly fatal car accident.

The two possible trajectories after the decision instance are represented by red and blue lines. If we die, experienced utility drops to zero immediately. If we survive, it's business as usual. The purple line represents the curve before it splits.

Total utility of blue trajectory: same as above, around 6,000,000
utiles.
Total utility of red trajectory: around 2,000,000 utiles. Ouch!

I'm sure you can imagine the utility trajectories for events such as
rehabilitating illness, serious injury, and so on. These things really suck, so
people devote a lot of effort to avoiding them, which is clearly a good thing.

Step 3: Life Extension

It has been shown scientifically that regular cigarette smoking can lead to a shorter life, either due to an increased probability of contracting lung cancer or for some other reason. It has also been shown that good nutrition, good genes, or regular exercise all contribute to longer lifespan. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the average human lifespan was around 20, today it's four times longer; 80. Isn't that cool?

We're able to have a lot more interesting experiences per typical human life because our average lifespan has increased so greatly. This leads us to the notion that extending one's lifespan may be a worthy focus, a convenient path to increasing one's total experienced utility. We don't appreciate how lucky we are to live 80 years rather than a mere 20. Our entire culture has molded to the longer lifespans; it's now considered normal to live such long lives, so our default frame of reference tends to settle there. We should realize how spoiled we are relative to our ancestors, but also how transient and shallow our lives are from the perspective of a person with much longer life or more fulfilling experiences.

Say we want to add 5 years on to the end of our life by quitting cigarettes. This would imply that we value long life more than the short-term pleasure of a nicotine buzz. We may consider the added experiences and learning we could have as a result of this wise decision. We will have displayed the maturity to choose long-term benefits over short-term ones; some people might call this wisdom. I'm sure you can visualize the various utility trajectories and the desirability of choosing between them, but here is a picture anyway:

Here's where I start talking about potential sources of utility you might not
have heard of before.

Say that I have a few friends who offer to preserve the physical structure of my body in a deep freeze as soon as possible after my brain activity stops, and keep it that way until medical science advances to the point of being able to revive me safely. Let's say your friends happen to be employees of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they've been doing these cryonic suspensions for years. Their services are relatively cheap - life insurance pays for the suspension as long as you pay the bills while you are alive.

There are a series of risks - the cryonics company could go out of business, nuclear war might occur, your brain decay might be too severe to reverse, and so on. But there is potentially an immense benefit. If a civilization has the technology and desire to revive a freshly preserved frozen body, then this same civilization probably has a great degree of control over biological processes in general. Aging occurs in humans because ordinary biological processes produce byproducts that the body fails to remove completely. So they build up in the body, causing decay. Keep in mind that most byproducts are removed, only a small percentage of the total remains. But that is enough to cause aging. Stopping aging is a matter of amplifying the human ability to self-regenerate - that is all. There is no mysterious mechanism that forces all organisms to perish at a certain age in order to comply with some Cosmic Order. Ensure that the byproducts of our biology are contained and removed, or not produced in the first place, and you have cured aging.

So we are faced with the decision posed to us by our friends, "would you like to sign up for cryonics, or not?" Let's say we're being extremely conservative, and only estimate the likelihood of a successful future revival at 0.1%. Let's say furthermore that our estimate of successful elimination of aging after the initial revival is only 10%, remaining conservative. But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?

 

Character: Washu
Occupation: mad scientist
Age: over 10,000
Conclusion: 10,000 years is not so bad. In the future, it will be normal. The main challenge is aging.

 

So, what kind of utility function might a successful cryonics patient have?
Maybe something like that shown below. The curve dips down to zero when the patient is frozen solid, and quickly jumps back up after revival. (The squiggy line on the time axis implies that a ten thousand years passes during that time.)

Total utility of complete trajectory: a whopping 750 million! Much
more impressive than a mere 6 million.

From the perspective of the pre-cryonics human being, experiencing the huge 10,000-year future lifespan is not certain. As we said; the estimation of successful revival is only 0.1%, and the estimation of an aging cure is 10%. Combine these, and we get an aggregated probability estimate of 0.01% that the whole thing will work at all. So we divide the expected utility of the outcome, 744 million utiles, by our probability estimate, 0.01%. The result is 74,400 utiles only. But what if paying our life insurance isn't that big of a dea to us, and the opportunity cost of the lost money only works out to 10,000 utiles or so? In that case, it would make sense to buy life insurance and sign up for cryonics - the expected utility exceeds the projected cost!

If the scenario matches that described above:

Total utility of "yes" answer: 6,074,000 utiles.
Total utility of "no" answer: 5,990,000 utiles.

Many people have made that decision. They tend to be well educated, successful, scientifically literate, and intelligent. Here is a short list by Ralph Merkle, plus a longer study of attitudes toward cryonics by W. Scott Badger. If our estimate of the probability of success goes up from 0.1%, the utility trajectories diverge even farther, and saying "yes" to cryonics seems to be an extremely compelling choice. The prospect of cryonics can contain a massive amount of expected positive utility.

Step 4: Extending Life for Everyone, Not Just Yourself

Stuff like cryonic suspension, regular exercise, good health, and so on, only apply to you. Other people don't benefit from these practices. Some of us care about humanity as a whole rather than just ourselves, our nation, or our clique, so we devote effort to technologies with the potential to grant more life to wide numbers of people. For example, respected Cambridge biogerontologist and co-founder of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, Aubrey de Grey, would like to extend the healthy human lifespan an order of magnitude or more beyond its current limits within the next twenty to fourty years. Yes, this is a serious strategy for workable anti-aging. He explains fully on his website, please feel free to read it thoroughly. From his proposed Institute outline, de Grey seems to be suggesting that a cure for human aging may come with a price tag of only $10-100m. Not so bad for the benefits, huh?

Let's say that you continue experiencing 1,000 utiles per 5 days of normal living, but also experience an additional 1 utile per 5 days for every 1,000 people whose lives are extended when they would have otherwise been snuffed out at the arbitrary age of 80 or whatever. "Added years" that people only get to experience as a result of this extreme life extension. If you feel that the success of de Grey's Institute will lead to an anti-aging therapy available to millions within the first decade of its release and billions within the third with a probability of, say, 25%, then contributing to this effort would be well worth the time and money. Since you care about each individual person that gets to experience the benefits of added life, it means a lot to you to raise the probability that the necessary anti-aging technology is widely available before they fall to the injustices of aging and premature death.

On his website, Aubrey mentions lifespans that exceed 5000 years. So, if the Institute is successful, then let's assume that translates into around five million people with five-millenia lifespans shortly after the technology is invented, around five hundred million people with lifespans of that length a decade after, and five billion people two decades after. Considering the fast global adoption of techologies such as the Internet and cell phones, this distribution pattern seems extremely conservative. People would surely be willing to focus on buying a drug that extends one's lifespan to 5000 healthy years or more. Possibly it could be a one-time thing, or "booster shots" might be required every few decades for negligible cost.

So, you find yourself with a million dollars. You can either buy a mansion or contribute the money to aging research. Your assumptons are roughly in line with those outlined above; you have examined Aubrey de Grey's arguments in detail and regard them as valid. The lives of other human beings are important to you and you feel satisfaction when their lives are extended. You want to compute the expected utility of both outcomes; how does the math work out?

• Say $1,000,000 is about 2% of the Institute's total financial requirements.
• So you are contributing 2% of the effort toward the Institute's success.
• If success is achieved, about five million people immediately get an extra 10 years of life.
• Every five days, you would get an extra 5,000 utiles in addition to the usual 1,000.
• After another decade, five hundred million people have the drug.
• That means five million more utiles per five days.
• After yet another decade, five billion people have it - half of Earth's projected population.
• You get fifty million utiles per five days.
• Let's say you feel the satisfaction for a total of another five decades before you get used to it.
• (When you get used to it, it becomes the new status quo, not really providing utility anymore.)
• Five decades times fifty million utiles per five days is... a lot.

At this point our results may look a little odd and we will question the original utilitarian assumptions. The point of this thought experiment is not really to encourage you to formalize your ethical system as a set of utility values and probabilities, but to convey the huge value of extending the human life span for millions or billions of people. Gandhi, MLK, or the inventor of the polio vaccine couldn't possibly have imagined a good deed on this scale. Giving huge lifespans to humans that want them is an action with huge utility, unless the whole thing backfires due to population problems. (Unlikely due to the availability of clean manufacturing processes, efficient habitats, and cheap space travel. See "Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?")

So, the resulting utility graph is a bit more complicated:

Total expected utility of donation: massive; billions of utiles or more.
Total expected utility of a mansion: not nearly as much.

Utility goes up more and more as additional lives are saved. This graph assumes that one considers the lives of all those living after his or her life to be meaningless. In real life, people often feel otherwise. The fuzziness of to the right side of the graph represents our uncertainty about the long-term consequences - 5,000 years may turn out to be a ridiculously low estimate, and our real lifespans may lie in the realm of the millions or even billions - who knows! If there are no huge cosmic disasters, no war, and you can repair yourself or back up your memories at a whim, who's to say that your lifespan won't be as long as that of the universe?

You'll also notice that the utility axis has been expanded in the upward direction. That's because contributing to the extended life of millions or billions of people is (presumably) a bigger deal than only extending your own life. Engineering the human brain to better experience pleasure may be another may to increase total utility, or perhaps through enhancing our intelligence, empathy, creativity, and so on. These speculations are the province of transhumanism. Feel free to read up on the topic if you're interested in learning more. See also the question on our FAQ, "wouldn't it be boring to live forever in the perfect world?"

Step 5: The Greatest Threat to Life - Existential Risk

The value of contributing to Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging project assumes that there continues to be a world around for people's lives to be extended. But if we nuke ourselves out of existence in 2010, then what? The probability of human extinction is the gateway function through which all efforts toward life extension must inevitably pass, including cryonics, biogerontology, and nanomedicine. They are all useless if we blow ourselves up. At this point one observes that there are many working toward life extension, but few focused on explicitly preventing terminal global disaster. Such huge risks sound like fairy tales rather than real threats - because we have never seen them happen before, we underestimate the probability of their occurrence. An existential disaster has not yet occurred on this planet.

The risks worth worrying about are not pollution, asteroid impact, or alien invasion - the ones you see dramaticized in movies - these events are all either very gradual or improbable. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns us of existential risks, "...where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Bostrom continues, "Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the “dark ages”, even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory." The four main risks we know about so far are summarized by the following, in ascending order of probability and severity over the course of the next 30 years:

Biological. More specifically, a genetically engineered supervirus. Bostrom writes, "With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality." There are several factors necessary for a virus to be a risk. The first is the presence of biologists with the knowledge necessary to genetically engineer a new virus of any sort. The second is access to the expensive machinery required for synthesis. Third is specific knowledge of viral genetic engineering. Fourth is a weaponization strategy and a delivery mechanism. These are nontrivial barriers, thankfully.

Nuclear. A traditional nuclear war could still break out, although it would be unlikely to result in our ultimate demise, it could drastically curtail our potential and set us back thousands or even millions of years technologically and ethically. Bostrom mentions that the US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Miniaturization technology, along with improve manufacturing technologies, could make it possible to mass produce nuclear weapons for easy delivery should an escalating arms race lead to that. As rogue nations begin to acquire the technology for nuclear strikes, powerful nations will feel increasingly edgy.

Nanotechnological. The Transhumanist FAQ reads, "Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological machinery. "Because nanomachines could be self-replicating or at least auto-productive, the technology and its products could proliferate very rapidly. Because nanotechnology could theoretically be used to create any chemically stable object, the potential for abuse is massive. Nanotechnology could be used to manufacture large weapons or other oppressive apparatus in mere hours; the only limitations are raw materials, management, software, and heat dissipation."

Human-indifferent superintelligence. In the near future, humanity will gain the technological capability to create forms of intelligence radically different than our own. Artificial Intelligences could be implemented on superfast transistors instead of slow biological neurons, and eventually gain the intellectual ability to fabricate new hardware and reprogram their source code. Such an intelligence could engage in "recursive self-improvement" - improving its own intelligence, then directing that intelligence towards further intelligence improvements. Such a process could lead far beyond our current level of intelligence in a relatively short time. We would be helpless to fight against such an intelligence if it did not value our continuation.

So let's say I have another million dollars to spend. My last million dollars went to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse Prize, for a grand total of billions of expected utiles. But wait - I forgot to factor in the probability that humanity will be destroyed before the positive effects of life extension are borne out. Even if my estimated probability of existential risk is very low, it is still rational to focus on addressing the risk because my whole enterprise would be ruined if disaster is not averted. If we value the prospect of all the future lives that could be enjoyed if we pass beyond the threshold of risk - possibly quadrillions or more, if we expand into the cosmos, then we will deeply value minimizing the probability of existential risk above all other considerations.

If my million dollars can avert the chance of existential disaster by, say, 0.0001%, then the expected utility of this action relative to the expected utility of life extension advocacy is shocking. That's 0.0001% of the utility of quadrillions or more humans, transhumans, and posthumans leading fulfilling lives. I'll spare the reader from working out the math and utility curves - I'm sure you can imagine them. So, why is it that people tend to devote more resources to life extension than risk prevention? The follow includes my guesses, feel free to tell
me if you disagree:

• They estimate the probability of any risk occurring to be extremely low.
• They estimate their potential influence over the likelihood of risk to be extremely low.
• They feel that positive PR towards any futurist goals will eventually result in higher awareness of risk.
• They fear social ostracization if they focus on "Doomsday scenarios" rather than traditional extension.

Those are my guesses. Immortalists with objections are free to send in their arguments, and I will post them here if they are especially strong. As far as I can tell however, the predicted utility of lowering the likelihood of existential risk outclasses any life extension effort I can imagine.

I cannot emphasize this enough. If a existential disaster occurs, not only will the possibilities of extreme life extension, sophisticated nanotechnology, intelligence enhancement, and space expansion never bear fruit, but everyone will be dead, never to come back. This would be awful. Because the we have so much to lose, existential risk is worth worrying about even if our estimated probability of occurrence is extremely low.

It is not the funding of life extension research projects that immortalists should be focusing on. It should be projects that decrease the risk of existential risk. By default, once the probability of existential risk is minimized, life extension technologies will be developed and applied. There are powerful economic and social imperatives in that direction, but few towards risk management. Existential risk creates a "loafer problem" - we always expect someone else to do it. I assert that this is a dangerous strategy and should be discarded in favor of making prevention of such risks a central focus.

Organizations explicitly working to prevent existential risk:

Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Advanced nanotechnology can build machines that are thousands of times more powerful—and hundreds of times cheaper—than today's devices. The humanitarian potential is enormous; so is the potential for misuse. The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. An important organization doing genuinely valuable, positive work.

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a nonprofit corporation dedicated solely to the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence. The Singularity Institute sees no reason why we won't be able to eventually build such intelligences - it basically burns down to an engineering problem. If the first greater-than-human intelligence were a benevolent one, it could use its intelligence to further improve its own intelligence, the intelligence of human beings, and assist others in the pursuit of humanitarian causes.

Thank you for your attention!
Michael Anissimov

Grant Morrison, 2012, & the Supercontext

There's a new interview with comic mage Grant Morrison, author of The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum, and the current run of The X-Men. Here's an excerpt:

CXF: Last, but certainly not least. It's December 22, 2012. As humanity takes its last wistful look at the constraints of space-time and dives headlong into the Supercontext, where is Grant Morrison?

GM: Shagging like bloody Shiva, I hope. I think that if anything happens at all, it's most likely to come in the form of a mass consciousness change - possibly triggered by planetary electromagnetic field alterations predicted to occur around that time - so that basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. 'Individuality' will dissolve and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind, which is likely to seem quite frightening and overwhelming, especially for the sheltered minds, and time will seem to disappear as we identify with the mitochondria in our cells, instead of identifying with the physical individual carrier 'bodies' we use to expedite the shuffling around of DNA.

The world's current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see - everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we'll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.

If something like this occurs at the end of 2012, and it's also possible that nothing of note will happen - we should see a lot of people freaking out when we re-enter what some Australian aboriginals call Aljira (a word English is not up to the task of translating, so it comes out as 'Dreamtime') and I call 'the Supercontext'. When we see in a new way and become new to ourselves, we'll also see lots of stuff that will probably scare people who didn't know it was there all along. People in delirium and on the brink of death see these crawling, replicating 'wilkie-swilkie men' all over everything and soon, I think, everyone will start to see them. They are 'the spaces between things, come to life…'

As for me, I hope I'll be screaming 'Yes!' like Molly Bloom as the universe rolls up into a silver paper ball for the quantum cats of Hell to play with.

[Thanks to New World Disorder for the link.]

Life, Universe and Everything

There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.

According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.

Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.

So how big is our universe?

HUGE

So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.

According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 10³⁵ light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 10³⁵ lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10⁶⁰ of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 10⁶⁰ golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.

This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10¹⁸ light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10³⁵ light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?

3.7 billion years

Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10¹⁰⁰ galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 10²³ atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 10⁶⁰. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10¹⁰⁰ is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.

Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10¹⁰⁰ is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.

For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 10⁷⁵ advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!

Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.

So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.

"If she lost her personal wormhole and forgot her
trans-species designation code (a seventy digit number!)
she would never, ever find her way home again.
None of her descriptions of where she comes from
would relate to anything anyone else knows."

The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.

Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis

Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.

Alex Grey At Burning Man 2003

Pelenque Norte is hosting an mp3 archive of a talk given by renowned visionary artist Alex Grey and his wife Allyson. The talk - titled Art, Love, & Psychedelics - was presented at last year's Burning Man.

It was hot. It was dusty. It was Friday, and it was noon in the desert. But that didn't prevent the Palenque Norte conversation with the Grey's from being one of the best-attended daytime events of Burning Man 2003. After a spectacular Thursday night of revelry, when the citizens of Black Rock City would normally still be asleep, a small crowd began to form Aetheria Village's lecture pod. By noon the pod was packed, bicycles and people filled the village's common areas, and several art-cars were parked within range of our sound system. Later we were told that additional hundreds listened to the Grey's on KPOD, our village radio station. For many of this year's burners, it was one of their most talked-about events. Now, those of you who couldn't attend this wonderful presentation can hear it in the comfort of your home (or wherever your Internet connection is :-).

Was Universe Created By Design?

I just read this article over at Slate. Ever since I heard of basement universes and the possibility of our future selves creating them for our own amusement (see Linde Scenario), it seemed all the more likely that our own universe was created by an advanced intelligence from another universe.

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

To get a better understanding of this matter, I thought it might be wise to consult the man who has done more than anyone else to explain how our universe got going. His name is Andrei Linde, and he is a physicist at Stanford University. (He's also an artist and an acrobat, but never mind.) In the early 1980s, the then-thirtysomething Linde came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde's theory, called "chaotic inflation," explained the shape of space and how galaxies were formed. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation from the Big Bang that was observed by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. Linde has been amply honored for his achievement, most recently by being awarded the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation (along with Alan Guth, another pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation).

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

Lightful Construction

Dymaxion 4D Lightful Dwellings by Buckminster Fuller:

In 1927, in the privately circulated draft entitled 4D, later printed as part of 4D Timelock Fuller outlined his vision of shipping mass-produced houses around the world by Zeppelin, to be accessible by means of small planes capable of prolonged ground-taxiing.

Fuller actually described the 10 deck houses shown here as "stepping stone, world airline maintenance crew environment controls", the idea being that, if appropriately distributed around the globe, they could serve as maintenance stations for planes on great circle air routes.

Fuller was convinced that his plan for mass-produced housing would render city-dwellings obsolete.

In July 1928, he wrote to his mother who was in their home in Bear Island, Maine, suggesting that the value of island property would be radically increased once his ideas took effect. He advised his mother to sell their house in Cambridge Massachussetts immediately, as the price of urban real estate was bound to fall dramatically:

"If the rest of the family want to keep their money in land, I should recommend transferring the money for the sale of the Cambridge property to the purchase of additional islands, picked for their landing facilities. In a year or so, when my 4D houses are ready, we will be able to put them up on the islands in one day, with every facility of modern city luxury built in, quite as comfortable in winter as any other time, on the installment plan, for a dollar down... There is no question that what I have predicted will come about."

The 4D-transport, that later developed into the dymaxion automobile, was initially intended as a private vehicle suited for this new decentralized human condition. Its primary role would be for flight between island dwellings. For ground-use, it would have to be capable of taxiing for long distances.

Well, Bucky was sure an optimist. But why not? Why shouldn't we get lightweight buildings delivered by zeppeliner or helicopter? Why does an average one-family house need to weigh 150 tons and take a number of months to construct? It makes sense to use as little resources as possible, and arrange the production procedures for fast and easy delivery.

eyeBlogging

From Slashdot:

"Researchers at Human Media Lab, Queen's University in Canada presented the ECSGlasses: eye contact sensing glasses that report when people look at their wearer. When eye contact is detected, the glasses stream this information to appliances to inform these about the wearer's engagement. According to HML.Blog the ECSGlasses uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker. eyeBlog uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it. Moreover, because eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments. If you are the academic type you can read the paper (2.2MB .pdf), otherwise the video in .mpg (1:49min, 320x240, 7.5MB), or mp4 (1:49min, 320x240, 4.9MB) should explain everything. Video Mirror: .mp4 .mpg."

That is weird and cool, of course. I'm not sure why I'd only want to capture people's picture when they're looking at me, but it could be useful added information of course. Like, if it were combined with face recognition software, and my glasses tells me who somebody is just before they start talking to me. There are some obvious problems in the scheme, of course, like that not everybody looks at each other when they're conversing, and the norms for this change from culture to culture. But just the ability to capture the picture of everybody who looks at me could ensure that I have the most obvious source material for good pictures of them. The glasses look kind of bizarre, with a series of LEDs bouncing light off of people's faces, and back into a cyclops camera in the middle. That itself would be enough to get people to stare directly at you. In horror, maybe. But I bet there are ways of making it all smaller and less visible.

Mobutobe

Mobutobe. It is mostly a joke, I think, but stimulating for thought nevertheless.

MOBUTOBE refers to the calculations of Isaac Asimov. The biologist and author published in 1971 that there are 20 trillion (20 x 10^12) tons of live cells on earth. 10 percent of these (that is two trillion tons) are animal cells. This number has to be regarded as the maximum level, for vegetable life cannot increase in quantitiy without an increase of sunlight or a refinement of its capability to process sunlight.

The latter sounds like they got it wrong. I suppose it means that the percentage of animal cells can't get higher, as animals need to feed on vegetable cells.

Animal life is heterotrophic, it lives on plants that metabolise energy from the sun into chemical energy. Animal life cannot be increased in quantitiy without an increase of the plants it feeds on. The number of humans shall continue to increase! The earth is capable of nourishing a maximum mass of human life equalling the momentary total mass of animal life. That would be no less than 40 trillion (40 x 10^12) people. The maximum average of people living on earth for ideal MOBUTOBE population would be 80.000 people per square kilometer. Each and every square kilometer of surface would be occupied.

MOBUTOBE propagates the construction of a multi-story building complex spanning the whole planet!

The building complex shall be constructed like this: The roof is reserved for plant cultivation. Edible algae as well as higher plants that are manipulated so that they are esculent as a whole are cultivated there. Regular supply is easily provided. Equispaced at small intervals, pipes are mounted that transport water and plant products to the lower levels. These materials are processed into food while the water is stored in tanks on the roof. Different pipes transport manure (consisting of human excrements and manipulated remainders of corpses) up to the roof.

OK, they're kidding. We don't really want that. But at the same time, there's a point. It is possible. If we really applied the planetary resources towards supporting the maximum biomass, in particular the maximum quantity of human biomass, then one could imagine some construct like that. I don't know how they get to the 40 trillion, but, yes, that would be around 80,000 per square kilometer, if we covered the whole surface. It would look like Trantor, but it would be possible, with a lot of engineering and planning of the food chain. Makes you think. Would be a horrible idea. But it shows that as it is now we're just really bad at managing resources and understanding natural cycles, as we're messing up the place to support a mere 6 billion people, and badly at that.

X-Prize To become Annual Event

Wow again. Now that the X-Prize is likely to be won this year, it's now going to become an annual event in New Mexico.

Entrants in the races, scheduled to begin in the summer of 2006 after an exhibition the preceding year, will include many of the participants in the current Ansari X Prize Competition. The winner of that $10 million prize will be announced later this year.

Nearly 30 teams from seven nations are competing in that contest to design and build a spaceship capable of sending three passengers 60 miles into space and returning them safely. Those launches are under way at sites around the world.

After that event, the runners-up and other teams will focus on the New Mexico event, which will be the next stage in the mission of the X Prize Foundation to the further development of safe, cost-effective space transportation for the general public.

"Teams and their fans from around the world will gather annually in New Mexico to participate in the competition for the X Prize Cup," said Peter Mitchell, director of the Office of Space Commercialization in Santa Fe.

Rick Homans, secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, said the ultimate goal of the competition is to encourage space commercialization.

"As the times get faster and faster, it means we are getting better at commercializing space and the cost is coming down," he said. "That's what this is all about, to drive the industry."

The entrants will compete for the fastest turnaround, maximum passengers per flight, maximum altitude and fastest flight from takeoff to landing. Winners will receive cash prizes and international media attention.

Thanks for the link Sauceruney.

Rutan's SpaceshipOne Goes Up 41 Miles!

This is exciting stuff. Burt Rutan's Spaceship on its third test flight went 2/3 of the way to space. I'm now very optimistic it will win the X Prize before this year is over, of going to space (61 miles up) twice in two weeks.

Original Article

Chalk up another booming flight of the privately-backed SpaceShipOne, the piloted rocket plane designed to soar to the edge of space and glide to a runway landing.

With pilot Mike Melvill at the controls -- following release from the White Knight turbojet-powered launch aircraft high above the Mojave, California desert -- SpaceShipOne punched through the sky today boosted by a hybrid propellant rocket motor.

Scaled Composites of Mojave is the builder of SpaceShipOne, an effort led by aviation innovator, Burt Rutan. The financial backer of the project is Microsoft mogul, Paul Allen.

In a post-flight statement from the company, the SpaceShipOne team reported that their space plane flew to 212,000 feet altitude, almost 41 miles. NASA awards astronaut status to anyone who flies above 50 miles in altitude.

Masturbate Online

Annalee Newitz, who wrote an article that inspired this site, writes in her latest Techsploitation:

In the "we're not sure we're part of the United States" Bay Area, we like to enjoy a little masturbation with our free speech. Politics should feel good! That's why Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence, founders of the nonprofit Center for Sex and Culture, are hosting a public Masturbate-a-thon May 15. All proceeds from the event – which is set up like a walkathon, with sponsors donating a certain amount for each masturbator – benefit the center, which is raising money for a permanent space. And what's truly cool is that the whole deal will be broadcast live on the Web (www.masturbate-a-thon.com). It's just one way the Internet allows us to share our Bay Area values with the world.

Promise of Artificial Photosynthesis

A new article in this months Prospect Magazine by Philip Hunter discusses some recent breakthroughs in making artificial photosynthesis a practical reality.

It is still unclear where most of our energy will come from in the longer-term future. Solar power cannot produce industrial quantities of electricity, while the tide is turning against wind turbines because they spoil the landscape and too many would be needed to replace conventional generators. Nuclear energy remains in the doldrums. Fossil fuels continue to threaten global warming.

But a promising new contender is emerging: the harnessing of photosynthesis, the mechanism by which plants derive their energy. The idea is to create artificial systems that exploit the basic chemistry of photosynthesis in order to produce hydrogen or other fuels both for engines and electricity. Hydrogen burns cleanly, yielding just water and energy. There is also the additional benefit that artificial photosynthesis could mop up any excess carbon dioxide left over from our present era of profligate fossil fuel consumption.

As we learned in school, photosynthesis is the process by which plants extract energy from sunlight to produce carbohydrates and ultimately proteins and fats from carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product. The evolution of photosynthesis in its current form made animal life possible by producing the oxygen we breathe and the carbon-based foods we eat. Photosynthesis does this on a massive scale, converting about 1,000bn metric tons of carbon dioxide into organic matter each year, yielding about 700bn metric tons of oxygen.

The first problem evolution faced was that the chemical reactions involved in carbohydrate formation are “uphill,” meaning they require energy to drive them forward. Only one source of energy was available on earth—from the sun—but the trouble is that “uphill” chemical reactions need energy in the form of electrons moving at high speeds to power them, in other words an electrical potential or voltage. Plants are in effect solar cells converting light into electrical energy. But for this to be sustainable, plants need a constant source of electrons, and this has to be an element or compound already present in the plant. Evolution tried a variety of chemicals such as hydrogen sulphide early on, and some of these are still used in certain bacteria. But there was a more promising candidate because of its ubiquitous presence — water.

It takes about 2.5 volts to break a single water molecule down into oxygen along with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. It is the extraction and separation of these oppositely charged electrons and protons from water molecules that provides the electric power. In plants, chlorophylls evolved to harvest light, and a complex labyrinth of proteins to conduct the photons (units of light energy) to a suitable centre where this crucial water-splitting takes place. In plants, oxygen is the only by-product of this process, but researchers realised some years ago that the reaction could be tweaked to produce hydrogen as well.

Still, tweaking photosynthesis to produce hydrogen rather than electrical energy is the easy bit, and researchers such as Stenbjörn Styring at Lund University in Sweden believe it will be possible to do so in artificial systems within one or two years. The hard part is to replicate the process of splitting water to obtain the electrons and protons in the first place, and this is where a recent breakthrough made by a British team at Imperial College comes in. Through a combination of rigorous analysis and innovative experiment, the team led by professors Jim Barber and So Iwata identified the precise location of just a few critical molecules of manganese, oxygen and calcium within the core of the plant’s photosynthesis engine where the water-splitting is performed.

What is striking about this chemical reaction, to which we owe our existence, is that the critical chemistry is co-ordinated by just a single atom of manganese within the photosynthesis core. The precise geometry of this core is vital to the process, as water molecules are shaped a bit like Mickey Mouse heads, with one oxygen atom bearing a pair of smaller hydrogen atoms forming the ears.

The achievement of Barber and colleagues has been to determine the precise events taking place within water-splitting at the molecular level as each photon of light arrives in the core. This is a level of detail far beyond that known for most chemical reactions in biology.

Following publication of this work in Science in March, leading specialists in artificial photosynthesis such as Styring are eager to start working on mimicking the water-splitting process in the laboratory. Attempts to do so have failed so far because the process is so finely balanced that the geometry has to be just right. Only now do researchers have sufficient detail of the geometry to start building workable systems.

Although such artificial systems will mimic the water-splitting chemistry of natural photosynthesis, they will not look like plants. Artificial systems will use metals such as ruthenium and iron to capture light and provide a scaffold for the water-splitting core. But the core itself would be based on manganese.

These are early days, but the recent breakthrough gives some grounds for optimism. The alternative method of producing hydrogen through water electrolysis powered by solar cells could also work, but photosynthesis promises a more efficient, elegant and economical source of power.

I still think the Solar Power Satellite idea is long overdue. Such a massive project would accomplish several things. It would solve ALL the worlds energy problems. It would cut world wide pollution down to a trickle. And best of all, it would bring launch costs and the space frontier to EVERYONE who wants to go!

Replacing Our DNA

I'm subscribed to Kurzweil.net's daily newsletter and somehow I missed this one. Thanks DRT.

Original Story

Ray Kurzweil has proposed a nanobiotechnology research program to replace the cell nucleus and ribosome machinery with a nanocomputer and nanobot to prevent diseases and aging and another program to create defensive technologies against rogue designer viruses.

Kurzweil presented the ideas in a keynote at the recent "Breakthrough Technologies for the World's Biggest Problems" conference on April 28, sponsored by the Arlington Institute.

The nucleus is basically a computer that stores the DNA genetic code and controls gene expression via RNA, messenger RNA, and ribosomes, which build amino acid sequences that get folded into proteins that control everything else.

Using nanotechnology expected to be available in the late 2020s, a nanocomputer would store and execute the software of the genetic code and the expression of genetic information. It would direct a nanobot to construct the amino acid sequences (eventually, it could also construct the folded proteins). The system would "block uncontrolled replication and DNA transcription errors, and virus replication that can result in cancer, disease, and aging," he said. "It could also upgrade the genetic code to eliminate other diseases, reverse aging, and enhance human abilities."

The concept of modeling the genetic code in software and using nanobots to repair a patient's DNA was suggested by Robert A. Freitas, Jr. in the book Nanomedicine Vol I. Kurzweil's concept would go further, replacing DNA, RNA, mRNA, and ribosomes with software and nanobots.

What I would like to ask Kurzweil though is this. If we have the technology to upgrade our cells to be immune from genetic disease, aging and killer designer viruses, couldn't the same nanotechnology be used to kill us by rogue nano-terrorists? Of course such an escalating war is exactly what we have with computers now. But can you imagine having to upgrade to the latest nanobot immune enhancers every time someone releases a killer virus into the world? Would such the assembler instructions be available free for download, or would we all be dependent on a few Symantic-like comanies of nanosecurity to keep on living? If intellectual property continues like it is, and I don't think it will, then I can see millions of people dying each time a new nanovirus is released because these people couldn't afford the latest patches. And since it is life itself we are talkign about, that gives the nanosecurity firms WAY more leverage than I would ever accept.

My hypothesis however is different than Kurzweil's however, as I think he underestimates just how disruptive these technologies will be. I imagine by the time nanomedicine of this maturity is available, virtually all aspects of our current societal, political and legal structures will be obsolete or utterly transformed...hopefully for the better. This is THE debate raging in transhumanist circles these days. Will there be a soft or hard takeoff? Will humanity be able to navigate this takeoff through the singularity, or will we need something like Friendly AI? All very good questions, which this site and many others are trying to answer.

Related Posts to this issue:

Altruism and Transhuman Intelligence
Artificial or Natural Intelligences
Singularity and the Fifth Dimension
Turning on Higher Intelligence

A Soul or Not a Soul

Guest writer Demitrious joins us today to share his ideas.

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I did not write this article to prove to you why the soul exist or dose not, but to connect the dots of genetics and environmental influence of the human brain to the abstract and free flowing beauty of creation.

Do we inhabit a soul? It’s something that many of us ask. Today’s technology has opened up for us some interesting views in exactly how we think, how we operate and why we dream. Many people today are convinced that our personality, are way of viewing the world and our motives are all part of the genetic, environment code we are all born with. That we are nothing more than electrical impulses and synapse firings.

But to really question the soul it takes some reflection on really asking, what makes a “soul”. Is it our personality, our dreams or our secret fantasies? Surly I could say that all those attributes are mere expressions of our environmental, genetic operating. But perhaps the soul isn’t what dreams we do have, our personality or what fantasies we often visualize our self acting out. Perhaps the soul is our instinct. (The way we pick/ single out and organize) It’s the reason we respond the way we do. Perhaps our souls are a connection to the begging of the universes creation, it’s every living particle and pattern ever developed. The soul could be called "the pattern interpreter". Some people believe in reincarnation, the living of another life after death, a non-stopping cycle of experience and touch. This would make some since if we look at our very first expressions after birth. We are not blank slates like John Locke once said. When you where a child, you always had an "opinion", you always had a reaction to experience, and was this genetically hardwired? Is it the infantile amnesia while the unconscious memory of the womb remaining? And what exactly goes on in the womb? Could the earth’s position, the temperature, effect our genetic hardwiring also, I think we need Darwin’s input on the evolution of the being in here as well.

Either way it seems we have always had a self, independent and observant. When can you remember making your first judgment and not just accepting things? Another question some people might ask is “Do animals have souls?" I certainly believe so, and then we might say the soul is not the personality because of our cerebral cortex. Well for those who assume the personality is only experienced through the cerebral cortex has to reflect on memory, because memory alone makes up an enormous part of our "selves" and this is not present in just one of our areas of the brain. Consciousness could be defined the "awareness" of our lives and influences of what pain and pleasure are doing to us. This Consciousness might by some ruling be considered the soul. Separating ourselves from animals, trees and machines we again might use this definition to explain why we are the superior race of the earth. One thing I often contemplate is what if animals, trees, and such are aware of what’s effecting them, but because of genetic material makeup they cannot respond the way we do.

The soul could be that “pattern interpretation” Over many many years we have accumulated through ion to ion, influence of orbit. What if the soul is an effect? Perhaps we do have a Collective Unconscious like Jung Said. And this is the instinct, the evolution through time and space, from form to form, season to season, ect. Humans as an individual are granted a great benefit in having such a brain as we do to expressing our reactions in to the physical world. I see the brain as a wet sponge waiting for an electrical impute to turn it on, When tissue and "soul" unite through years and years of experience they become the very prominent and skilled "us". This soul is the energy, the invisible reactions from the very begging of creation. Like I said before, the instinct we all inhibit deep in our beings could be such a soul. Some people might have a little different instinct, Perhaps they have been "interpreting patterns" a lot longer. In the creation of life something was fueling it, something enormous and skilled, Perhaps it was like water running over rocks making erosion pushing, lifting, sifting, changing the very foundation of life its self. The soul could be known as the water and the body and brain could be called the rock. The water doesn’t change, but it alters the curvature and appearance of the rock, so as the rock and re-direct the flow of the water anyway environment has affected it. This might seem an off way analogy but life is all about analogy’s. Your soul in some ways could be pictures as a frequency wave with crest and troughs showing the very dints and curves your life or life’s have gone through and if this was the case then the "pattern interpreter" makes a lot of since. There’s a lot more to question as to the individual soul and why this seems so. But that’s for later.

-Demetrious

Future of Computation is Infinite

Roland Piquepaille's Technolo