Great Thinkings

The Future Will Be A Privatized Corporate Dystopia

2008-11-16T07:45:00.000-08:00

By Trent Schlictmann

I beg to differ with my colleague. Having read the futuristic accounts of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, the path our future shall take will be bleak, indeed–but in a much different way.

When the ongoing trend of corporate mergers reaches critical mass in 2030, the scant handful of corporations that remain will be too powerful to resist and will ultimately supplant all government. National borders will crumble, replaced by warring corporate armies who deploy vat-grown Yakuza assassins to take down enemy CEOs in the name of commerce.

The future will be every color but gray–not that the future will be worth living in. Giant videoscreen billboards will cover the exposed surface of every skyscraper, bombarding our consciousness with advertising for anything and everything. Looking up will expose us to giant orbiting mylar superscreens bearing more logos and slogans.

A citizen will be unable to walk down the street without encountering roving clouds made up of billions of microscopic nanoprobes that form corporate logos right before their very eyes.

Which is not to imply that the average citizen will do much walking: When every inch of space is privatized, it will cost money to walk from your living room to the kitchen. The average citizen will spend nearly all of his waking hours neurally jacked into the futuristic grandchild of the Internet, roaming cyberspace rather than moving and interacting in the inelegant, inconvenient three-dimensional world.

When we do log off the CyberNet, the very walls of our apartments will teem with droning media messages. Tolerating such in-home advertising will be the only way the average citizen will be able to afford an apartment at all. Only the wealthiest will be able to afford a quiet, dark room in which to sleep. The rest of us will simply become desensitized to the 24 hours of stimuli attacking our minds.

All media will consist of some form of advertising–print, audio, video–with some actually beamed directly into our brains. The theme song to every TV show will be a product jingle.

Newscasters will segue straight from war reports into soft-drink pitches without batting an eye.

To the powers that be, a citizen will be no more than a potential receptacle of consumption, only as valuable as his or her electronically catalogued personal wealth. All transactions will be conducted instantaneously by retinal scan, and credit fraud will be a crime worse than murder.

Oh, how I pity future generations.

The Future Will Be A Totalitarian Government Dystopia

2008-11-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

By Timothy Geist

I am sad to say that for all our efforts in the name of freedom, the future shall be a bleak one, indeed. Such visionary authors as George Orwell and Robert Heinlein have mapped out the hellish future that awaits.

By the end of this century, the Earth will be controlled by a single unified world government–a government solely dedicated to perpetuating itself and keeping the populace under control. The first and greatest casualty of this New World Order shall be personal liberty.

Humans will live in identical, low-ceilinged, one-roomed concrete dwellings, outfitted with little more than a bed and a telescreen, arranged in endless grid patterns stretching to the horizon.

Our bleary-eyed descendants 100 years hence shall shuffle between their assigned tasks in gray, one-piece coveralls. What few possessions they enjoy will be meted out by the government, and even these spare trinkets will be small and inexpensive–a plastic comb, a morsel of chocolate, a new pair of shoes when the old ones have worn to unwearability.

Citizens will be assigned to various vocational fields, the most common being propaganda, bureaucracy, and the police. Those who perform with unerring loyalty will be rewarded with slightly larger dwellings and the right to lower the volume of their telescreens.

Unremovable electronic trackers will be implanted in our brains, monitoring our whereabouts and thoughts at all times. Citizens who harbor anti-authoritarian sentiments will be swiftly seized by jackbooted secret police and either put to death–a procedure filmed and displayed via telescreen as a grim warning to other would-be dissenters–or rehabilitated into blind servitude through torture and brainwashing.

Food will be prepared by machines and served in drab public mess halls. No fruits and vegetables for future-man: Every meal will be a flavorless, grainy paste designed to provide just enough nutrition to sustain life and nothing more–any more energy and the powers that be risk rebellion.

Oh, how I dread the future. May God protect our yet-unborn children.

Study says eyes evolved for X-Ray vision

2008-08-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D. Now, a new study from a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: our ability to see through things.

Most animals — fish, insects, reptiles, birds, rabbits, and horses, for example — exist in non-cluttered environments like fields or plains, and they have eyes located on either side of their head. These sideways-facing eyes allow an animal to see in front of and behind itself, an ability also known as panoramic vision.

Humans and other large mammals — primates and large carnivores like tigers, for example — exist in cluttered environments like forests or jungles, and their eyes have evolved to point in the same direction.

While animals with forward-facing eyes lose the ability to see what's behind them, they gain X-ray vision, according to Mark Changizi, assistant professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer, who says eyes facing the same direction have been selected for maximizing our ability to see in leafy environments like forests.

All animals have a binocular region — parts of the world that both eyes can see simultaneously — which allows for X-ray vision and grows as eyes become more forward facing.

Demonstrating our X-ray ability is fairly simple: hold a pen vertically and look at something far beyond it. If you first close one eye, and then the other, you'll see that in each case the pen blocks your view. If you open both eyes, however, you can see through the pen to the world behind it.

To demonstrate how our eyes allow us to see through clutter, hold up all of your fingers in random directions, and note how much of the world you can see beyond them when only one eye is open compared to both. You miss out on a lot with only one eye open, but can see nearly everything behind the clutter with both.

"Our binocular region is a kind of 'spotlight' shining through the clutter, allowing us to visually sweep out a cluttered region to recognize the objects beyond it," says Changizi, who is principal investigator on the project. "As long as the separation between our eyes is wider than the width of the objects causing clutter — as is the case with our fingers, or would be the case with the leaves in the forest — then we can tend to see through it."

To identify which animals have this impressive power, Changizi studied 319 species across 17 mammalian orders and discovered that eye position depends on two variables: the clutter, or lack thereof in an animal's environment, and the animal's body size relative to the objects creating the clutter.

Changizi discovered that animals in non-cluttered environments — which he described as either "non-leafy surroundings, or surroundings where the cluttering objects are bigger in size than the separation between the animal's eyes" (think a tiny mouse trying to see through 6-inch wide leaves in the forest) — tended to have sideways-facing eyes.

"Animals outside of leafy environments do not have to deal with clutter no matter how big or small they are, so there is never any X-ray advantage to forward-facing eyes for them," says Changizi. "Because binocular vision does not help them see any better than monocular vision, they are able to survey a much greater region with sideways-facing eyes."

However, in cluttered environments — which Changizi defined as leafy surroundings where the cluttering objects are smaller than the separation between an animal's eyes — animals tend to have a wide field of binocular vision, and thus forward-facing eyes, in order to see past leaf walls.

"This X-ray vision makes it possible for animals with forward-facing eyes to visually survey a much greater region around themselves than sideways-facing eyes would allow," says Changizi. "Additionally, the larger the animal in a cluttered environment, the more forward facing its eyes will be to allow for the greatest X-ray vision possible, in order to aid in hunting, running from predators, and maneuvering through dense forest or jungle."

Changizi says human eyes have evolved to be forward facing, but that we now live in a non-cluttered environment where we might actually benefit more from sideways-facing eyes.

"In today's world, humans have more in common visually with tiny mice in a forest than with a large animal in the jungle. We aren't faced with a great deal of small clutter, and the things that do clutter our visual field — cars and skyscrapers — are much wider than the separation between our eyes, so we can't use our X-ray power to see through them," Changizi says.

"If we froze ourselves today and woke up a million years from now, it's possible that it might be difficult for us to look the new human population in the eyes, because by then they might be facing sideways."

Changizi's research was completed in collaboration with Shinsuke Shimojo at the California Institute of Technology, and is published online in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart

2008-08-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

After two tremendous growth spurts — one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability — the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy.

It consumes huge amounts of calories, is rather temperamental and, when harnessed just right, exhibits incredible prowess. The brain's roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man's invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.

"This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat," said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.
But the increase in size, Khaitovich continued, "did not make humans as smart as they are today."

The early shift

For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.

The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.
The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.

The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body.

Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.
Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

Digestion question

Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal's caloric intake.

Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, "with very severe health problems."

Scientists wonder if our cognitive spurt happened too fast. Some of our most common mental health problems, ranging from depression and bipolar disorder to autism and schizophrenia, may be by-products of the metabolic changes that happened in an evolutionary "blink of an eye," Khaitovich said.

While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out (one involves the introduction of fish to the human diet), the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."

Lights in the sky

2008-06-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

William B Stoecker:

Debunkers are fond of "explaining" ufos as ball lightning, swamp gas, etc., but, inasmuch as we have next to no understanding of such phenomena, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, for example, ball lightning is a ufo.

After all, the term"ufo" doesn't mean Pleiadian beam ship or Sirian mother ship; it means "unidentified flying object," and is an admission of the fact that there are objects or phenomena flying around in the sky that we don't even begin to understand.

In fact, there are a multitude of luminous phenomena in and beyond our atmosphere that we don't even begin to understand, and they all seem to be interrelated in some fashion; indeed, they may be different forms of the same thing.For centuries, people have reported seeing moving balls of light, usually in swampy areas; these have been called swamp lights, will-o-the-wisp, or jack-o-lanterns.

Debunkers claim that these are nothing more than glowing or burning methane gas released by rotting vegetation in swamps. While there is no doubt that methane is produced this way, there is no known chemical process that would cause methane to coldly luminesce. And for it to burn, there would have to be something to ignite the gas, and most swamps don't come equipped with spark plugs.

If bubbles of methane were somehow ignited, they would simply produce a brief flame just above the water level. Yet scores of witnesses have reported discrete balls of light moving through the air, and holding themselves together for many seconds. Burning gas expands, rises, and cools. Ever turn on the gas range in your kitchen and have to chase a fireball around the room? I think not. In addition, many observers have reported a seeming awareness on the part of the lights; they seem to react to a human presence.

And then there is so called ball lightning. This has been reported by so many reliable witnesses that mainstream science has had to admit that it exists. Tesla and others have even produced what appears to be ball lightning in laboratories, or from lit candles in microwaves (don't try this at home), and researchers have produced similar effects by hitting silicon with an electric arc, leading some to suspect that natural ball lightning may be caused by ordinary lightning hitting sandy soil, but the lights they produced were only a few centimeters in diameter, and lasted, at the most, for one or two seconds.

By contrast, witnesses have reported natural ball lightning over a meter in diameter and lasting many seconds. It has been reported entering sealed aircraft cabins and closed rooms. At a Church in Devon, England on 10/21/1638, witnesses reported an eight foot fireball that killed four people and injured sixty. The problem with trying to explain it is that a ball of hot, glowing gas, or plasma, would, like the burning methane discussed earlier, tend to expand, rise, and cool very quickly.

But not only do we not understand ball lightning (if, indeed, it is lightning), we don't fully understand ordinary lightning. In addition, satellites and high flying aircraft have photographed "red sprites," dim, red flashes as high as ninety kilometers with filaments extending down toward thunderclouds, often in clusters. Also photographed are blue jets that shoot up as narrow cones from the tops of thunderclouds.

The sprites somehow produce gamma ray bursts, and no one has any explanation for any of this.Earthquake lights are another phenomenon that mainstream science admits is real, but cannot explain. Sometimes the lights are seen before or after the quake, and are typically white or bluish glows like an aurora. There are also reports of glowing spheres, or what appear to be flames coming from the ground.

Usually they are silent, but sometimes a crackling sound is reported, indicating that they might be electrical in nature. Theories include the release of methane from the ground, but, if so, what ignites it? Another theory is that ball lightning is an electrical discharge due to the piezoelectric effect (quartz crystals subjected to sudden impact or pressure produce electricity), but ball lightning has been reported at sea.

How would electric discharges find their way through hundreds of feet of sea water? Also, if the reports of glowing balls are correct, we are faced with the same problem as with swamp lights. What powers the glowing ball, and what holds it together? Also, earthquakes have caused electromagnetic disturbances and low frequency radio emissions in the 10-20 KHz range. This, too, is a mystery.

Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, is the organizer of the Behavioral Neuroscience Program. He has stimulated the temporal lobes of volunteers with weak magnetic fields, causing them to sense a "presence" in the room. This has led him to theorize that ufos are earthquake lights, and that the earthquake-caused electromagnetic disturbances somehow cause people to hallucinate full-fledged abductions.

It is quite a stretch from sensing a "presence" to the kind of experience alleged abductees report. In addition, abduction experiences usually happen when there is no earthquake, and often far from any fault lines. Persinger has theorized that even between quakes there may be strain on the rocks inside the Earth, and calls this the Tectonic Strain Theory.

Chris Rutkowski of the University of Manitoba has pointed out that common household electrical appliances subject people to far stronger electric and magnetic fields than have been produced by earthquakes, but do not cause hallucinations.British researcher Michael Devereux, like Persinger, believes that lights may appear even when there is no earthquake, and he has organized the Dragon Project to study what he calls "earthlights."

At a very few ancient ruins he has detected magnetic and radiation anomalies, and possibly infrared and ultrasound effects. Note that crop circles are also commonly found near ancient ruins in England. Devereux has come to suspect that the lights are in some sense alive or aware, possessing at least some level of intelligence.Videographer Jose Escamilla taped what he calls "rods" at Midway, New Mexico on 3/19/94 and many times since. He thinks that researchers like Ivan T. Sanderson and Trevor James Constable may have photographed them in the late nineteen fifties, and Constable used infrared film.

Basically, the rods appear to be some sort of bizarre flying creatures with rod-shaped bodies and projecting fins, that move through the air, and apparently through water and even solid rock at such speed that they are normally invisible to the human eye. When videotape is played back in extreme slow motion, they often appear. Before anyone accuses Escamilla of a hoax, consider the fact that dozens of other people have also taped them.

In one case, researchers taped some nocturnal moths, and, when the tape was played back in slow motion, the moths took on the appearance of rods due to a doubling effect inherent to videocameras. But many other rods have offset fins in multiples of three, an effect impossible to achieve with insects, whose wings are in multiples of two.

Escamilla points out that a rod photographed in Maryland appears to be partly behind a cloud, indicating that, whatever it was, it was colossal in size. In many of these videotapes, the cameras appear to be focused on infinity, making it difficult to explain the rods as insects very close to the camera. Escamilla and other researchers have also reported a seeming awareness on the part of the rods; often they swerve to avoid people.

I have discussed with Mr. Escamilla the possibility that the larger rods may be identical with at least some of the flying dragons of folklore. The idea that ufos, or some of them, may be some sort of bizarre life form, is very old. Whatever they are, they are worthy of further study, and, as common as they seem to be, studying them shouldn't be all that difficult.It should also be fairly easy to study another phenomenon reported in recent years: orbs.

When electronic cameras are used with a flash attachment, fairly often glowing balls of light appear, that were not visible at the time to the photographer or other people present when the picture was taken. Naturally, the manufacturers claim that these are not artifacts of the cameras caused by some defect. Debunkers claim that they are merely dust motes in the air. Perhaps so, but they appear in some pictures and not in others and seem to have no connection to the amount of dust present.

Researcher Paul J. Muir claims to have photographed them near ancient English ruins, or sacred sites, apparently making them identical to Devereux's earthlights. At some of these sites he claims to have triangulated their position using two cameras, apparently ruling out the dust mote theory, and, like Devereux, he has reported magnetic anomalies at some of the sites, and says that the orbs are electrically charged.

Note that these reports of electromagnetic anomalies seem common to many of these various phenomena, and have also been reported by ufo researchers.If orbs and rods would seem to be easy to study, the same is true of mysterious lights that show up over and over at the same locations. One of these would be Marfa, in West Texas, where balls of light, usually reddish in color, flashing off and on rapidly, have been seen by numerous observers, and also photographed and videotaped.

Debunkers claim that they are distant car headlights, but they are seen in directions away from the roads, and, anyway, were reportd in 1883 before there was even a rail line in the area, let alone any automobiles. As with all of these phenomena, most professional scientists refuse to investigate them, leaving that task mostly to amateurs, whom the professionals then disparage. It might be useful to get detailed seismic and geological data on the area, to see if the lights cluster around fault lines or near certain minerals or ground water.

Acoustic data should be collected, as some observers have reported a high pitched hum. Infrared and low light cameras should be used, and geiger counters and ultraviolet detectors, and, although the lights are only reported at night, that doesn't mean that they are not present by day, only invisible.Similar lights have been reported on and around Brown Mountain Ridge in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, dating back to pre-Civil War and Indian accounts, which would appear to rule out the convenient car headlight theory.

They are seen floating among the trees and sometimes larger lights split into several smaller ones, something also reported with ufos.The League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained Phenomena Research, or LEMUR, have detected them with infrared and moving across rock faces. They have activated geiger counters, but this may be due, not to radiation, but to the ionization of the air. LEMUR has also measured electrical currents moving through the ground, and radio emissions in the 140 KHz range.

They appear to be more common in times of high solar activity. There are thrust faults in the region, and caves and springs, and quartz and magnetite are common minerals around the ridge. One man claimed to have touched one and received an electric shock. All of this suggests something electrical in nature, but what? Note that caves and springs are reportedly also the site of many paranormal events.Another of the many areas where mysterious lights are reported is Hessdalen, Norway.

Linda Moulton Howe and some Norwegian researchers have done a fairly detailed study of these lights. They have come to believe that about ninety five percent are not solid objects, but plasmas emitting low frequency radio, and varying in brightness and size but not in temperature. The researchers have somehow determined that some five percent of the lights contain solid objects, polished spheres up to forty centimeters in diameter.

Some are visible only in infrared, large lights have been seen emitting smaller ones, and they seem to have a complex structure of many small components vibrating around. A ufo of the flying triangle type has also been reported at Hessdalen. In the town of Silver Cliff, Colorado, there are two cemetaries on Mill Street about a mile south of town, where numerous observers have reported a multitude of small lights in many colors flying around, and even following people.

This certainly suggests some kind of awareness, and the cemetary location suggests that the lights may be paranormal in nature, but no one knows for sure. Again, it would be easy for professional scientists to do a detailed study, if any of them cared enough to bother.And then there is Toppenish Ridge on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washingtom State, just east of the volcanic Cascade Mountains and in an area with several fault lines. For decades, many, many witnesses have reported flashing red and white lights and a few blue or orange ones moving around; often they move jerkily, or back and forth.

Fire lookouts, people whose observations generally have to be trusted, have often reported them. Much original work was done by David Akers on behalf of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who evolved from a ufo debunker into a ufo investigator. He found no magnetic anomalies.Clearly we are dealing, at the very least, with a natural phenomenon or several phenomena, that challenge our basic understanding of physics.

If these things are alive or aware in some way, the implications are disturbing. Could they be a bizarre life form? Or are they paranormal entities, challenging the current atheist/materialist paradigm? Or are we wrong to draw a line between life forms and the paranormal? Are they perhaps part of a continuum, or is all life in some sense paranormal?

And, since these are, by definition, ufos, does that mean that all ufos are a strange natural phenomenon, or bizarre life forms, or manifestations of the paranormal? Or are some of them spacecraft of unknown origin, while others are paranormal? Why do we assume that all ufos are essentially the same thing? Things may be more complex and strange than we can understand.

The Emergence of Virtual Sex

2008-06-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

From Virtual Sex to No Sex?

An inquiry from a journalist about the phenomenon of sex in the virtual world Second Life got me waxing eloquent about a topic interwoven with my Cyborg Buddha book project: the future of sex.

Here is my thesis: the two most important developments in the technological control of sex are both already occurring; first separating sex from physical contact, and then establishing our control over our sexual feelings altogether.

Sex is already moving in a virtual direction, between widespread access to and use of porn, phone sex, video-interactive sex, sex in virtual worlds, and eventually teledildonics, the use of body suits and tactile equipment controlled from afar.

Electronically mediated sex and porn are safer (no diseases or pregnancy), easier (lengthy courtship and foreplay are unnecessary), more convenient (available any time you are) and more likely to be exactly what you want (your partners can be anyone, or anything, you desire, without any physical defects).

The virtualization of sex has progressed from the first erotic paintings and photographs to sex in Second Life. Teledildonics is the next step, and it has been around since the early days of the Web. But the equipment has been so crude that it has not provided a very interesting experience for many. In about ten years however I’m sure that Wii-sex will be quite popular.

The growing sophistication of AI and robotics to detect human emotion, anticipate human desires and respond in ways that simulate a human response will also speed the virtualization of sex. People who are too busy, shy, or unappealing, or whose preferences are too elaborate or taboo to reveal to a living person, may turn to robot sex as an alternative.

Of course, we will have a serious problem of robot rights if and when machine minds achieve true self-awareness - perhaps a problem of apocalyptic proportions - and this would effect robot sex like everything else. (It would be bad if the first god-like AI was a former sex slave.)

Lots of people are horrified that virtual sex and porn are reducing desire for and tolerance for physical sex, especially with spouses or partners. But I think that this is first a matter of individual preference; many will still prefer body sex. The decline in physical sex will also soon be overcome by neurotechnologies that control and channel sexual desire.

Soon, in addition to Viagra, we will have chemicals that increase and channel desire itself. Right now we can chemically castrate pedophiles and turn off their obsessive thoughts about children, along with all of their sex drive. We can stimulate sexual desire in men and women by increasing their testosterone. We can increase feelings of trust and bonding with oxytocin.

Eventually we will be able to directly stimulate the parts of the brain that desire specific partners or experiences. In the future we will be able to specifically turn off sexual thoughts about children, and turn on appropriate sexual thoughts about adults. We will be able to make gays straight, and straights gay, and everything in between. There will be no more necessity for sexual boredom between long term partners.

We will be able to wire ourselves to only desire sex with our spouses, to only desire it in-body, and to desire it according to an agreed upon frequency. Or we can turn off our jealousy, and turn up our libidos, if we have agreed to a polyamorous lifestyle.

When we have our brains laced with nano-neural networks (40 years?) we will eventually be able to experience completely virtual body sensation, so we can have equal or better quality sex with partners in virtual reality, or with combinations of virtual reality and material reality; two real people in a virtual space, a virtual partner in a real space, two real and one virtual person in a semi-real space, whatever.

Nano-neural networks and new psychopharmaceuticals will also allow us to modify and enhance sexual and emotional experience, to have orgasms as long and hard as we like, or no orgasms, or to have an experience of cosmic love and oneness instead of an orgasm, experienced as a bolt of tingles through every inch of our body.

Also, as we gain complete control over the neurochemistry of sex, love and bonding we can make conscious, explicit choices about our feelings and desires. Just as we have prenuptial contracts for property, partners may agree to lock their love and sexual desire onto their partners for a specified period, or at least go to marital counseling to have adulterous feelings modified.

This technology will also be a huge boon for celibate religious orders, who will be able to turn off their mendicants’ sexual feelings. (Perhaps not taking your celibacy pill will be the mark of true self-flagellant.)

I suspect that as the range of sexual choices expand, and the potential for sexual addiction grows, a lot of people will adopt either strict monogamy or even celibacy, channeling all that energy into other pursuits.

The challenge will be to remain a liberal society as the birth rate drops and the risk of virtual sexual obsessions grows. These neurotechnological controls over sexuality could enable new forms of Puritanism and repression in authoritarian societies, “curing" homosexuals and enforcing monogamy on people against their will.

We will have to work hard to defend cognitive liberty and sexual liberalism against the forces of repression, partly by developing the means for people to control and channel their own sexuality. The debates over the limits on sex in virtual worlds is only the beginning.

Written by:
James Hughes Ph.D., the IEET Executive Director, is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut USA. He is author of Citizen Cyborg and is working on a second book tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha. He produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio.

Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered

2008-06-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.

Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Changizi now says it's our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd. His research on this topic is detailed in the May/June issue of the journal Cognitive Science.

Explaining illusions

That same seer ability can explain a range of optical illusions, Changizi found.
"Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality," Changizi said.

Here's how the foresight theory could explain the most common visual illusions — geometric illusions that involve shapes:

Something called the Hering illusion, for instance, looks like bike spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are moving forward, and thus, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we aren't actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones.

"Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future,” Changizi said. "The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward — as we would in the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we move through it — and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."

Grand unified theory

In real life, when you are moving forward, it's not just the shape of objects that changes, he explained. Other variables, such as the angular size (how much of your visual field the object takes up), speed and contrast between the object and background, will also change.

For instance, if two objects are about the same distance in front of you, and you move toward one of the objects, that object will speed up more in the next moment, appear larger, have lower contrast (because something that is moving faster gets more blurred), and literally get nearer to you compared with the other object.

Changizi realized the same future-seeing process could explain several other types of illusions. In what he refers to as a "grand unified theory," Changizi organized 50 kinds of illusions into a matrix of 28 categories. The results can successfully predict how certain variables, such as proximity to the central point or size, will be perceived.

Changizi says that finding a theory that works for so many different classes of illusions is "a theorist's dream."

Most other ideas put forth to explain illusions have explained one or just a few types, he said. The theory is "a big new player in the debate about the origins of illusions," Changizi told LiveScience. "All I'm hoping for is that it becomes a giant gorilla on the block that can take some punches."

Modern technology is changing the way our brains work

2008-05-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

By: Susan Greenfield

Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.

It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave. It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all.

This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals.

And it's caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.

Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.

It would be a world where such devices could enhance our muscle power, or our senses, beyond the norm, and where we all take a daily cocktail of drugs to control our moods and performance.
Already, an electronic chip is being developed that could allow a paralysed patient to move a robotic limb just by thinking about it.

As for drug manipulated moods, they're already with us - although so far only to a medically prescribed extent.

Increasing numbers of people already take Prozac for depression, Paxil as an antidote for shyness, and give Ritalin to children to improve their concentration.

But what if there were still more pills to enhance or "correct" a range of other specific mental functions?

What would such aspirations to be "perfect" or "better" do to our notions of identity, and what would it do to those who could not get their hands on the pills? Would some finally have become more equal than others, as George Orwell always feared?

Of course, there are benefits from technical progress - but there are great dangers as well, and I believe that we are seeing some of those today.

I'm a neuroscientist and my day-to-day research at Oxford University strives for an ever greater understanding - and therefore maybe, one day, a cure - for Alzheimer's disease.
But one vital fact I have learnt is that the brain is not the unchanging organ that we might imagine.

It not only goes on developing, changing and, in some tragic cases, eventually deteriorating with age, it is also substantially shaped by what we do to it and by the experience of daily life.

When I say "shaped", I'm not talking figuratively or metaphorically; I'm talking literally.

At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.

The brain, in other words, is malleable - not just in early childhood but right up to early adulthood, and, in certain instances, beyond.

The surrounding environment has a huge impact both on the way our brains develop and how that brain is transformed into a unique human mind.

Of course, there's nothing new about that: human brains have been changing, adapting and developing in response to outside stimuli for centuries.

What prompted me to write my book is that the pace of change in the outside environment and in the development of new technologies has increased dramatically.

This will affect our brains over the next 100 years in ways we might never have imagined.
Our brains are under the influence of an ever- expanding world of new technology: multichannel television, video games, MP3 players, the internet, wireless networks, Bluetooth links - the list goes on and on.

But our modern brains are also having to adapt to other 21st century intrusions, some of which, such as prescribed drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, are supposed to be of benefit, and some of which, such as widelyavailable illegal drugs like cannabis and heroin, are not.

Electronic devices and pharmaceutical drugs all have an impact on the micro- cellular structure and complex biochemistry of our brains. And that, in turn, affects our personality, our behaviour and our characteristics. In short, the modern world could well be altering our human identity.

Three hundred years ago, our notions of human identity were vastly simpler: we were defined by the family we were born into and our position within that family. Social advancement was nigh on impossible and the concept of "individuality" took a back seat.

That only arrived with the Industrial Revolution, which for the first time offered rewards for initiative, ingenuity and ambition.

Suddenly, people had their own life stories - ones which could be shaped by their own thoughts and actions. For the first time, individuals had a real sense of self.

But with our brains now under such widespread attack from the modern world, there's a danger that that cherished sense of self could be diminished or even lost.

Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School.

There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.

The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.

And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.
The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.

But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons.

"The power of imagination" is not a metaphor, it seems; it's real, and has a physical basis in your brain.

Alas, no neuroscientist can explain how the sort of changes that the Harvard experimenters reported at the micro-cellular level translate into changes in character, personality or behaviour.
But we don't need to know that to realise that changes in brain structure and our higher thoughts and feelings are incontrovertibly linked.

What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure, and therefore some presumably minor change in the way the aspiring player performs, what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about?

That eternal teenage protest of 'it's only a game, Mum' certainly begins to ring alarmingly hollow.

Already, it's pretty clear that the screen-based, two dimensional world that so many teenagers - and a growing number of adults - choose to inhabit is producing changes in behaviour.

Attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are reduced and there's a marked reduction in the ability to think abstractly.

This games-driven generation interpret the world through screen-shaped eyes. It's almost as if something hasn't really happened until it's been posted on Facebook, Bebo or YouTube.

Add that to the huge amount of personal information now stored on the internet - births, marriages, telephone numbers, credit ratings, holiday pictures - and it's sometimes difficult to know where the boundaries of our individuality actually lie.

Only one thing is certain: those boundaries are weakening.

And they could weaken further still if, and when, neurochip technology becomes more widely available.

These tiny devices will take advantage of the discovery that nerve cells and silicon chips can happily co-exist, allowing an interface between the electronic world and the human body.

One of my colleagues recently suggested that someone could be fitted with a cochlear implant (devices that convert sound waves into electronic impulses and enable the deaf to hear) and a skull-mounted micro- chip that converts brain waves into words (a prototype is under research).

Then, if both devices were connected to a wireless network, we really would have arrived at the point which science fiction writers have been getting excited about for years. Mind reading!
He was joking, but for how long the gag remains funny is far from clear.

Today's technology is already producing a marked shift in the way we think and behave, particularly among the young.

I mustn't, however, be too censorious, because what I'm talking about is pleasure. For some, pleasure means wine, women and song; for others, more recently, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; and for millions today, endless hours at the computer console.

But whatever your particular variety of pleasure (and energetic sport needs to be added to the list), it's long been accepted that 'pure' pleasure - that is to say, activity during which you truly "let yourself go" - was part of the diverse portfolio of normal human life. Until now, that is.

Now, coinciding with the moment when technology and pharmaceutical companies are finding ever more ways to have a direct influence on the human brain, pleasure is becoming the sole be-all and end-all of many lives, especially among the young.

We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment, and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.

This is a trend that worries me profoundly. For as any alcoholic or drug addict will tell you, nobody can be trapped in the moment of pleasure forever. Sooner or later, you have to come down.

I'm certainly not saying all video games are addictive (as yet, there is not enough research to back that up), and I genuinely welcome the new generation of "brain-training" computer games aimed at keeping the little grey cells active for longer.

As my Alzheimer's research has shown me, when it comes to higher brain function, it's clear that there is some truth in the adage "use it or lose it".

However, playing certain games can mimic addiction, and that the heaviest users of these games might soon begin to do a pretty good impersonation of an addict.

Throw in circumstantial evidence that links a sharp rise in diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and the associated three-fold increase in Ritalin prescriptions over the past ten years with the boom in computer games and you have an immensely worrying scenario.
But we mustn't be too pessimistic about the future.

It may sound frighteningly Orwellian, but there may be some potential advantages to be gained from our growing understanding of the human brain's tremendous plasticity.

What if we could create an environment that would allow the brain to develop in a way that was seen to be of universal benefit?

I'm not convinced that scientists will ever find a way of manipulating the brain to make us all much cleverer (it would probably be cheaper and far more effective to manipulate the education system).

And nor do I believe that we can somehow be made much happier - not, at least, without somehow anaesthetising ourselves against the sadness and misery that is part and parcel of the human condition.

When someone I love dies, I still want to be able to cry.

But I do, paradoxically, see potential in one particular direction.

I think it possible that we might one day be able to harness outside stimuli in such a way that creativity - surely the ultimate expression of individuality - is actually boosted rather than diminished.

I am optimistic and excited by what future research will reveal into the workings of the human brain, and the extraordinary process by which it is translated into a uniquely individual mind.

But I'm also concerned that we seem to be so oblivious to the dangers that are already upon us.

Well, that debate must start now. Identity, the very essence of what it is to be human, is open to change - both good and bad. Our children, and certainly our grandchildren, will not thank us if we put off discussion much longer.

Uploading, Self-Transformation & Sexual Engineering

2008-04-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

What is the lossiness of the uploading process? Physically, are we uploading the function of hormones along with that of the neurons, neurotransmitters, etc? What about the thymus, pituitary, testes or ovaries, pancreas, digestive tract, sexual organs, etc.?

The point where psychology leaves off and irrelevant physical detail begins is not clear, and even the most intellectually motivated person may be irrevocably disoriented if these kind of biological processes and motivations are removed suddenly.

If we upload our neurons, and leave behind the hormones, does that give us 90% of our previous identity, or 10%? I don't think the answer is at all clear. Much as we take pride in our intellect most humans spend most of our time at the dictates of our hormones: eating, sleeping, seeking sex.

We might call the loss of biological substrate upon uploading the problem of dangling sexuality (so to speak :-), or more generally phantom biology, or phantom motivation. I refer to the phenomenon of "phantom limbs" in which pain etc. are felt in a limb even after it has been lost.

The big problem here is that an uploader may be left with no motivation at all. Why expand memory or CPU? Why search for better algorithms? Why explore the universe and put it to use?

Why not commit suicide or go hide in some archive until the universe ends? Without extropian motivations, there is no clear reason for or against doing any of these. And it's not just a matter if abstractly wanting to do these things; it's a matter of being hungry for them, of lusting after them, of falling head over heals in love with them.

Uploaders will likely face stiff competition: military/hacking competition from mature a-life and/or experienced uploaders, economic competition from evolving trader bots, etc.

If the uploader spends excessive CPU cycles simulating glands and hormones, recreating 3D landscapes and living out old sexual fantasies, etc. they may quickly go bankrupt. Depending on the rules of the uploader PPL, they may have their memory garbage collected and be filed away into a museum archive, may be merged into other consciousness (cf. proposal to auction off organs of bankrupt people in biological PPL), etc.

So even if the capability exists to simulate sexuality, hunger, taste for music, and other old dominant motivations in a minimally lossy way, competition may require these quickly be dumped overboard in favor of motivations that allow the agent to survive and grow in the new environment.

By the same token we can step back and examine what is valuable in our own environment, here today. We seem to live in an environment that is very forgiving wrt our forebears, and perhaps may be very forgiving compared to the world of a-life and uploader.

But is our own environment really that forgiving? Isn't it an incredibly great great loss when people die, for good, because they lack money for life extension and cryonic suspension, and do not make what might be called "semi-connected backups" (children, long-lived memes)?

Our current decisions and motivations are quite important, and even in today's environment biology may lead us astray. Consider the time we spend on work, recreation, entertainment, sexuality, eating, listening to music, etc. Do we do what is most extropic, or do we do what biology and culture have led us to want to do?

How can we transform ourselves into a more extropian state?

So, we see that the impedance of biology is not unique to uploaders; even today we can start the task of self-transformation from biological motivations suitable for a hunter-gatherer tribe, to extropian motivations suitable for today. Taking this a step further, this leads us to ways of avoiding a sudden change in connectedness upon uploading.

Well before we begin the physical process of uploading, we can begin the psychological process of uploading. This requires that we anticipate the uploader environment, and what it will take for us to succeed there, and transform ourselves in that direction even as we remain in our biological bodies. By the time we upload, we should be already well-transformed; psychologically prepared to do combat in cyberspace. Such transformation might include:

Fetish engineering: moving our sexuality away from biological and towards economic or information-resource triggers. We may be able learn from precedents (eg monks), but mostly we will be breaking new ground. Anti-aphrodisiacs or training on fetish objects with aphrodisiacs may help here.

Finding fetishes that suitably motivate abstract goals such as learning, life extension, child bearing and raising, expansion of the bank account, etc. may not be easy. Fetish engineering may be the most important and productive form of self-transformation, if we can pull it off.

Aesthetic shift: retrain ourselves to get aesthetic pleasure from technological or economic accomplishment, eg hacking good code or making a good deal in the market, and less from similar but less useful aesthetic pastimes like music or good cooking.

It may be necessary to develop very sophisticated tastes in music, cooking, etc. before such transformation is possible; or perhaps the opposite is true, that sophistication in music or cooking detracts from technological or economic sophistication.

It's important that we resolve these issues; otherwise we won't know whether we're transforming towards or away from a consciousness suited to our environment, or ready for uploading.

Thirst, hunger, satiation, and taste: In the uploader, these need to be linked to new resources: taste buds to sense, and software to respond to memory and CPU cycles and power sources instead of fats and proteins and carbohydrates. Today, many of us already find these biological motivations excessive, to the point of distracting us from intellectual tasks and even being downright unhealthy (eg overweight lowers life expectancy).

This suggests also empirical benchmarks, telling us how far we've progressed on the road from human to transhuman to posthuman. How much of our motivational energy, or more measurably how many hours per day, are spent chasing obsolete biological ends? How much are spent in ways that would be beneficial to an uploader? If we spend more of our time at the latter, we might truly call ourselves transhuman; if our schedule is dominated by what would also concern the uploader, then we have reached posthumanity.

All this may sound very cold & dry: trying to turn sophisticated biological & culture tastes into cold & abstract mechanisms. Far from it! The fact that we find the machines cold & abstract is a problem endemic to humans; the transhuman task is developing tastes for the new resources that not only rival our current _haute cuisine_, sexual skills and romantic subtleties, but go beyond them in both sophisticated elegance and raw powerful lust.

It may also sound quite perverted, engineering fetishes in place of "normal, healthy" sexuality. But we already live in a world where the genetic goal of sex is short-circuited by birth control, sex is perverted by pornography, brood-care perverted by pets and dolls, etc. Yesterday's perversion can be tommorrow's route to success or failure.

Political correctness, social norms, and our current personal tastes bear no relation to the outcome unless they have either emerged to a state of rationality, or been designed rationally -- and even then are subject to continual obsolescence as culture evolves around us. Putting these genies back in the bottle is futile.

The idea here is to sort out our perversions, to figure out which are extropic and which entropic, and use both perversions and self-discipline to transform ourselves into ever greater heights of extropy.

Nick Szabo

Humanity's close shave with Extinction

2008-04-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

It was a very close call.

If a devastating drought that gripped Africa had lasted just a little longer, or been a little worse, we would not be here today.

There would be no humans, no cities, no art and no science. There would be no wars and no human-induced climate change. The world would belong to the animals.

An international genetics project has found that modern humans almost became extinct 70,000 years ago.

The Genographic Project, led by American and Israeli researchers, made the discovery after undertaking the most extensive mitochondrial DNA survey ever undertaken in Africa.In 1987 a study of mitochondrial DNA, passed down the generations via the maternal line, revealed that every person alive today is descended from one woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.

The latest study shows that after the birth of humanity in eastern Africa, people quickly split into separate communities.

About 150,000 years ago humans, possibly pursuing animal herds, moved to settle throughout Africa. The number of people soared, peaking somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000.

But before the first person could venture out of Africa, the population suddenly crashed to just 2000.

"It could have been even fewer," said Spencer Wells, the Genographic Project director. "We were, in effect, hanging on by our fingertips."That's fewer people than there are Sumatra orang-utans today, and they are classified as extremely endangered and will probably go extinct in 20 years."

The crisis was probably caused by climate change. About 130,000 years ago the world started cooling and drying as it neared another ice age."There were massive droughts in Africa ... mega-droughts," Dr Wells said. With much of the continent barren and hostile, the tiny human settlements became isolated from each other.

As humanity hovered on the edge of extinction "a shift in culture began. People began making the better hunting tools they needed to survive the drought. Art makes its appearance. There is abstract thought," he said.

Then the drought broke. Isolated communities migrated and merged. With better skills and a friendlier climate, the population boomed again and people finally left Africa, spreading along the Asian coast, towards Australia.

Backed by National Geographic and IBM, the researchers, who have published their findings in The American Journal Of Human Genetics, identified humans' near demise after studying DNA mutation rates.

"By sampling people alive today, estimating how much genetic variation they have ... and knowing the rate at which variation accumulates we can say how long it took to accumulate the observed level of variation, and the size of the starting population," Dr Wells said.

The project aimed to discover what humans were doing before leaving Africa.

"Three quarters of our history is virtually unknown," Dr Wells said. The research showed "there was lots going on".

He believes humanity's close shave should send a message to the 6.6 billion people alive today. "We should start to see ourselves as the lucky survivors."

Probability of Advanced Life Forms in our Galaxy

2008-04-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

It is almost an article of faith among many ufologists that, of course, the ufos are piloted by beings from distant star systems.

Some go further and make sweeping statements about Pleiadean beamships and Sirian motherships.Sirius and all the stars in the Pleiades cluster are, by the way, only a fraction of the age of our Earth and Sun.

But let us address two questions. Is there anyone out there, and, if so, could they come here? The answer to the first question, of course, is that we don't know for sure, and, while it seems likely in such a vast universe that someone is out there, there are reasons to believe that technological civilizations are few and far between.

As to the second question, most certainly they could come here, if they exist and have sufficient wealth (interstellar flight is likely to be an expensive undertaking) and are sufficiently advanced.

As discussed in another article, even if faster than light speeds or "warp drive" prove impossible, and even if the tenuous interstellar medium, composed mainly of hydrogen, makes near light speed travel impossible, immense "space arks," rotating to produce artificial gravity and containing entire ecosystems, with cities and farms, would allow "manned" interstellar flight, although such voyages could take centuries or even millions of years, and generations would be born and die on the way.

But the first question is more difficult. Are they out there? Astronomers estimate the number of stars in our galaxy at 100 to 400 billion, say 200 billion, and they estimate that there may be 100 billion other galaxies in our universe. Bear in mind that without some kind of "warp drive" intergalactic voyages are problematic at best.

Our galaxy is believed to have a dense nucleus and six spiral arms, with a halo of dense globular star clusters surrounding the nucleus. We are thought to be about a third of the way out on what is called the Orion Arm, and our galaxy is believed to be about 100,000 light years across. So, at first glance, you would expect us to have plenty of company.

Not so fast. Most of the stars are packed into the globular clusters and the dense central regions of the galaxy. Most of these are so closely surrounded by other stars that their planets would have no night, so bright would the starlight be.

Even if they were not too hot from all that energy, any life forms there, or at least advanced life forms, would be periodically wiped out by nearby supernovae. These are hostile environments.

In addition, our Sun is a second generation population one star, with enough of the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, or enough "metallicity" as astronomers put it, to have solid planets like the Earth end elements like carbon and oxygen for life as we know it. The first stars, population three, apparently no longer exist, and the later population two stars are still so poor in heavier elements that they could not have solid planets or carbon based life forms.

So out of our 200 billion stars, we have perhaps 20 billion that might have advanced life forms. Bear in mind that this is just an educated guessing game, an updated version of Drake's Equation, formulated in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake.Stars much more massive than our Sun fuse their hydrogen more rapidly and go off the Hertzsprung Russell diagram's main sequence sooner; that is, they become unstable, and, depending on their mass, either swell up into red giants or explode as supernovae.

Either way, their planets are destroyed and any life is wiped out. It has taken us four point six billion years to "evolve," and, while as an advocate of intelligent design I can't say it is impossible for civilizations to develop in only one or two billion years or less, it seems unlikely. Stars much less massive than our Sun, red dwarves, are unstable.

To receive enough light and warmth for life, a planet would have to orbit very close to its star (one such system has recently been discovered) where it would periodically be blasted by solar flares.

Also, the steep tidal gradient would probably induce heating of the planet's interior (like Jupiter's moon Io), which, added to the heat already generated in the interior of any near Earth sized planet, would cause too much vulcanism for anything to survive.

Eventually the planet would become tide locked, like our own Moon, with one side always burned by its parent star and the other side frozen in eternal night. Being very generous, we are now down to about two billion stars with the right luminosity.

Most stars are multiples, with two or three or (rarely) more stars orbiting a common center of gravity. If the two stars of a binary system are either very close together or very far apart, one or both might have a planet with a stable orbit receiving the right amount of energy.Otherwise, no dice.

This brings us down to perhaps a billion stars. But it turns out that, far from us being the new kids on the block, our Sun is one of the oldest population one stars. So now we are down to perhaps a hundred million stars with habitable planets old enough for civilizations to have developed.

Since our Sun, like all stars, slowly gets hotter as it ages, it will destroy all life long before it goes off the main sequence.Also, the craters we see on every solid world in our Solar System show that we are in a shooting gallery, and it is just pure luck (or Divine Providence) that we have not been destroyed by asteroid or cometary impacts, and that we "evolved" before our Sun became too hot.

So now we are down to maybe ten million stars suitable for advanced life forms. If a tenth of those have advanced civilizations on their planets, we would have the company of one million worlds out of a galaxy of 200 billion stars.

That is one in 200 thousand.

Bear in mind that most of the solar systems we have yet discovered are very different from our own, with gas giants orbiting very close to their stars, and that many astronomers believe that our Moon, formed by Earth's freakish and improbable collision with a large planetismal, may be essential to keeping our axial inclination stable enough for us to live here.

Still, a million is not bad. But where are they?

The SETI people, who mock us ufologists who have nothing but radar and visual sightings and videotape, have been listening for radio messages from other planets for decades. They have checked hundreds of stars on many wave lengths, and have never yet detected a single message.

Consider this.

If only one star in a million in our galaxy, or 200,000, had a planet with a technological culture, and only one in a hundred of those was broadcasting radio, that would be 2,000 message senders.

If only one in ten of those was within radio range, we should be listening to 200 other civilizations.

So where are they?

It is beginning to look as though we don't have very much company out there after all. Perhaps the ufos come from much, much closer to home.

William B Stoecker

Bruce Effect

2008-04-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

The Bruce effect is a form of pregnancy disruption in mammals in which exposure of a female to an unknown male results in pre- (Bruce 1959) or postimplantation failure.

Some form of pregnancy block or disruption has been reported in the laboratory for at least 12 species of rodents, including domestic mice, Mus musculus; deer mice, Peromyscus; and voles, Microtus.

The basic design of these experiments is that a recently inseminated female is exposed directly to an unfamiliar, nonsire male or to its urine or soiled bedding, which in turn causes her to prevent implantation or to abort or reabsorb her embryos. Pregnancy disruption may occur at any time from conception to 17 days postmating, depending on the species and experimental conditions.

Variables such as length of exposure, timing of exposure to a strange male, sexual experience, and behavior of strange males may all influence the degree of pregnancy failure. The overall implication is that some level of exposure to strange males disrupts normal pregnancy in female rodents. This response supposedly is adaptive for the male, in that termination of pregnancy results in the female coming into estrus within 1 to 4 days, providing the male with a mating opportunity.

The benefit to the female is less clear, but if the strange male were to commit infanticide and kill her offspring after parturition, a female could conserve reproductive effort by aborting her current litter and mating with the new male. Thus, pregnancy block, or termination of pregnancy, supposedly evolved as a female counterstrategy to infanticide by males.

The Bruce effect has not been demonstrated outside the laboratory, and does not occur in wild grey voles, so it might be a laboratory artifact.

Bateman's Principle

2008-04-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

In biology, Bateman's principle is the theory that females almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males, and therefore in most species females are a limiting resource over which the other sex will compete.

Typically it is the females who have a relatively larger investment in producing each offspring. A single male can easily fertilize all a female's eggs: she will not produce more offspring by mating with more than one male. A male is capable of fathering more offspring than any (one) female can bear, if he mates with several females.

By and large, a male's reproductive success increases with each female he mates with, whereas a female's reproductive success is not increased nearly as much by mating with more males. This results in sexual selection, in which males compete with each other, and females become choosy in which males to mate with.

Bateman's observations came from his empirical work on mating behaviour in fruit flies. He attributed the origin of the unequal investment to the differences in the production of gametes: sperm are cheaper than eggs. Animals are therefore fundamentally polygynous, as a result of being anisogamous.

"A female can have only a limited number of offspring, whereas a male can have a virtually unlimited number, provided that he can find females willing to mate with him. Thus females generally need to be much choosier about who they mate with." --Caspar Hewett, 2003

"A male can easily produce sperm in excess of what it would take to fertilize all the females that could conceivably be available. Hence the development of the masculine emphasis on courtship and territoriality or other forms of conflict with competing males." --Williams, 1966.
"in most animals the fertility of the female is limited by egg production which causes a severe strain on their nutrition.

In mammals the corresponding limiting factors are uterine nutrition and milk production, which together may be termed the capacity for rearing young. In the male, however, fertility is seldom likely to be limited by sperm production but rather by the number of inseminations or the number of females available to him...

In general, then, the fertility of an individual female will be much more limited than the fertility of a male... This would explain why in unisexual organisms there is nearly always a combination of an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females." --Bateman, 1948.

"among polygynous species, the variance in male reproductive success is likely to be greater than the variance in female reproductive success." --Huxley, 1938.

"The female, with the rarest exceptions, is less eager than the male... she is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape." --Darwin, 1871.

Study dampens hopes of finding E.T.

2008-04-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

Advanced ground and space-based telescopes are discovering new planets around other stars almost daily, but an environmental scientist from England believes that even if some of those planets turn out to be Earthlike, the odds are very low they'll have intelligent inhabitants.

In a recent paper published in the journal Astrobiology, Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia describes an improved mathematical model for the evolution of intelligent life as the result of a small number of discrete steps.

Evolutionary step models have been used before, but Watson (a Fellow of England's Royal Society who studied under James Lovelock, inventor of the "Gaia hypothesis") sees a limiting factor: The habitability of Earth (and presumably, other living worlds) will end as the sun brightens.

Like most stars, as it progresses along the main sequence, the sun's output increases (it is believed to be about 25 percent brighter now than when Earth formed). Within at most 1 billion years, this will raise Earth's average temperature to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), rendering the planet uninhabitable.

Four major stepsApplying the limited lifespan to a stepwise model, Watson finds that approximately four major evolutionary steps were required before an intelligent civilization could develop on Earth.

These steps probably included the emergence of single-celled life about half a billion years after the Earth was formed, multicellular life about a billion and a half years later, specialized cells allowing complex life forms with functional organs a billion years after that, and human language a billion years later still.

Several of these steps agree with major transitions that have been observed in the geological record.

Watson estimates the overall probability that intelligent life will evolve as the product of the probabilities of each of the necessary steps.

In his model, the probability of each evolutionary step occurring in any given epoch is 10 percent or less, so the total probability that intelligent life will emerge is quite low (less than 0.01 percent over 4 billion years). Even if intelligent life eventually emerges, the model suggests its persistence will be relatively short by comparison to the lifespan of the planet on which it developed.

The mathematical methods Watson used assume that each evolutionary step is independent of the others, though they must occur in sequence. Watson considers this "a reasonable first approximation for what is, after all, a very idealized sort of model, deliberately simplified enough that the math can be solved analytically."

Watson also suggests that some of the critical steps may have changed the biosphere irreversibly.

The development of photosynthetic plants, for example, led to an oxygen atmosphere, which was a necessary precursor to the development of complex land animals. Once this transition occurred, any further evolutionary step would have to take place in an oxygen atmosphere, which may have limited opportunities for non oxygen-breathing life to evolve.

Watson says in the conclusion to his paper: " ... only on those rare planets on which complex creatures happen to evolve can there exist observers who ask questions about evolution and care about the answers."

Asked if an advanced, space-faring civilization might be able to survive the brightening of its star by migrating off the planet where it evolved, Watson agrees that's possible: "the model predicts only when 'intelligence' can arise based on the time available. Once the observers exist, they might do all manner of things to find new places to live."

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, had this comment on Watson's work: "We have, of course, only one example of intelligent life (indeed, of life of any type). That means we cannot possibly estimate from this single instance what is the probability of life on other worlds unless we are completely confident we understand all the relevant evolutionary processes.

Watson argues that intelligent life will be dismayingly rare: There is no way to prove that is true. On the other hand, if the converse is the case — if the galaxy is home to many intelligences — that is amenable to proof. We should do the experiment."

The Real Matrix

2008-04-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

By Glenn Campbell

In the movie The Matrix, we discover that life as we know it is a computer generated virtual reality illusion. The "real" reality is something much bleaker and more desperate, where a few escaped humans are fighting an oppressive machine that is using people as an energy source. The illusion itself is called "the Matrix," and once you escape from it, you can never go back, at least with the same naive perceptions.

This is the perfect metaphor for life as we know it. Most of us are still living in the Matrix, being fed soothing illusions by our social environment and mass media. The Matrix gives us distorted information about life and tries to make us believe that the world is happy place. When we break out of the Matrix, we see a much darker universe where hardly anything is going right. Once we see our delusions for what they are, it is hard to go back to believing in them.

The true requirements of life are simple: food, health, self-regulation and meaningful interaction with others. The social Matrix we are living in piles all sorts of useless products on top of this, like fashion that doesn't make you attractive, entertainment that doesn't entertain, and illusions of a perfect life that can never be attained. The Matrix sets you up with goals and assumptions that may be entirely out of line with how the world really works and what really makes you happy.

All of this serves the needs of the machine but not necessarily our own needs.

It serves the goals of the machine to create an illusion of normative happiness. Social and Capitalist forces want you to believe that life is basically good and wholesome, with only a few minor problems, like underarm odor and an absence of full-flavored taste in your beer or cigarettes. Lo and behold, most of the problems identified by the machine can be solved by purchasing the right product: a new car, perhaps, or even a religion.

The Matrix is a very trivial place, obsessed with insignificant things like sports, sitcoms and the scandals of celebrities. The Matrix gives us Martha Stewart, fly fishing and a million different ways you can waste time before you die. The Matrix encourages you to fiddle while Rome burns.

If you aren't personally happy, then it must be your fault. You must not have purchased the right product. The illusion of normative happiness make us feel even worse when misfortune befalls us. "This isn't supposed to happen," we say, yet tragedy does happen, and nothing in the Matrix has prepared us for it. When you suffer, you usually have to do it alone, because no one else within the matrix has been trained to deal with it.

If we encounter a problem that isn't readily solvable, like mental illness, crime or world hunger, the Matrix tell us that this is an anomaly. Ninety-nine percent of life is fine, we think; it is only this one percent that doesn't seem to working out so well.

Naturally, we start looking around for some sort of simple product to solve that nagging one percent. Maybe we need more Capitalism to solve the world hunger problem, and maybe we should to put a gun into every citizen's hand to take care of crime. Life is happy, you understand, and all that is bothering us is a few solvable problems.

Once you break out of the Matrix, you see the opposite: Ninety-nine percent of the world is painful and desperate, wasting human resources on a huge scale. There are only a few little islands of happiness, where people are working well with each other and individual potential is close to being achieved. Everyone else is enslaved.

We don't take much notice of the true bleakness of the world because routine tragedy doesn't get much press. Pessimism doesn't sell commercial products, only false optimism does. Even our parents gave us sugar-coated fairy tales about the world because it was much easier to raise us that way. People who are fed a steady stream of pleasant delusions and simplistic goals are easier to manage. It is like giving them drugs to keep them subdued.

In the real world, human lives are wasted on a massive, production scale. Nearly every baby starts out with great promise, but very few adults fulfill it. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood, the spirit and creativity of most people on Earth are crushed. Instead of attaining something approaching their potential, most people are turned into Soylent Green—dumb food for other people.

You don't have to go to industrial China to find broken, exploited and wasted humanity. It is all around us. Maybe we are one of the wasted. Maybe we are not achieving our own potential because of the social situation we have found ourselves in or because of our own unachievable delusions of what life should be.

Given the option, which are we going to seek: real internal satisfaction based on our own experience or the product-based delusion of satisfaction as fed to us by the machine? Usually, the machine wins.

Breaking out of the Matrix, we discover that the problems of the world are massive and essentially unsolvable, at least by any power that we personally possess. Most people, even close to us, are living lives of either acute pain, numbing servitude or mindless delusion.

The family next door, we may know full well, is psychologically abusing their child and will turn him into a screwed up adult, but we may also recognize that there is little we can do about it. There is little we can do about most of the suffering of the world, because there is so much of it and our own powers are so limited.

Breaking out of the Matrix means seeing, for the first time, all of the rich, polychromatic suffering of the world and not flinching from it. This planet is a horrible place, and we have landed in the middle of it. It is like the science fiction story about the psychic who can read people's minds but can't turn it off. He feels all of the suffering of millions and often wishes that he didn't have that power.

Seeing all of the pain of the world doesn't mean you have to go mad. It just requires a different perspective. If there is far more suffering than you can do anything about, this can actually be liberating.

When you were locked in the Matrix and you saw on TV that some family or group was suffering, you felt compelled to help, because that suffering was seen as an unusual event—a disruption of your happy view of the world.

If you now recognize that suffering is everywhere, most of it never seen on TV, then you also have to realize that you can't address all of it. You have to be selective and intelligent in the way that you help and not just blindly donate to the number on your screen.

Breaking out of the Matrix lifts a veil from your eyes and gives you vision. You can now recognize social delusions for what they are: sales messages to serve the needs of others. You can now see that tragedy is everywhere and that there is little you can do about most of it, so you help where you can and sleep comfortably when you can't.

Without your delusions, you see that your own place in the world is very weak and fragile. All you really have is a few little slivers of discretion. With them, you can try to build your own tentative happiness and rescue that tiny portion of the world that you have some control over.

Simulated Reality- An Interesting Perspective

2008-04-01T03:32:00.000-07:00

By JOHN TIERNEY

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation.

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Form Constant

2008-03-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

A form constant is one of several geometric patterns which are recurringly observed during hallucinations and altered states of consciousness.

In 1926, Heinrich Kluver systematically studied the effects of mescaline (peyote) on the subjective experiences of its users. In addition to producing hallucinations characterized by bright, "highly saturated" colors and vivid imagery, Kluver noticed that mescaline produced recurring geometric patterns in different users.

He called these patterns 'form constants' and categorized four types: lattices (including honeycombs, checkerboards, and triangles), cobwebs, tunnels, and spirals.

Many of these shapes have an intriguing similarity to much of the imagery in Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

Kluver's form constants have appeared in other drug-induced and naturally-occurring hallucinations, suggesting a similar physiological process underlying hallucinations with different triggers. Kluver's form constants also appear in near-death experiences and hallucinations of those with synesthesia.

Other triggers include psychological stress, or threshold consciousness, hypnagogia, insulin hypoglycemia, the delirium of fever, epilepsy, psychotic episodes, advanced syphilis, sensory deprivation, photostimulation, electrical stimulation, crystal gazing, migraine headaches, dizziness and a variety of drug-induced intoxications.

These shapes may appear on their own or with eyes shut in the form of phosphenes, especially when exerting pressure against the closed eyelid.

Author Michael Moorcock once observed in print that the shapes he had seen during his migraine headaches resembled exactly the form of fractals. The diversity of conditions that provoke such patterns suggests that form constants reflect some fundamental property of visual perception.

The practice of the ancient art of divination may suggest a deliberate practice of cultivating form constant imagery and applying the brain's intuitive faculty and/or imagination to derive some meaning from transient visual phenomena.

Many religions represent geometric and/or repetitive forms as indicative of the divine, particularly in a starburst pattern.

Examples include mandalas, yantras (both of these specifically designed to evoke certain mental states), Islamic art and cathedral architecture.

Psychedelic art, inspired at least in part by psychedelic substances, frequently includes repetitive abstract forms and patterns such as tessellation, Moire patterns or patterns similar to those created by paper marbling, and, in later years, fractals. The op art genre of visual art created art using bold imagery very like that of form constants.

Exploding head syndrome

2008-03-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Exploding head syndrome is a condition first reported by a British physician in 1988 that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as if from within his or her own head, usually described as an explosion, roar or a ringing noise.

This usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, but is not the result of a dream and can happen during the day as well.

Although perceived as tremendously loud, the noise is usually not accompanied by pain. Attacks appear to increase and decrease in frequency over time, with several attacks occurring in a space of days or weeks followed by months of remission.

Sufferers often feel a sense of fear and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate. Attacks are also often accompanied by perceived flashes of light (when perceived on their own, known as a "visual sleep start") or difficulty in breathing.

The condition is also known as "auditory sleep starts." It is not thought to be dangerous, although it is sometimes distressing to experience.

Note that exploding head syndrome does not involve the head actually exploding.

The cause of exploding head syndrome is not known, though some physicians have reported a correlation with stress or extreme fatigue. The condition may develop at any time during life and women are slightly more likely to suffer from it than men. Attacks can be one-time events, or can recur.

The mechanism is also not known, though possibilities have been suggested; one is that it may be the result of a sudden movement of a middle ear component or of the eustachian tube, another is that it may be the result of a form of minor seizure in the temporal lobe where the nerve cells for hearing are located.

Electroencephalograms recorded during actual attacks show unusual activity only in some sufferers, and have ruled out epileptic seizures as a cause.

Hypnic jerk

2008-03-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

A hypnic or hypnagogic jerk is an involuntary muscle twitch (commonly known as a myoclonic twitch) which occurs during the transition into hypnagogia.

It is often described as an electric shock or falling sensation, and can cause movement of the body in bed. Hypnic jerks are experienced by most people, especially when exhausted or sleeping uncomfortably.

Hypnic jerks are usually felt once or twice per night. More regular, and usually less intense, hypnic jerks often occur during normal sleep. In extreme cases, this may be classified as a disorder called periodic limb movement. The person with the disorder will usually sleep through the events.

Although the ultimate cause of the hypnic jerk is unknown, a common hypothesis is that the brain misinterprets relaxation as the sleeping primate falling out of a tree.

When a subject is deprived of sleep and is trying to fight sleep, hypnic jerks can occur more often. This normally happens to subjects who have deprived themselves of sleep for longer than 24 hours, or to those who have recently woken up from insufficient amounts of sleep.

False Awakening

2008-03-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

A false awakening is an event in which someone dreams they have awoken from sleep. This illusion of having awakened is very convincing to the person. After a false awakening, people will usually dream of performing daily morning rituals, believing they have truly awakened.

A dream in which a false awakening takes place is sometimes colloquially referred to as a "double dream", or a "dream within a dream".

Relationship to lucidity

A false awakening may occur either following an ordinary dream or following a lucid dream (one in which the dreamer has been aware of dreaming). Particularly if the false awakening follows a lucid dream, the false awakening may turn into a ‘pre-lucid dream', that is, one in which the dreamer may start to wonder if they're really awake and may or may not come to the correct conclusion.

Relationship to simulated reality

A false awakening has significance to the simulation hypothesis which states that what we perceive as "true" reality is in truth an illusion as evidenced by our minds' inability to distinguish between reality and dreams. Therefore, advocates of the simulation hypothesis argue that the probability of our "true" reality being a simulated reality is affected by the prevalence of false awakenings.

Realism and unrealism

Certain aspects of life may be dramatized, or out of place in false awakenings. Things may seem wrong: details, like the painting on a wall, not being able to talk or difficulty reading (purportedly reading in lucid dreams is often difficult or impossible.

In some experiences, the human senses are heightened, or changed. For instance, one may be able to see things in greater detail, or lesser detail, or one may feel an intense burst of fear and anxiety, or possibly pleasure.

Repetition

Because the dreamer is still dreaming after a false awakening, it is possible for there to be more than one false awakening in a single dream.

Often, dreamers will seem to have awakened, begin eating breakfast, brushing teeth, and so on and then find themselves back in bed, begin daily morning rituals, believe that they have awakened, and so forth.

The French psychologist Yves Delage reported an experience of his own of this kind, in which he experienced four successive false awakenings. The philosopher Bertrand Russell even claimed to have experienced ‘about a hundred’ false awakenings in succession while coming round from a general anaesthetic

Types of false awakenings

Celia Green suggested a distinction should be made between two types of false awakening:

Type 1

Type 1 may be thought of as the ‘common-or-garden’ sort, in which the dreamer seems to wake up, but not necessarily in realistic surroundings, that is, not in their own bedroom. A pre-lucid dream may ensue. More commonly, dreamers will believe they have awakened and then ‘fall back asleep’ in the dream.

Type 2

The Type 2 false awakening seems to be considerably less common. Green characterised it as follows: 'the subject appears to wake up in a realistic manner, but to an atmosphere of suspense. His surroundings may at first appear normal, and he may gradually become aware of something uncanny in the atmosphere, and perhaps of unwonted sounds and movements.

Or he may “awake” immediately to a “stressed” and “stormy” atmosphere. In either case, the end result would appear to be characterized by feelings of suspense, excitement or apprehension.'

Charles McCreery drew attention to the similarity between this description and the description by the German psychopathologist Karl Jaspers of the so-called ‘primary delusionary experience’ (a general feeling which precedes any more specific delusory belief).

Jaspers wrote: ‘Patients feel uncanny and that there is something suspicious afoot. Everything gets a new meaning. The environment is somehow different – not to a gross degree – perception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light. Something seems in the air which the patient cannot account for, a distrustful, uncomfortable, uncanny tension invades him.’

McCreery suggests that this phenomenological similarity is not accidental, and results from the fact that both phenomena, the Type 2 false awakening and the primary delusionary experience, are phenomena of sleep.

He suggests that the primary delusionary experience, like other phenomena of psychosis such as hallucinations and secondary or specific delusions, represents an intrusion into waking consciousness of processes associated with Stage 1 sleep.

It is suggested that the reason for these intrusions is that the psychotic subject is in a state of hyper-arousal, a state which can lead to what Ian Oswald called ‘micro-sleeps’ in waking life.

Sleep Paralysis

2008-03-19T06:13:00.000-07:00

Sleep paralysis is a condition characterized by temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis) or, less often, shortly before falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis).

Physiologically, it is closely related to the paralysis that occurs as a natural part of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is known as REM atonia.

Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the bodily paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully conscious, but unable to move. In addition, the state may be accompanied by terrifying hallucinations (hypnopompic or hypnagogic) which cause an acute sense of danger.

Sleep paralysis is particularly frightening to the individual due to the vividness of such hallucinations. The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects may appear in the room alongside one's normal vision. Some scientists have proposed this condition as a theory for alien abductions and ghostly encounters.

The paralysis can last from several seconds to several minutes "after which the individual may experience panic symptoms and the realization that the distorted perceptions were false".

When there is an absence of narcolepsy, sleep paralysis is referred to as isolated sleep paralysis (ISP). "ISP appears to be far more common and recurrent among African Americans than among White Americans or Nigerian Blacks", and is often referred to within African American communities as "the witch riding your back"

Symtoms

Symptoms of sleep paralysis can be either one of the following or a combination:

Paralysis: this occurs after waking up or shortly before falling asleep. the person cannot move any body part, cannot speak, and only has minimal control over blinking and breathing. This paralysis is the same paralysis that occurs when dreaming. The brain paralyzes the muscles to prevent possible injury during dreams, as some body parts may move during dreaming. If the person wakes up suddenly, the brain may still think that it is dreaming, and sustains the paralysis.

Hallucinations: Images or speaking that appear during the paralysis. The person may think that someone is standing beside them or they may hear strange sounds. These may be dreamlike, possibly causing the person to think that they are still dreaming. Often it is reported as feeling a weight on one's chest, as if being underneath a person or heavy object.

These symptoms can last from mere seconds to several minutes (although they can feel like much longer) and can be frightening to the person.

Possible Causes

Sleep paralysis occurs during REM sleep, thus preventing the body from manifesting movements made in the subject's dreams. Very little is known about the physiology of sleep paralysis.

However, some have suggested that it may be linked to post-synaptic inhibition of motor neurons in the pons region of the brain.

In particular, low levels of melatonin may stop the depolarization current in the nerves, which prevents the stimulation of the muscles, to prevent the body from enacting the dream activity (e.g. preventing a sleeper from flailing his legs when dreaming about running).

Several studies have concluded that many or most people will experience sleep paralysis at least once or twice in their lives.

Many people who commonly enter sleep paralysis also suffer from narcolepsy. In African-Americans, panic disorder occurs with sleep paralysis more frequently than in Caucasians.

Some reports read that various factors increase the likelihood of both paralysis and hallucinations. These include:

1) Sleeping in an upwards supine position

2) Irregular sleeping schedules; naps, sleeping in, sleep deprivation

3) Increased stress

4) Sudden environmental/lifestyle changes

5) A lucid dream that immediately precedes the episode.

Confabulation (False Memory)

2008-03-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

Confabulation, also known as false memory is the confusion of imagination with memory, and/or the confusion of true memories with false memories. Confabulation can result from both organic and psychological causes.

Organic Causes

Berlyne defined confabulation as “…a falsification of memory occurring in clear consciousness in association with an organically derived amnesia.” He distinguished between:

“momentary” (or “provoked”) confabulations - fleeting, and invariably provoked by questions probing the subject’s memory – sometimes consisting of “real” memories displaced in their temporal context.

“fantastic” (or “spontaneous”) confabulations - characterised by the spontaneous outpouring of irrelevant associations – sometimes bizarre ideas, which may be held with firm conviction.

Patients who have suffered brain damage or lesions, especially to the Prefrontal cortical regions, may have confabulation of memories as a symptom.

Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome characteristically confabulate by guessing an answer or imagining an event and then mistaking their guess or imagination for an actual memory. In some cases, confabulation is a function of the brain's chemistry, a mapping of the activation of neurons to brain activity.

Confabulation can also occur as a result of damage to the Anterior communicating artery (ACoA), in the Circle of Willis.

Some military agents, such as BZ, and deliriant drugs such as those found in datura, noticeably scopolamine and atropine, may also cause confabulation.

Psychological Causes

Bartlett’s studies of remembering are arguably the first concerted attempt to look at memory illusions phenomena.

In one experiment, he asked a group of students to read in Indian folktale and then recall that at various time intervals. As well as errors of omission, interestingly he found numerous errors of commission whereby participants had adapted or added to the story to make it more rational or consistent.

In the 1970s a number of researchers and theories started to emphasise what has been called the constructivist view of memory, maintaining that reasoning influences memory, in contrast to the prevailing view at the time which was that memory is essential for proper reasoning.

Theorists such as Bransford and Franks noted the significance of personal beliefs and desires, or more technically scripts and schemas, in memory retrieval.

Constructivism has fallen out of fashion recently due to the contention that it is either false or un-testable. Memory is presumably not always reconstructive as the considerable evidence of its veridical quality is testament. Constructivism cannot simply be rephrased as the thesis that memory is not always reproductive.

As Reyna and Lloyd point out, this amounts to the claim that memory is sometimes reproductive and sometimes reconstructive; which is unexplanatory and unfalsefiable as any result can be accommodated post hoc. Because of this a number of theories have now been advanced which instead focus on the mechanism by which an essentially accurate memory system can sometimes produce erroneous results.

Notably, both source monitoring framework and fuzzy-trace theory purport to both indicate when false memories are likely to occur and give a more detailed explanatory account than either reproductive or constructivist views.

Source monitoring refers to the process by which we discriminate between internally and externally derived memory sources as well as differentiations within the external and external domains: differentiating between two external sources or between internal sources, for instance between what was said and what was thought.

The theory postulates that these decisions are made based on the characteristics of memories compared to norms for memories for different sources, such as the proportions of perceptual, contextual, affective and semantic information featured in the encoding of the memory. Under the source monitoring framework false memory is seen as a failure to attribute information to the correct source.

This happens when there is insufficient information available to discriminate between different sources (perhaps because of natural deterioration), or when the wrong criterion is used to discriminate. For example a doctor might mistakenly think a patient is on a specific medicine because they were discussing the medicine with a colleague shortly after seeing them.

Fuzzy trace theory is based on the assumption that memory is not stored in unitary form. Instead memories are encoded on a number of levels, from an exact ‘verbatim’ account, to ‘gist’ which represents the overall meaning of the event. False memory effects are usually (but not always) explained as a reliance on gist traces in a situation when verbatim traces are needed.

Because of this people may mistakenly recall a memory that only goes along with a vague gist of what happened, rather than the exact course of events. Essentially there are three reasons why people might do this.

There is thought to be a general bias towards the use of gist traces in cognition due to their resource efficiency and people will tend to use gist traces when it is thought that they will be adequate to satisfy the demands of the situation.

Second, verbatim traces are said to be inherently less stable than gist and decay quicker.

Finally, during the course of forgetting memories fragment and gist and verbatim can become independent.

Cellular Memory

2008-03-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Cellular memory is the hypothesis that such things as memories, habits, interests, and tastes may somehow be stored in all the cells of human bodies, i.e. not only in the brain. The suggestion arose following a number of organ transplants in which the recipient was reported to have developed the memories.

An article, "Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors", published in the Spring 2002 issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies without peer review, sources or evidence, reported anecdotes in which recipients "inherited" a love for classical music, a change of sexual orientation, changes in diet and vocabulary, and in one case an identification of the donor's murderer.

The academic organ transplant community accepts this notion as pseudoscientific and absurd, as it has never been demonstrated in a scientific manner. There is also the fear that such notions may hinder organ donation.

The 2008 film The Eye is about a character named Sydney, a young, blind violinist who is given the chance to see for the first time since childhood through a miraculous corneal transplant.

As Sydney adjusts to a dizzying new world of colors and shapes, she is haunted by frightening visions of death itself capturing the doomed and dragging them away from the world of the living and is an example of cellular memory portrayed in the media.

Do Meteors Create Life?

2008-03-18T06:05:00.000-07:00

Do Meteors Create Life? Explosion Of New Life Coincided With Hundreds Of Meteorite Impacts...

Meteorite impacts are often associated with huge disasters, mass extinction and why the dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earth some 65 million years ago.

However, the opposite may also occur – that new and more varied animal life arises following such a catastrophe, is shown by new research conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen.

Together with colleagues from Lund University in Sweden, two palaeontologists, Svend Stouge and Dave Harper, have discovered that the Earth in the so-called Ordovician period 490-440 million years ago was struck by more than 100 meteorites at one time, and that in the wake of this event, new and more varied life evolved in the oceans, which at that time were home to virtually all life on Earth.

“You could say that biological evolution experienced a serious boost within a relatively short period of time. And, as is the case with, for example, volcanic eruptions or large forest fires, the impacts initially had a devastating effect on all life, but from the ashes arose a much richer fauna than had existed previously.

And another interesting aspect is that this situation occurred 40 million years after the so-called Cambrian explosion. It was during this explosion that the first complex multicellular creatures appeared, even though scientists are still discussing whether this evolution was a rapid explosion or whether it took place over a longer period of time,” says Dave Harper from the University of Copenhagen.

The conclusions of the two scientists are, among other things, based on computer analyses, chemical samples from meteorites, fossils and examination of different craters in Sweden, for example the large Lockne crater in northern Sweden, which has a diameter of 7.5 km.

“So far, our research has shown that it was a regional phenomenon around Baltica, the Baltic Sea of that time.

The area underwent an extraordinary change during a short period of time in terms of the evolution of new species, primarily shellfish, e.g. the so-called brachiopods, which resemble today’s mussels, but which already at that time were quite different.

We will now be studying whether this was a global phenomenon. It will be really exciting for the entire history of evolution, especially as it does seem that there is some truth in it and in the impact theory.

We have now found meteorites in southern China with the same chemical composition as those we have studied in Sweden. Consequently, we are going to be studying craters and meteorites in China and in the USA to establish whether it was a global phenomenon,” says Svend Stouge from the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

The findings of the two scientists have been published in the British journal Nature Geoscience.

Introduction to Brain-Computer Interfacing

2008-03-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device.

In one-way BCIs, computers either accept commands from the brain or send signals to it (for example, to restore vision) but not both.

Two-way BCIs would allow brains and external devices to exchange information in both directions but have yet to be successfully implanted in animals or humans.

In this definition, the word brain means the brain or nervous system of an organic life form rather than the mind. Computer means any processing or computational device, from simple circuits to silicon chips (including hypothetical future technologies such as quantum computing).

Research on BCIs began in the 1970s, but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the first working experimental implants in humans appeared. Following years of animal experimentation, early working implants in humans now exist, designed to restore damaged hearing, sight and movement.

The common thread throughout the research is the remarkable cortical plasticity of the brain, which often adapts to BCIs, treating prostheses controlled by implants as natural limbs.

With recent advances in technology and knowledge, pioneering researchers could now conceivably attempt to produce BCIs that augment human functions rather than simply restoring them, previously only the realm of science fiction.

New Age Movement

2008-03-17T03:23:00.000-07:00

New Age is the term commonly used to designate the broad movement of late 20th century and contemporary Western culture, characterized by an eclectic and individual approach to spiritual exploration and references the supposed coming astrological Age of Aquarius. Self-spirituality, New spirituality, and Mind-body-spirit are other names sometimes used for the movement.

Beliefs in New Age ideas are found among diverse individuals, including some who graft additional beliefs onto a traditional religious affiliation. Individuals who hold any of its beliefs may not identify with the name, and the name may be applied as a label by outsiders to anyone they consider inclined towards its world view.

The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions from both East and West, many of which have been melded with ideas from modern science, particularly psychology and ecology.

New Age ideas could be described as drawing inspiration from all the major world religions with influences from Spiritualism, Buddhism, Hermeticism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shamanism, Mayanism, Ceremonial magic, Sufism, Taoism, New Thought, Wiccan and Neo-Paganism being especially strong.

From this collection of influences have come a wide-ranging literature on spirituality, new forms of music known as "new age music", crafts—most visible in speciality shops and New Age fairs and festivals, and increased interest in the methods of alternative medicine.

New Age Music

New Age music is peaceful music of various styles that is intended to create relaxation and positive feelings. Some but not all new age music is associated with New Age beliefs.

New Age music is typically relaxing and inspiring, and is often used by listeners for such activities as yoga, massage, meditation, reading, as a method of stress management or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments.

The harmonies in new age music are generally modal, consonant, or include a drone bass. The melodies are often repetitive, to create a hypnotic feeling, and sometimes recordings of nature sounds are used as an introduction to a track or throughout the piece. Songs of up to 30 minutes duration are not uncommon.

New Age music includes both electronic forms, frequently relying on sustained pads or long sequencer-based runs; and acoustic forms, featuring instruments such as flutes, piano, acoustic guitar and a wide variety of non-western acoustic instruments.

In many cases, high-quality digitally sampled instruments are used instead of natural acoustic instruments. Vocal arrangements were initially rare in New Age music but as it has evolved vocals have become more common, especially vocals featuring Sanskrit, Tibetan or Native American-influenced chants, or lyrics based on mythology such as Celtic legends or the realm of Faerie.

Introduction to Computer Vision

2008-03-17T03:21:00.000-07:00

Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see.

As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as a video sequence, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data from a medical scanner.

As a technological discipline, computer vision seeks to apply the theories and models of computer vision to the construction of computer vision systems. Examples of applications of computer vision systems include systems for:

1) Controlling processes (e.g. an industrial robot or an autonomous vehicle).

2) Detecting events (e.g. for visual surveillance or people counting).

3) Organizing information (e.g. for indexing databases of images and image sequences).

4) Modeling objects or environments (e.g. industrial inspection, medical image analysis or topographical modeling).

5) Interaction (e.g. as the input to a device for computer-human interaction).

Computer vision can also be described as a complement (but not necessarily the opposite) of biological vision. In biological vision, the visual perception of humans and various animals are studied, resulting in models of how these systems operate in terms of physiological processes.

Computer vision, on the other hand, studies and describes artificial vision system that are implemented in software and/or hardware. Interdisciplinary exchange between biological and computer vision has proven increasingly fruitful for both fields.

Sub-domains of computer vision include scene reconstruction, event detection, tracking, object recognition, learning, indexing, ego-motion and image restoration.

Cyborgs - Cybernetic Organisms

2008-03-14T23:49:00.000-07:00

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems).

The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.

D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a "new frontier" that was "not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between 'inner space' to 'outer space' -a bridge...between mind and matter."

The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology, but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback.

Fictional cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts, and frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and empathy.

Fictional cyborgs may be represented as visibly mechanical (e.g. the Borg in the Star Trek franchise); or as almost indistinguishable from humans (e.g. the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica).

These fictional portrayals often register our society's discomfort with its seemingly increasing reliance upon technology, particularly when used for war, and when used in ways that seem to threaten free will.

They also often have abilities, physical or mental, far in advance of their human counterparts (military forms may have inbuilt weapons, amongst other things). Real cyborgs are more frequently people who use cybernetic technology to repair or overcome the physical and mental constraints of their bodies.

While cyborgs are commonly thought of as mammals, they can be any kind of organism.

According to some definitions of the term, the metaphysical and physical attachments humanity has with even the most basic technologies have already made them cyborgs.

In a typical example, a human fitted with a heart pacemaker or an insulin pump (if the person has diabetes) might be considered a cyborg, since these mechanical parts enhance the body's "natural" mechanisms through synthetic feedback mechanisms.

Some theorists cite such modifications as contact lenses, hearing aids, or intraocular lenses as examples of fitting humans with technology to enhance their biological capabilities; however, these modifications are no more cybernetic than would be a pen, a wooden leg, or the spears used by chimps to hunt vertebrates.

Cochlear implants that combine mechanical modification with any kind of feedback response are more accurately cyborg enhancements.

The prefix "cyber" is also used to address human-technology mixtures in the abstract. This includes artifacts that may not popularly be considered technology.

Pen and paper, for example, as well as speech, language. Augmented with these technologies, and connected in communication with people in other times and places, a person becomes capable of much more than they were before.

This is like computers, which gain power by using Internet protocols to connect with other computers.

Cybernetic technologies include highways, pipes, electrical wiring, buildings, electrical plants, libraries, and other infrastructure that we hardly notice, but which are critical parts of the cybernetics that we work within.

Robot Fetishism

2008-03-14T23:32:00.000-07:00

Robot fetishism (also ASFR or technosexuality) is a fetishistic attraction to humanoid or non-humanoid robots; also to people acting like robots or people dressed in robot costumes. A less common fantasy involves transformation into a robot.

In these ways it is similar to agalmatophilia, which involves attraction to or transformation into statues or mannequins.

Robot fetishism can be viewed as a form of erotic anthropomorphism. When transformation or roleplaying is involved it can be thought of as a form of erotic objectification.

By its enthusiasts, robot fetishism is more commonly referred to by the initials ASFR. This initialism stems from the now defunct newsgroup alt.sex.fetish.robots. Many devotees of this fetish refer to themselves as technosexual, or as "ASFRians". ASFR can be divided into two distinct but sometimes overlapping types of fantasies.

The first of these is simply a desire to have a ready-made android partner. This partner can be desired for sex, companionship, or any combination of the two. The main distinguishing feature of this fantasy is that the android is a completely artificial construct, often manufactured solely to fulfil the wishes of its owner. This type of fantasy or situation is referred to as built.

The second type of fantasy prevalent within ASFR is referred to as transformation. This involves a human who has been either willingly or unwillingly turned into an android. That person can be either oneself or one's partner, or both. It is usually the process of transformation (through whatever means it is achieved) that is the focus of this fantasy.

Many people in the ASFR community prefer either one or the other. In some cases this preference is very strong, and people can be as equally repelled by one type as they are attracted to the other. In other cases, there is as much appreciation for built as there is for transformation.

A recent informal survey of ASFR community members found that three fifths prefer built while the remainder prefer transformation or some combination of both.

The aspects of this fetish that are most appreciated by members of the ASFR community are greatly varied. For some, things like robotic appearance, motion, or sound are important for arousal.

For others, these are not, and a completely life-like android that appears to be human is desired. This holds true for other aspects, such as sentience or self-awareness. The ability of the android to remove parts of its skin or other bodily appendages in order to reveal its circuitry is quite pleasing to some, but distasteful to others.

There is a further divide between those who prefer an android to appear human-like and those who would prefer a more mechanical looking robot, i.e. with a metallic surface.

As realistic androids and humanoid robots do not currently exist in a form readily available to the consumer, this fetish can only be acted upon in a limited number of ways. Primarily this is done through fantasy, involving either self stimulation or sexual roleplaying with a partner.

ASFR art is therefore important to aid in the reinforcement of imagination.

Art with ASFR content includes but is not limited to science fiction movies, television shows, novels, short stories, illustrations, manipulated photographs, songs and even television commercials.

Such works are sought after by technosexuals since economically viable androids are not yet available. Realistic sex dolls such as the RealDoll remain the only concrete way to fully explore this fetish.

However, recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, such as those seen in the Actroid or EveR-1 can only lead to the production of more advanced synthetic partners.

It is also worth noting that some ASFRians do not wish to use synthetic partners at all, and instead would prefer human partners to participate in forms of fantasy play.

Agalmatophilia

2008-03-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

Agalmatophilia is the sexual attraction to a statue, doll or mannequin. Pygmalionism, refers to a state of love for an object of one's own creation, but may also be used to describe the attraction to statues.

Preferences in the individual

Agalmatophilia also crosses over into transformation fetishism in the form of fantasies about people transformed into any of those objects. For many it is the idea of immobility or loss of control that is arousing rather than an immobile object per se, and so there are also fantasies about mannequin-like paralysis which sometimes cross over into hypnofetishism and robot fetishism.

Such fantasies may of course be extended to roleplaying, and the self-coined term used by fetishists who enjoy being transformed appears to be "rubber doll" or "latex doll".

Representation in the arts

A number of famous art photographers have extensively featured sexualised life-sized dolls in their work, such as: Hans Bellmer, Bernard Faucon, Helmut Newton, Morton Bartlett, Katan Amano, Kishin Shinoyama, and Ryoichi Yoshida.

Agalmatophilia features prominently in Tarsem Singh's 2000 thriller movie The Cell. The movie centres on a serial killer named Carl Stargher who drowns his victims (all young women) and then bleaches their bodies so they resemble dolls. He then masturbates while hanging himself above them.

Later on in the movie there is a scene taking place inside his mind in which a psychiatrist finds a collection of grotesque, doll-like, corpse-like women inside display cases depicting scenes, while attached to crude machinery that jerks them about in sadomasochistic sexual poses; how the killer percieves his victims.

Hybrots - Hybrid Robots

2008-03-12T06:56:00.001-07:00

A hybrot (short for "hybrid robot") is a cybernetic organism in the form of a robot controlled by a computer consisting of both electronic and biological elements. The biological elements are rat neurons connected to a computer chip.

This feat was first accomplished by Dr. Steve Potter, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology:

"In his experiment, Potter places a droplet of solution containing thousands of rat neuron cells onto a silicon chip that's embedded with 60 electrodes connected to an amplifier. The electrical signals that the cells fire at one another are picked up by the electrodes which then send the amplified signal into a computer. The computer, in turn, wirelessly relays the data to the robot."

"The robot then manifests this neuronal activity with physical motion, each of its movements a direct result of neurons talking to neurons. And the robot also sends information back to the cells. Equipped with light sensors, the robot receives input about its location in the playpen from infrared signals lining the borders."

What separates a hybrot from a cyborg is that the latter term is a commonly used to refer to a cybernetically enhanced human or animal; while a hybrot is an entirely new type of creature constructed from organic and artificial materials. It's perhaps helpful to think of the hybrot as "semi-living," a term also used by the hybrot's inventors.

Another interesting feature of the hybrot is its longevity. Neurons separated from a living brain usually die after a short period of time; however, due to a specially designed incubator utilizing a new sealed-dish culture system, a hybrot may live as long as two years.

Part 2: Colonization of Mars

2008-03-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.hauns.com/~DCQu4E5g/Mars.html

Now, can we ever colonize Mars? NASA has been trying to find a solution to a problem that we learned about in exercise physiology a long time ago.

When you decrease the stress on the human skeleton, calcium leaches out of the skeleton making it more brittle. This leaching begins surprisingly fast and occurs in relation to the decrease in stress on the skeleton.

In other words, less gravity causes our bones to quickly get weaker and become more susceptible to breaking.

This is very serious because it is a form of gravity induced osteoporosis and has the same potential hazards.

With regular osteoporosis, a decrease in bone density of just 10% greatly increases bone breakage from falls or impacts. Now imagine living on Mars for a few years where the gravity is only 38% of Earth's gravity. Your bone density would quickly decrease to less than 50% of its regular density.

You could not return to Earth to visit relatives because the force of the impact of just landing on Earth would crush your bones and possibly cause your death. And there are other problems caused by decreased gravity on the body such as weakening of muscles and connective tissue.

Now imagine living in zero gravity for the six months required to reach Mars, living on Mars for the minimum of one year that it will take before Earth and Mars are again close enough to travel between the two planets, and then living in zero gravity for the six months required to return to Earth. Until NASA can solve the problems caused by decreased gravity, we cannot even send a manned expedition to Mars. They could never return to Earth.

One possible solution for an expedition is to have a space vehicle which rotates to use centripetal force to create the force effects of gravity on the body. This vehicle would have to be used as a base of operations in orbit above Mars with the scientists commuting back and forth between the space vehicle and the surface of Mars.

They could not stay on the surface of Mars for prolonged periods of time. This type of vehicle would be very expensive and, maybe, prohibitive.Such a vehicle could not be used for the colonization of Mars unless they plan to live on the space station and only commute to the surface of Mars for brief periods of time.

Simply put, it is not possible to colonize Mars unless we first develop artificial gravity.

We can never live outside of pressurized shelters on Mars because of the inadequate atmospheric pressure. You have to understand that the atmosphere around us is constantly pushing in on our bodies with the pressure of one bar of atmospheric pressure. In order to keep our bodies from being crushed by our atmospheric pressure, our bodies are pushing out with one bar of atmospheric pressure.

If we significantly increase the atmospheric pressure on our bodies, we will be crushed and, if we significantly decrease the atmospheric pressure on our bodies, we will expand very quickly or explode.On Mars, our bodies will be pushing out with a force at least 200 times greater than the force of the atmosphere pushing in on it.

Two things will happen almost instantly if you were to step outside without a space suit.

That much of a decrease in outside pressure on your body will cause the water in your body and cells to vaporize very quickly which will greatly increase the outward force of your body to much more than 200 times the atmospheric pressure.

With this much of an imbalance in pressures, every cell in your body will turn into a very powerful, tiny bomb and you will turn into a cloud of molecules almost instantly. There wont be one cubic inch of tissue left.

The explosion will probably destroy anything within a block or more of you and you will leave a really nice crater. But don't worry, it will happen so fast that your nerve and brain cells wont have time to process any signals so you wont fell a thing. You will be standing there one instant and then...POOF!!!

The stuff you see in the movies and on TV about people being blown out of air locks and floating off into space completely intact is incorrect. As soon as the pressure in the air lock decreased to a certain level, your body would explode with enough force to rip a hole in the side of the space ship and cause it to also explode or at least spew everyone and everything inside of it into space.

All of the organic objects in the space vehicle would quickly explode. It is a matter of relative pressures. If an object exerts an outward force 200 to thousands of times greater than the inward pressure of the atmosphere, we call it a bomb. In Mars' atmosphere, you would be a bomb.

Part 1: Mars Analysis

2008-03-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.hauns.com/~DCQu4E5g/Mars.html

Is it possible for life to have ever existed on Mars or for man to colonize Mars? Scientists at NASA are leading us to believe that both are true. Are they true? Let's see.To answer these questions, we will use science to analyze and compare three different planets. Earth, Earth's moon, and Mars.

Mars is regularly referred to as Earth's sister planet to imply that the two planets are close enough in size to have the same physical properties and, since Earth can support life, then so can Mars.

But...Mars is actually closer to the size of the Moon (our moon is the fifth largest known moon in our universe.) We know that the moon cannot support life because it does not have enough gravity to maintain enough of an atmosphere to have life. If we were to pipe all of Earth's atmosphere to the Moon, it would all float out into space within a relatively brief period of time.

Without an adequate atmosphere, we cannot have water in a liquid state. Atmospheric pressure is required to keep water in the liquid state. We have known for over half a century that liquid water in a vacuum instantly either vaporizes (boils) or freezes. Without adequate atmospheric pressure, water can only exist as either a gas or solid.

Without liquid water, you cannot have life because of the very unusual properties of water which make life possible and are not found in any other fluids. Therefore, life cannot happen or evolve on the Moon.Mars is only 17% the size of Earth which means that Earth is more than five times the size of Mars.

This is a huge difference for planets that are supposed to be sister planets. Mars only has 38% of Earth's gravity which means that Earth has more than two and a half times more gravity than Mars.

This is a crucial difference and the main factor which will tell us whether or not life can exist on Mars or if we can colonize Mars. The Moon only has 16.7% of Earth's gravity. Mar's gravity is only a little more than twice that of the Moon's gravity. As you can see, Mars is much more a sister of our Moon than Earth. It gets better.

The Moon does have a little atmosphere but so little that we say it has none. Mars has a similar problem to the Moon. With less gravity, it is easier for gas to float away from a planet and, therefore, the planet cannot maintain as much or as dense of an atmosphere. Mar's atmospheric pressure is between four and five millibars at the surface. 1,000 millibars equals one bar of atmospheric pressure which is Earth's atmospheric pressure.

Mars' atmosphere is less than 5/1,000 that of Earth's atmospheric pressure. This is much closer to the Moon's atmospheric pressure.The gravity on Mars is not adequate to maintain much of an atmosphere for very long. It cannot maintain enough atmosphere to have water in the liquid state.

Liquid water released on Mars will either vaporize or freeze very quickly. The only way you can have liquid water on the surface of Mars for even a brief period of time is if volcanic activity were to quickly release enough steam into the atmosphere to force the water beyond the point of saturation for the atmosphere and forcing water to condense. Enough of this water vapor would quickly float away from Mars to return it to the state to where liquid water would quickly either vaporize or freeze.

Mars cannot maintain water in the liquid state required for life for even a million years, much less for long enough for life to happen and evolve.A problem caused by this very thin atmosphere is that there is not enough atmosphere on Mars to keep the heat created by sun light striking the surface from quickly radiating out into space.

This problem is made even worse because Mars is enough further from the sun so that much less light hits its surface and there is less surface to heat up the atmosphere. Because of this, the temperature on Mars remains well below freezing (average temperature is -55 F) except during the summer at the equator during the day time when it can briefly reach up to 80 degrees F.

This further decreases the possibility of ever having life on Mars. An atmosphere is crucial to having the conditions required for life which means that an adequate gravity is also required to have life happen and evolve on a planet. A planet has to be just the right size to be able to have life on it. Earth is the only planet in our universe which is the right size to have life on it.Then why is NASA telling us that we are looking for life on Mars.

I suggest two possible reasons.

First, a number of the most influential scientists are evolutionists who are hoping to find evidence of life on Mars to keep their religion of evolution alive as I stated in the page on "What Is Science?" and they are so desperate they are willing to ignore what science tells them should be the case.

Second, maybe they don't feel that Americans will spend the billions of dollars to explore Mars for scientific curiosity but will spend the money to search for possible life. In other words, it keeps the money coming in to pay their salaries. I believe that it is probably a little of both.

Lunar Ark to preserve Human Civilisation

2008-03-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

Mankind's secrets kept in lunar ark

IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

According to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agency’s research department, the first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015.
“Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of Noah’s ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere,” said Foing.

Tulips are ideal because they can be frozen, transported long distances and grown with little nourishment. Combined with algae, an enclosed artificial atmosphere and chemically enhanced lunar soil, they could form the basis of an ecosystem.

The first experiments would be carried out in transparent biospheres containing a mix of gases to mimic the earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide given off by the decomposing plants would be mopped up by the algae, which would generate oxygen through photosynthesis.

The databank would initially be run by robots and linked to earth by radio transmissions. Scientists hope to put a manned station on the moon before the end of the century.

The databank would need to be buried under rock to protect it from the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum on the moon. It would be run partly on solar power. The scientists envisage placing the first experimental databank on the moon no later than 2020 and it could have a lifespan of 30 years. The full archive would be launched by 2035.

The information would be held in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish and would be linked by transmitter to 4,000 “Earth repositories” that would provide shelter, food, a water supply for survivors.

Birth Regression

2008-03-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.spiritreleasement.org/birth_regression.htm

Birth Regression

There are two approaches to the pre-natal and birth experience. During past life exploration the natural progression leads from the past life into the Light. From the planning stage in the Light just before the present life begins, a being can move into the earth plane and locate the woman who will be the mother in the lifetime to come.

The client is guided to the experience of mother and father as they join in the union which will lead to conception. This interaction can be, loving in a romantic setting, or it can be rape, incest, or a drunken brawl between a husband and a wife.

The moment of conception occurs when the sperm meets and breaks through into the egg. The therapist allows the client time to experience this silently as it is usually indescribable. A person may get a sense of electric shock beginning at the top of their head and moving entirely down the length of their body.

The emotions and sensations involved in the interaction between mother and father are fully registered on the consciousness of the incoming being. The client may report a time when mom and dad are making love or fighting.

The moment when momma discovers she's pregnant is usually registered clearly; dad's reaction when she tells him she's pregnant may be even more significant. He may react in anger, "Oh no, not another kid," or something similar.

This may set the emotional tone for the life to come. If several months pass between conception and the discovery of pregnancy the being may feel invisible, unacknowledged, denied. This also foretells an attitude in the family.

Pregnancy can terminate by miscarriage if the desire to leave is strong enough. Early crib death may result from the unwillingness of the being to engage in life. Any thoughts the parent may have about abortion are registered by the consciousness and the client will react strongly as this memory surfaces.

The incoming spirit knows at that point everything that is transpiring and reacts as a personality. The therapist guides the client in a thorough exploration of these responses from the parents.

If there is a strong or painful reaction, especially if the reaction still affects the present day relationships, it can be used as a bridge to a trauma in a prior lifetime that leads into the pre-natal situation.

This will often uncover a time when the roles of parent and child were reversed. As this past life resentment, even the resistance to the present life circumstance often seems to dissolve.

The therapist uses gentle prompting to move the client forward in the pre-natal experience. This continues until the client feels the time of delivery is near. There may be a strong desire to get out of there. The client will usually describe incredible pressure on the head, and a feeling of being squeezed.

There might be a resistance, an aversion to leaving the security of the womb. Despite this resistance the physiology moves on irrevocably to conclusion. This reluctance to leave the womb can manifest as a breech presentation at birth.

Finally when it feels hopeless to the infant, like they're gong to be crushed from top to bottom, head to toe, there is an easing of the pressure against the top of the head as the cervix begins to dilate. In the birth canal they are squeezed, there is a combination of pleasure and pain, fear and resistance to coming out. As the baby emerges there is usually the bight light, the unfamiliar sounds in the delivery room and the inevitable separation from Mother.

If there is anesthesia which dulls mother's consciousness the infant experiences that momma goes away. There's a separation mentally as well as physically. The infant feels abandoned, rejected and does not understand what is happening.

This perceived separation can develop into a fear of separation which may pervade an entire lifetime. There is often enormous anger at that point. The newborn has the feelings but cannot express them. The therapist encourages the client to cry and express the anger, using the language of the adult.

The therapist can probe to determine the source of the anger. What expectations were there before coming in? What happened? What didn't happen at the time of the birth? What agreements were made between mother and child in the planning stage? At the time the conception what agreements were broken? The anger is often about broken agreements.

These memories can be uncovered, revivified and the attendant emotions expressed. When the anger is healed, forgiveness is possible. This resolves the conflict.

There second approach to the birth experience is a gentle regression from the present moment backward in time. The intention is to explore the birth, pre-natal and conception. With the client in a comfortable position the therapist guides softly.

Therapist:

"Breathe in deeply, breathe in light as you breath in and breathe out, relaxing more and more with each breath you take.

A little deeper relaxed with each breath that you take. Breathe in the most beautiful color, the most beautiful color that you can imagine.

As that color fills you let yourself move back, back in time, back through the years. Back to before you were born and you were inside your mother.

Let the color carry you back, let the color carry you back to before you were inside. Before your physical body was conceived. Before the physical experience began.

Find yourself now as a point of consciousness close to the woman that you seem to be drawn to, attracted to. Close to the woman who will become your mother. Describe your first reaction, your response as you locate the woman."

The response may be immediate. It usually doesn't take much longer than this for the client to access the memory. Birth regression is a deeply profound experience for the client and can unravel much of the distortion of the present lifetime.

Human birth is a miracle of existence. A mother's womb is an intricate and delicate mechanism which furnishes the portal or passageway for a discarnate spirit to manifest in the physical world in a human form.

Birth regression is a stimulating process and provides a rich source of material which can be used therapeutically for the healing of the client.

Trauma of Biological Birth

2008-03-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.spiritreleasement.org/birth_regression.htm

Birth Trauma

Birth may be the most traumatic and dangerous experience one can undergo in life. Freud saw the birth as the first trauma and the origin of all anxieties at the root of later psychic problems.

However, he claimed that the experience was too deeply buried in the unconscious to be retrieved. Especially since it happened in the preverbal consciousness, he thought the trauma was not open to analysis.

Otto Rank, who broke with Freud over this point, insisted that the biological birth trauma must be confronted and relived for resolution.

Human behavior tends to reenact birth: emotional, sexual, psychosomatic and cognitive patterns seem to be in some sense duplications of an intensified memory experience during the birth. It seems that most people are fixated or stuck in the birth trauma.

Past life patterns which plague a person through the present life are re-stimulated sometime during the pre-natal period or the birth and peri-natal experience.

Recall of a past life situation can be triggered in the mind of the unborn or neonate by a sound or smell, the position of the body during birth, the attitude of mother, or the absence of mother's consciousness caused by anesthesia administered during the last minutes of labor and delivery.

The stimulus may be a word or a phrase spoken, especially with strong emotion, by the mother or father anytime during the pregnancy, or the attending physician or nurses during delivery. In a past life therapy session, it is necessary to locate this trigger point in the pre-natal or birth experience.

The major aspect of the consciousness, or the soul, enters at or near the first breath. However, part of the consciousness seems to be connected with the body from the moment of conception, receiving and recording all experience in the forming body including the thoughts and feelings of the mother.

This information is unfiltered, unprocessed and accepted without judgment or discrimination. The impact of this information can have devastating effects on the mind and life of the person in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

The distorted memories and experiences of the newborn can be corrected in adulthood through pre- and peri-natal therapy and birth regression.

Autoeroticism in Animals

2008-03-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

It appears that many animals, both male and female, masturbate, both when partners are available and otherwise.

The paper "Sexual Behavior - Current Topics in Applied Ethology and Clinical Methods" by Sue McDonnell states:

"One example is the behavior known within the horse breeding industry as masturbation. This involves normal periodic erections and penile movements. This behavior, both from the descriptive field studies cited above and in extensive study of domestic horses, is now understood as normal, frequent behavior of male equids."

Attempting to inhibit or punish masturbation, which is still a common practice of horse managers regionally around the world, often leads to increased masturbation and disturbances of normal breeding behavior.

Sexual release seeking is common in both domestic and non-domestic species.

The female porcupine will use a stick as a vibrator, holding one end of a stick between her paws and walk around, straddling the stick as it bumps against the ground and vibrates against her genitalia.

Sexologist Havelock Ellis in his 1927 "Studies in the Psychology of Sex" identified bulls, goats, sheep, camels and elephants as species known to practice autoeroticism, adding of some other species:

I am informed by a gentleman who is a recognized authority on goats, that they sometimes take the penis into the mouth and produce actual orgasm, thus practicing auto-fellatio. As regards ferrets..."if the bitch, when in heat, cannot obtain a dog [ie, male ferret] she pines and becomes ill.

If a smooth pebble is introduced into the hutch, she will masturbate upon it, thus preserving her normal health for one season. But if this artificial substitute is given to her a second season, she will not, as formerly, be content with it."

Blumenbach observed a bear act somewhat similarly on seeing other bears coupling, and hyenas, according to Ploss and Bartels, have been seen practicing mutual masturbation by licking each other's genitals.

In his 1999 book, Biological exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl PhD documents that:
Autoeroticism also occurs widely among animals, both male and female.

A variety of creative techniques are used, including genital stimulation using the hand or front paw (primates, Lions), foot (Vampire Bats, primates), flipper (Walruses), or tail (Savanna Baboons), sometimes accompanied by stimulation of the nipples (Rhesus Macaques, Bonobos); auto-fellating or licking, sucking and/or nuzzling by a male of his own penis (Common Chimpanzees, Savanna Bonobos, Vervet Monkeys, Squirrel Monkeys, Thinhorn Sheep, Bharal, Aovdad, Dwarf Cavies); stimulation of the penis by flipping or rubbing it against the belly or in its own sheath (White-tailed and Mule Deer, Zebras and Takhi); spontaneous ejaculations (Mountain Sheep, Warthogs, Spotted Hyenas); and stimulation of the genitals using inanimate objects (found in several primates and cetaceans).

Many birds masturbate by mounting and copulating with tufts of grass, leaves or mounds of earth, and some mammals such as primates and Dolphins also rub their genitals against the ground or other surfaces to stimulate themselves.

Autoeroticism in female mammals, as well as heterosexual and homosexual intercourse (especially in primates), often involves direct or indirect stimulation of the clitoris. This organ is present in the females of all mammalian species and several other animal groups, and that:

Apes and Monkeys use a variety of objects to masturbate with and even deliberately create implements for sexual stimulation often in highly creative ways.

Petter Bøckman of the Norwegian Natural History Museum commented that:

"Masturbation is common in the animal kingdom ... We have a Darwinist mentality that all animals only have sex to procreate. But there are plenty of animals who will masturbate when they have nothing better to do.

Masturbation has been observed among primates, deer, killer whales and penguins, and we're talking about both males and females. They rub themselves against stones and roots. Orangutans are especially inventive. They make dildos of wood and bark."

Evolutionary Purpose of Dark Skin

2008-03-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

The evolution of dark skin is tied with the question of loss of body hair.

By 1.2 million years ago, all people having descendants today had exactly the receptor protein of today's Africans; their skin was dark, and the intense sun killed off the progeny with any lighter skin that resulted from mutational variation in the receptor protein. This is significantly earlier than the speciation of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus some 250,000 years ago.

Dark skin helps protect against skin cancer that develops as a result of ultraviolet light radiation, causing mutations in the skin. Furthermore, dark skin prevents an essential B vitamin, folate, from being destroyed.

Therefore, in the absence of modern medicine and diet, a person with dark skin in the tropics would live longer, be more healthy and more likely to reproduce than a person with light skin. White Australians have some of the highest rates of skin cancer as evidence of this expectation.

Conversely, as dark skin prevents sunlight from penetrating the skin it hinders the production of vitamin D3. Hence when humans migrated to less sun-intensive regions in the north, low vitamin D3 levels became a problem and lighter skin colors started appearing.

The people of Europe, who have low levels of melanin, naturally have an almost colorless skin pigmentation, especially when untanned. This low level of pigmentation allows the blood vessels to become visible and gives the characteristic pale pink color of white people.

The difference in skin color between black and whites is however a minor genetic difference accounting for just one letter in 3.1 billion letters of DNA.

Some scholars argue that based on cave paintings, Europeans may have been dark-skinned as late as 13,000 years ago. The painters depicted themselves as having darker complexions than the animals they hunted.

This hypothesis finds support from genetics with the discovery of the SLC24A5 gene in 2005.

The mutation resulting in light skin is currently estimated to have originated among Europeans some 6,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Evolution of Ageing

2008-03-03T05:47:00.000-08:00

Enquiry into the evolution of ageing aims to explain why almost all living things weaken and die with age.

There is not yet agreement in the scientific community on a single answer. The evolutionary origin of senescence remains a fundamental unsolved problem in biology.

Historically, ageing was first likened to 'wear and tear': Our bodies get weak for the same reason that a knife gets dull or metal rusts.

But this idea was discredited in the 19th century when the second law of thermodynamics was formalized.

Entropy (disorder) must increase inevitably within a closed system, but living beings are not closed systems.

In fact, it is a defining feature of life that we take in free energy from the environment and unload our entropy as waste. Living systems routinely repair themselves, and, in fact, can build themselves up from seed.

There is no thermodynamic necessity for senescence.

Ageing is believed to have evolved because of the increasingly smaller probability of an organism still being alive at older age, due to predation and accidents, both of which may be random and age-invariant.

It is thought that strategies which result in a higher reproductive rate at a young age, but shorter overall lifespan, result in a higher lifetime reproductive success and are therefore favoured by natural selection.

Essentially, ageing is therefore the result of investing resources in reproduction, rather than maintenance of the body (the "Disposable Soma" theory), in light of the fact that accidents, predation and disease will eventually kill the organism no matter how much energy is devoted to repair of the body.

Various other, or more specific, theories of ageing exist, and are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

In the distant future, Mankind sleeps for eternity

2008-02-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

So, what if nothing really happens? What if the world isn't struck by meteors, destroyed by divine hand or blown to bits by scientists? Well, in the long run, we might sleep. Not just for the nights, but also during the day. We might even sleep our entire lives, from birth to death, without ever waking up. What's more: the survival of our species may depend on it.

Luckily, it will take some time before it gets that far. Something like one hundred trillion years, to be precise.

Our Universe expands. Ever since the Big Bang blew all matter, space and time into existence, the Universe grows. The Universe expands and cools, much like the fire cloud after an explosion gets bigger and colder. And that's exactly what astronomers see as they study the sky: all stars we see rush away from us and from each other at tremendous speeds.

But time is ticking. According to the latest insights, the expanding and cooling of the cosmos will go on and on and on. Galaxies and stars will be further and further apart. Stars will slowly become dimmer, as they move out of sight. The night sky will become darker and darker. And darker still, until there's absolutely nothing to be seen.

What's more, stars die. After a lifecycle of several to many millions of years (depending on their size), every star is destined to spew out its last bit of energy and collapse, becoming a cold `neutron star', a `white dwarf', or a black hole. As time passes, this will happen to more and more stars, creating a Universe full of burnt out dead stars and black holes.

And black holes `eat' other stars. A black hole has such immense gravity, that no star or planet can resist it. The increasing number of black holes will sweep the Universe clean, much like the devil in St. John's biblical vision of the Apocalypse sweeps the stars from the sky with its tail. It will become even darker still. And oh, by the way, our own Sun will die too, about 5,000 million years from now.

So what about us? Suppose man somehow finds a way to survive all these cataclysmic events.

Suppose humanity colonizes other, `safer' planets. And, for argument's sake, just suppose humanity is somehow able to dodge all those mean, black holes that scavenge the cosmos. What would life be like?

First, we would find ourselves in an increasingly cold, numbingly dark surrounding. We would be truly alone in the Universe.

But that's not the biggest problem. With the stars and the Sun long gone, we'll find ourselves in the midst of an energy crisis of unimaginable proportions. And terrible enough, in all the dark and the cold, we need energy more than ever.

Just hack up some atoms in a nuclear power plant, you might say. But that's not a good solution. By physical law, the energy within atoms decreases as the Universe expands.

And, bizarre as it may sound, the supply of atoms is ultimately limited. The matter on our planet is, of course, finite. And in the nothingness of the faded-out Universe, matter is hard to get at. It's either beyond reach or eaten up by black holes. And there's no more particles raining down on our planet from solar radiation, meteors or cosmic dust.

In the long run, we have to come up with something to adapt to our new environment. And `adapting' means more than getting used to cold feet and being able to see in total darkness: it means cutting drastically on our energy bill.

First, we'll have to get rid of our bodies. No, really! Our carbon-based bodies are very vulnerable to cold. They get damaged even when temperatures drop only a few degrees. It's absolutely certain there's no way life as we know it can survive for a substantial period of time in an expanded Universe.

But that's no big deal, Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson and many others suggest. We `only' have to transport our consciousness into something else. A cyborg, an interstellar cloud of particles maybe -- with one hundred trillion years ahead, we have plenty of time to come up with something.

So okay. Grudgingly, you've turned yourself into a cyborg. But in the long run, even that isn't enough. For one thing, thought itself costs energy. Just think of your computer doing its calculations: the thing simply wouldn't run if you didn't have it connected to a power source.

And what's worse, the universe gets colder still. This brings out other, very weird physical problems of its own. The speed of thought will drastically decline in extreme cold, Dyson demonstrated. So there you are, you've decided to become a cyborg, and now you find out you're sooooo slooow-witted.

And when temperatures drop even further, there's more trouble facing us poor former humans. It'll be so cold, even a cyborg would get into trouble. A point comes when organisms cannot lower their temperatures any further without becoming less complex -- in effect, dumbing down. Before long, life could no longer be regarded as intelligent.

It's here where sleep comes into play. As Dyson calculates, there's only one possibility to survive. We'd hibernate. By sleeping, our metabolic rates will drop, and we will be able to achieve an ever-lower body temperature. In fact, by spending an increasing fraction of our time asleep, eternal life would indeed be possible.

So you've become a slow-thinking robot that's asleep most of the time. Still, even that may not be enough. For example, what kind of alarm clock would you set to wake you up? Your alarm clock would have to operate reliably for a long, long time, using less and less energy. A curious but, scientifically speaking, dead serious problem, that no physicist has been able to answer yet.

And then there's the problem of thought. In the early 1980s, computer researchers realized that in principle it's possible to design a computer that doesn't dissipate energy while processing information. Isn't that great news for all those dormant cyborgs to come?

No, it isn't. To function, this computer -- that only is a theoretical possibility so far -- must never, NEVER discard any information. If it does discard only one bit of information, it will be like pulling the plug out of a bath tub: it would use up energy while calculating for ever more.

But thoughts are finite. Information is by definition stored in a finite amount of particles. Even in your cyborg brain, there will come a point where you would have to discard old information in order to store something new. And that IS a problem.

'All organisms would ever do is relive the past, having the same thoughts over and over again,' cosmologists Lawrence M. Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman estimate. 'Eternity would become a prison, rather than an endlessly receding horizon of creativity and exploration. It might be nirvana, but would it be living?'

Nope. Probably not. There you go, Mr. Cyborg: constantly asleep, and when awake only rethinking old thoughts.

Perhaps it's best our world is swallowed by one of those big, mean Black Holes after all.

Implants create computer-controlled insect cyborgs

2008-02-08T04:29:00.000-08:00

Cornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms as early pupae.

The hornworms pass through the chrysalis stage to mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics.

The research was showcased at MEMS 2008, an international academic conference on Micro-Electrico-Mechanical Systems that took place from January 13-17 in Tucson, AZ. The pupae insertion state was found to yield the best results.

The resulting moth, a microsystem-controlled insect, has a circuit board protruding from the top of its midsection. Probes are inserted into the dorsoventral and dorsolongitudinal flight muscles.

CT images show components of high absorbance indicating tissue growth around the probe. The research also indicated the most favorable and least favorable times for insertion of control devices.

The overall size of the circuit board is just 8x7mm, with a total weight of about 500 mg. The capacity of the battery is 16 mAh, and weighs 240 mg. A driving voltage of 5 volts causes the tobacco hornworm blade muscles (two pairs) to move for flight and maneuvering.

The insect cyborgs are part of a program called HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect MEMS), a DARPA program initiated by Program Manager Dr. Amit Lal.

The ultimate goal of the HI-MEMS program is to provide insect cyborgs that can demonstrate controlled flight; the insects would be used in a variety of military and homeland security applications. HI-MEMS program director Amit Lal credits science fiction writer Thomas Easton with the idea.

Lal read Easton's 1990 novel Sparrowhawk, in which animals enlarged by genetic engineering (called Roachsters) were outfitted with implanted control systems. Dr. Easton, a professor of science at Thomas College, sees a number of applications for HI-MEMS insects.

Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractants, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, they could use sex attractants instead. Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."

"[Also,] with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.

DARPA had better be careful with its insect army; in Easton's novel, hackers are able to gain control of genetically engineered animals by hacking the controller chips used in their implanted control structures.

One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes

2008-02-02T04:29:00.000-08:00

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.

"It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study.

Baby blues

Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.

They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production.

Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes. If a group of individuals shares long haplotypes, that means the sequence arose relatively recently in our human ancestors. The DNA sequence didn't have enough time to get mixed up.

"What they were able to show is that the people who have blue eyes in Denmark, as far as Jordan, these people all have this same haplotype, they all have exactly the same gene changes that are all linked to this one mutation that makes eyes blue," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

Melanin switch

The mutation is what regulates the OCA2 switch for melanin production. And depending on the amount of melanin in the iris, a person can end up with eye color ranging from brown to green. Brown-eyed individuals have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. But they found that blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn't fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot," Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.
"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

Universal Consciousness

2008-01-16T05:58:00.000-08:00

We are well aware of the idea that life constantly evolves. But how far does this process of evolution go? Does it stop at life, or could it be argued that evolution is a property of the cosmos?For instance, if the universe began from a Big Bang, and has constantly changed from this point, does this show the property of evolution? And could a similar argument be laid down for known, and constant, change upon planet Earth?

LIFE AND EARTH

The fundamental problem with the idea that planet Earth evolves concerns the place of life within the evolutionary process. Does life evolve separate to the planet, or is life - including mankind - part of the process of Earth’s evolutionary mechanism?

To accept the latter holds severe problems for science. It not only removes us from the top of the evolutionary tree, but would suggest a form of co-ordinated intelligence invested in planet Earth which is guiding us along.There are, infact, many indicators that this is, indeed, the case. One of the absolutes of evolution is the idea that evolution only evolves what is required for survival. There is no surplus.

However, the massive explosion in the size of the human brain goes way ahead of our ability to use it. Our brain capacity is far greater than is required by this evolutionary law. Yet if seen as part of an evolving requirement of planet Earth, our brain size could fall into the evolutionary pattern.

COLLECTIVE PHILOSOPHIES

French philosopher Henri Bergson would have had no problem with this idea. He believed that nature had an urge to create - a principle he called the ‘elan vital’. Such an urge would be above an individual species, placing all of nature within an evolutionary concept which could easily be seen as part of the evolution of planet Earth.British physicist Peter Russell could have placed our big brain within this format.

He theorised upon a growing planetary level of consciousness called the ‘Gaiafield’ - a self-reflective consciousness of all minds, forming a social superorganism.In a way this is similar to psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious lying under the personal mind. But instead of being a species supermind, Russell would invest the property on a planetary level.

THE QUANTUM EFFECT

A big stumbling block to such ideas concerns the extent to which consciousness exists in nature. The suggestion is made that consciousness is a fundamental property of, not only nature, but the universe at large - in effect, a higher intelligence exists.Yet quantum theory seems to be hinting that such a consciousness may well be out there.

For instance, quantum reality is probabilistic. In its natural state, a particle can be said to be in any position possible.An exact reality is only known through observation by an intelligence capable of understanding it. Hence, for a reality to exist, it must be created through observation. Hence, a form of consciousness must exist for reality to come into existence.And seeing the reality of a physical universe existed before life entered the cosmos, consciousness must be a property of that cosmos.

UNIVERSAL MIND

If such an evolving universal intelligence does exist, then it is fair to say that the investing of consciousness in life is a recent development of consciousness. As such, human consciousness can be seen to be towards the lower level of consciousness.But placed in terms of an evolving cosmos, it can equally be argued that it is our place to evolve into a more universal mind.Such an idea was proposed by Catholic mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. To him, life evolved towards an Omega Point, or completion.

When life had evolved to this point, the Omega Point would move forwards.Hence, we constantly evolve in stages. The Omega Point presently lies at the creation of the ‘noosphere’, which can be described as a planetisation of the mind. This would cause ‘noogenesis’, and the creation of a planetary consciousness.

WORLD IN HARMONY

To achieve such a planetary mind, life and the physical characteristics of the planet would have to work in unison. And such an idea was put forward in 1958 by theorist Alfred Redfield, who noted that the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans seemed to be biologically controlled.However, it wasn’t until 1979, and the publication of ‘Gaia: A New Look At Life On Earth’, that James Lovelock took the idea to its ultimate expression.

Lovelock, a British biologist, formulated the Gaia Hypothesis whilst working on equipment designed to find life on Mars for NASA.Gaia, a survival of the ancient Mother Goddess, was adopted by the ancient Greeks, and was the mother of Zeus, who was allowed to rule only on her consent. Hence, it was the perfect name to give to what in effect became an Earth entity.

For to Lovelock, Earth is an overall biosphere organism, where life on Earth makes a contribution to the regulation of the planet. The atmosphere and the biosphere (life) conspire in a form of symbiosis to produce a self-regulatory mechanism which makes life possible, with even the oceans and crust falling into evolutionary line.The obvious continuation of the Gala Hypothesis is to argue that planet Earth is conscious, and in seeing itself through our space cameras it has become aware.

But of course there is no way of testing such ideas, for to test a system, it must be tested from outside. And at present, we cannot do this.

THE BIG STORY

In a philosophical sense, we can argue the validity of the hypothesis. Knowledge throughout history has been the product of culture. Within the scope of knowledge we place the hopes and aspirations of the people.

This was easily identified within religious knowledge, where knowledge of deities was very much an expression of the social mood. It is not so easy to identify in science, but it is still there, for science is an expression of our belief in our superior intellect.It does not matter whether planetary consciousness exists or not.

What is important is to see if such consciousness can be seen as analogous to our history, our present, and where we see the future as going.American historian Thomas Berry understood this point. Every culture has to have a spiritual ethic in order to bring people together and make them whole. And this requirement still exists, even in an apparently secular world.And Berry realised that we need, in effect, a ‘new story’; a form of creation myth for the planet, imbued with meaning and expression.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell thought likewise. In an increasingly connected global village, a new planetary mythology would be needed, seeing the world as a whole, and above nations and their cultures. So can such a mythology be constructed to take all these points into account? Perhaps it can.

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

One vital point of evolution is that every lifeform evolved the ability to communicate. To what degree of sophistication this goes on we are not sure, but there is no doubt that purposive communication takes place.

Man also communicates - and without the need for words.

We have an instinctual language we can all understand. Fear, love, hunger, happiness and the need for procreation can all be communicated through mannerisms and subliminal means.And the strange thing is, this is the only language we need for survival. The spoken word is surplus to evolution.

Complex spoken language seems to be an idiosyncracy of a species that routinely deals in abstracts which have no intrinsic survival value.

Yet, if evolution has any validity, our species drive to complex communicative skill must have some purpose.

Applying the rules of evolution, it is possible to argue that it is the evolutionary purpose of mankind to consciously understand the purpose and mechanics of communication. And this can certainly be seen in our impulse towards high technology, which is primarily geared towards communicative skills.We are presently, and increasingly, talking to ourselves, other species and the stars.

We are, in effect, becoming global chatterboxes. And interestingly, communication causes abstracts, and abstract ideas require increasingly complex information-processing equipment to understand them.And nothing is more complex for this purpose than our evolved big brain.

Evolution has given us the most complex information-processing equipment available, suggesting we are evolving ever more complex communicative skills for an evolutionary purpose.

ONE ORGANISM

If this process continues, the day is not far away when, through us, the whole planet will speak as a single voice. Indeed, all that stands between us and its realisation are the dying dreams of Empire and the violence they engender.

Basically, our present technological impulses are leading us to bring the planet together as a single communicative organism with man as its mouthpiece. And in increasing our communicative skills we are also realising our interdependence with the whole ecology of planet Earth.

Basically, the ecological movement is leading us back to symbiosis. Man, nature, and the planet we all inhabit are coming together, and coming together through our custodianship.

THE END OF FRAGMENTATION?

Unconsciously this coming together has been gaining ground throughout our recent history. Of course, many would argue that this is wrong. Rather, recent history has been the epitome of violent fragmentation.Even now ethnic and national minorities seem to be striving to return mankind to tribalism.

However, could this be part of a process that will inevitably result in planetary consciousness? Just look a little closer at what has been happening.In the past, despots have risen and imposed themselves upon the world with little or no opposition. Empire builders have still risen in modern history, but are increasingly unlikely to get away with it. As soon as a despot tries to export hIs despotism outside his own country, free nations are increasingly likely to band together to say no.

This was the reality of the two world wars, of Korea, of the Falklands, and of the original 1990 Gulf War, leading logically to the armed forces as peacekeeper in nations such as Bosnia.This is where an increasing amount of violence within modern warfare has come from - not to conquer, but to liberate - no matter how ill defined and poorly understood those motives might have been at the time.

Certainly there are still problems - we are a long way from being perfect - but the principle is there are gaining ground.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

Increasingly, and perhaps unconsciously, our species is coming together to uphold individual and group freedoms in the species and in nature in a way unthought of in preceding centuries.In the future, I suggest, this principle of denying despotism - of whatever kind - the facility to freely operate will grow until despots will be unable to rise to power at all.

And in conjunction with a growing ecological consciousness that is teaching us that planet Earth is one and an interdependent life support system, the principle outlined could well be the first indication that we are leaving our barbaric past behind and moving towards a true planetary consciousness. But where will this leave us?

As far as we are aware, we are the only lifeform on planet Earth that has so far attempted communication beyond the planet. But to do so we had to evolve the hard way, learning to understand barbarism and the need for possessions.It was possessions that grounded our advancement in the physical and the material; it was barbarism and fragmentation that eventually led to the impulse to communicate to bring ourselves together again.

And the two evolved towards the ‘physical’ need to communicate.And our advancement to the attainment of high technology communicative skills is suddenly the answer to the question posed by philosophers down the centuries - why are we here? We are here to aid planet Earth in its attempt to become cosmically conscious. But then again, perhaps more than even this.

DESTINATION, THE STARS

Man has begun to learn the value of ecological co-operation at the same time that his technology has reached the stage of seriously contemplating the idea of space travel. Already systems are on the drawing board that could transport us to the stars.Certainly it would not be travel as seen in Star Trek, but ideas concerning generation starships and the Ramscoop, not to mention the ion drive, take star travel away from science fiction and place it in the realms of scientific possibility.

Except for one problem. Evolution evolves only what is required. There is no surplus. And it is now becoming apparent to those who envisage star travel that nothing less than the entire resources and co-operation of mankind would be required to turn it into a real possibility.

The coming together of so many factors can be seen as the root of a new mythology for the Space Age, combining the past, present and future into a new meaning and direction for mankind.Ecological awareness, realisation of the errors of our barbarism, increasing high technology communicative abilities and the realisation of star travel are all coming upon us together, shaping our destiny for the future.

Perhaps we do have purpose after all; and that purpose is to aid planet Earth in becoming a conscious organism and exporting awareness to the stars. And is it not strange that this is only achieveable by man coming together in co-operation with each other and nature?

Basically, to export ourselves, we can only do it when we come to peace with ourselves. And if this is so, we can look forward to a beautiful, exciting and rewarding future.

Homunculus Argument

2008-01-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

The homunculus argument arises most commonly in the theory of vision. One may explain (human) vision by arguing that the light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or some'one') in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen (this theory of vision is sometimes termed the theory of the Cartesian Theater: it is most associated, nowadays, with the psychologist David Marr).

But the question is: 'who' is it who is looking at this 'internal' movie inside the brain? The assumption here (although this is rarely made explicit) is that there is a 'little man' or 'homunculus' inside the brain 'looking at' this movie. (Alternatively it might be proposed that the images on the retinas are transferred to the visual cortex where it is scanned. But here again, all that has been done is to place a homunculus in the brain behind the cortex.)

The reason why this is a fallacy is that an obvious problem then presents itself: how does the homunculus 'see' this internal movie? The obvious answer is that there is another homunculus inside the first homunculus's 'head' or 'brain' looking at this 'movie'. But how does this homunculus see the 'outside world'?

In order to answer this, we are forced to posit another homunculus inside this other homunculus's head and so forth. In other words, we are in a situation of infinite regress.

This is always a sure sign that an argument has gone wrong. (Another way of putting this is to say that the homunculus argument accounts for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain--that is, homuncular arguments are fallacious for the same reason that a recipe for cake that had, as one of its ingredients, 'cake' is not a real (explanatory) recipe).

Another example is with cognitivist theories that argue that the human brain uses 'rules' to carry out operations (these rules often conceptualised as being like the algorithms of a computer program).

For example, in his work of the '50s, '60s and '70s Noam Chomsky argued that (in the words of one of his books) human beings use Rules and Representations (or to be more specific, rules acting on representations) in order to cognise (more recently Chomsky has abandoned this view: c.f. the Minimalist Program).

Now, in terms of (say) chess, the players are given 'rules' (i.e. the rules of chess) to follow. So: who uses these rules?

The answer is self-evident: the players of the game (of chess) use the rules: it's not the case (obviously) that the rules themselves play chess.

The rules themselves are merely inert marks on paper until a human being reads, understands and uses them. But what about the 'rules' that are, allegedly, inside our head (brain)?

Who reads, understands and uses them? Again, the implicit answer is (and, some would argue, must be) a 'homunculus': a little man who reads the rules and then gives orders to the body to act on them.

But again we are in a situation of infinite regress, because this implies that the homunculus has cognitive process that are also rule bound, which presupposes another homunculus inside its head, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, so the argument goes, theories of mind that imply or state explicitly that cognition is rule bound cannot be correct unless some way is found to 'ground' the regress.

This is important because it is often assumed in cognitive science that rules and algorithms are essentially the same: in other words, the theory that cognition is rule bound is often believed to imply that thought (cognition) is essentially, the manipulation of algorithms, and this is one of the key assumptions of some varieties of artificial intelligence.

Homunculus arguments are always fallacious unless some way can be found to 'ground' the regress. In the psychology and philosophy of mind, 'homunculus arguments' (or the 'homunculus fallacies') are extremely useful for detecting where theories of mind fail or are incomplete.

The Homunculus fallacy is closely related to Ryle's Regress.

A possible counter to this is that the brain as a whole is the homunculus, rather than thinking a specific part must be watching the movie.

Is Time slowing down & disappearing from the Universe?

2008-01-07T04:44:00.000-08:00

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".

However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.

At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured.

The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."

If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."
Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark.

However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.

"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk". In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.

"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."

Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect."

Plasma Life Forms - Dark Panspermia

2008-01-03T05:23:00.000-08:00

The Meteoric Rise of Life on Earth

One of the goals of astrobiology is to understand how life on Earth began. 2,500 years ago, Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher, proposed a hypothesis called "panspermia" (Greek for "all seeds") which posited that all life, and indeed all things, originated from the combination of tiny seeds pervading the cosmos.

Astrobiologists at NASA and elsewhere are now seriously considering the possibility that life on Earth originated outside the planet and was brought into it by space debris impacting its surface over vast stretches of time. Recent discoveries are lending increasing support to the hypothesis of panspermia.

Researchers discovered a meteorite from Mars that was cool enough in its core when it reached Earth to support life-forms such as bacteria. Another group succeeded in reviving bacteria more than 250 million years old. In 2004 the Stardust Mission discovered a range of complex hydrocarbon molecules, the building blocks for life, inside Comet Wild 2.

In 2005 the Deep Impact mission discovered a mixture of organic and clay particles inside Comet Tempel 1. NASA researchers at Johnson Space Center, Houston, discovered organic materials that formed in the most distant reaches of the early Solar System preserved in the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of meteorite that is rich in organic (carbon-bearing) compounds.

The discovery of organic matter in meteorites is of considerable interest to scientists because the material is likely to have been formed at the dawn of the Solar System almost 4.6 billion years ago and may have seeded the early Earth with the building blocks of life. Scott Messenger, NASA space scientist, says "The organic globules most likely originated in the cold molecular cloud that gave birth to our Solar System, or at the outermost reaches of the early Solar System."

Mike Zolensky, NASA cosmic mineralogist, says "If, as we suspect, this type of meteorite has been falling onto Earth throughout its entire history, then the Earth was seeded with these organic globules at the same time life was first forming here." Presumably, all this "seeding" is still going on.

Meteorites represent primitive solar system material. Every day several hundred tons of meteoritic matter fall to Earth. Many asteroids originate from the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Their orbits have large eccentricities and inclinations.

There is sufficient evidence that asteroids caused numerous craters to be formed on Earth when they impacted the planet's surface, including the Tunguska crater in Siberia in 1908, the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago and the crater north of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago. Comets have elliptical orbits and take varying lengths of time to orbit the Sun - some take 3 years, others may take hundreds of thousands of years.

Millions of comets are believed to form the Oort cloud which is beyond the orbit of Neptune and half the distance to the nearest star. Hence, they may originate from the farthest reaches of the solar neighborhood.

Dark Meteorites

Dr Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne argues that some meteorites, such as the one that caused the Tunguska crater, may be composed of "mirror matter" (a component of dark matter where particles have a different parity from the particles tabulated under the physicists' Standard Model or what plasma metaphysics calls the "standard particles") and have impacted the Earth without leaving any ordinary matter fragments.

Dark Panspermia

Is it possible that the space debris that seeded life on Earth contained dark matter? If so, it will revolutionize our theories of evolution. Let's review the facts. The first thing to determine is whether it is plausible that meteorites, asteroids and comets could actually harbor dark matter.

Why some Meteorites, Asteroids and Comets could contain Dark Matter

Our galaxy's dark matter halo is believed to outweigh its visible ordinary matter by more than 20 times. While the visible galaxy (a disk) is around 120,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light years thick, the dark halo (a sphere) may extend to more than 3 times that distance, beyond 300,000 to 400,000 light years out from the galactic center. In terms of volume, therefore, the halo is much larger than the visible galaxy.

The visible galaxy will be like a thin rotating compact disc sitting in the center of a large beach ball. Most of the matter in our galaxy is therefore composed of dark matter. Only a very small proportion is composed of ordinary matter.

The Sun and its entourage are currently wading through the Local Interstellar Cloud. It entered the Cloud about 100,000 years ago (just when our early human ancestors were moving out of Africa) and is expected to remain within it for another 10,000 to 20,000 years. Leo Blitz of the University of California and David Spergel of Princeton University believe that interstellar clouds harbor dark matter.

The shape of the rotation curve of the Milky Way was found to be flat to distances beyond the edge of the Milky Way's disk. The rotation curve is plotted with the velocity of the star on one axis and its distance from the galactic center (its radius) on another axis. Measurements show that after rising from zero in the center to about 200 km/s in the inner region, the rotation curve remained fairly constant; attaining velocities of between 200 km/s and 225 km/s, up to 15 kpc from the galactic center.

The Sun is about 8.5 kpc from the galactic center and its orbital speed around the galaxy is about 220 km/s. Its orbital speed is much faster than what would be expected at that distance from the galactic center within the visible galaxy, suggesting the direct effect of dark matter on the Sun.

The density of matter in the vicinity of the Sun can be estimated by sampling a uniform population of luminous stars that extends above the disk of the galaxy. The average velocities of the stars and the vertical distances they traverse above the disk provide a measure of the gravitational force that keeps these stars within the disk.

From the strength of this force the total density of matter can be estimated. Measurements indicate that the actual number of (visible) stars accounted for only half this density. This provides further evidence that there must be dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun to eliminate the shortfall and balance-out to the measured density.

It is conceivable, therefore, that comets which travel to the far reaches of the Solar System (beyond Neptune's orbit) and then to the opposite end, near to the Sun, accumulate dark matter as they sweep through the Solar System and beyond.

Meteorites and asteroids, similarly, collect some dark matter within the Solar System, as they sweep through their orbits. We would therefore expect the Earth to be impacted by space debris containing dark matter every day.

Dark Evolution

After falling into habitable zones; meteorites, asteroids and comets, containing both the dark and visible building blocks of life, generated the first single-celled and later multi-cellular life-forms which developed both ordinary and dark matter bodies that were coupled to each other.According to plasma metaphysics, dark matter consists largely of a plasma of very high energy super particles (sometimes of a different parity) - or "dark plasma".

Due to their very high energy levels (or different parities) these particles interacted only weakly with ordinary matter (in other words, there are only subtle interactions between the ordinary and dark matter bodies) or they do not interact at all with ordinary matter at extremely high energies.

It is reasonable to assume that the lower frequency (or energy) dark matter (which can be correlated to what metaphysicists call "physical-etheric matter") would have subtle interactions with the biochemical fields within the biological body whereas the higher frequency dark matter (which can be correlated with what metaphysicists call the "astral" and other even higher energy matter) may not interact directly with ordinary matter.

Meteorites which contain dark plasma generated the first bioplasma cells which were the precursors to the biochemical cells (as argued by Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu of Cuza University in 2003; and inferred by V N Tsytovich and his colleagues of the Russian Academy of Science in 2007).

It has been shown that plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. As argued by Tsytovich, the plasma cell acted as a mold or template for the formation of the biochemical cell.

This is consistent with the observation, often found in the metaphysical literature (for example Barbara Brennan and others), that the subtle bioplasma body provides the template for the morphogenesis of the biochemical body in 3+1 dimensional space.

This is also consistent with dark matter theories, which propose that dark matter provides the scaffolding for ordinary matter (as reported by Richard Massey, California Institute of Technology, and others). Physicist Chung Pei-Ma, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, concludes that "the ghost universe of dark matter is a template for the visible universe".

While the carbon-based body was ordinarily visible, the dark matter body was invisible. It is conceivable that a series of invisible bodies, developing over a spectrum of energy levels and composed of dark matter, formed an invisible superstructure over the biological body. The higher energy bodies and the biological bodies then co-evolved as a composite during the lifetime of the carbon-based biological body.

When the biological bodies died, however, dark matter bodies continued to evolve on their own. At periodic intervals these older dark matter bodies (with accumulated memories) fused with the young dark matter counterpart bodies of embryonic biological bodies to continue their evolution with biological bodies.

The evolution of these dark matter bodies were therefore inter-twined with the evolution of biological bodies over vast stretches of time. The dark matter bodies of human beings have often been described as "subtle bodies" or "bioplasma bodies" in the metaphysical and off-mainstream scientific literature.

Role of Water is replaced by Liquid-Crystal Plasma

Liquid water is essential for biochemical life as an agent for transport and protein folding. Its high heat capacity, ability to remain a liquid over a wide temperature range and properties as a solvent ensures a stable and useful substrate for biochemical activities. Its importance, however, is relative to biochemical life - not electromagnetic life.

It is not necessary for electromagnetic life which uses magnetic fields to form structures and electric fields as agents of transport.Complex plasma (which is what bioplasma bodies are composed of, according to plasma metaphysics) can exist in a liquid-crystal state - similar to biological cells in the human body.

Particles in a liquid-crystal phase are free to move about in much the same way as in a liquid, but as they do so they remain oriented in a certain direction. This feature may make it superior to the properties of water - enabling liquid crystal bioplasma, polarized by magnetic and electric fields, to serve as an electronic matrix, a co-ordinate system and a template for the morphogenesis of the carbon-based fetus.

In this role, the symbiotic bioplasma body acts as a developmental catalyst for the carbon-based body.

Symbiotic Relationship between Plasma and Carbon Based Bodies

"Symbiosis" is a term used to describe a close ecological relationship between the individuals of two (or more) different species. Sometimes a symbiotic relationship benefits both species, sometimes one species benefits at the other's expense, and in other cases neither species benefits.

It has been observed by metaphysicists that the symbiotic relationship between the bioplasma and carbon-based bodies is one of "mutualism" where both species benefit.Dr. Robert Foot has suggested a coupling force between ordinary and mirror photons. He believes that one effect of this force is to make dark mirror matter intermittently visible as it travels through the atmosphere.

To generalize, plasma metaphysics hypothesizes that there are coupling forces between the carbon-based body and the invisible superstructure of bioplasma bodies which keeps them linked until any of the bodies die. This hypothesis can be cited as the Plasma-Carbon Symbiotic Life Forms hypothesis

(Really) Weird Plasma-Based Life Forms

Plasma metaphysics views the life-forms which have been described as "ghosts", "angels" and "deities" and other similar entities as weird plasma-based life-forms which are also evolving within Earth's dark matter counterparts.

As discussed in the author's article Angels, Ghosts, Deities and their Magnetic Plasma Bodies and book Our Invisible Bodies the appearance and properties of these entities, described by various observers, suggest a category of electromagnetic life forms that are not available for controlled examination because of limitations in current scientific instruments.

Much has already been written with respect to the anatomy and physiology of these plasma-based bodies derived from observations by metaphysicists and interpreted using current physics (see books and articles by Jay Alfred and others).

They could serve as basic models for further scientific research into weird life - a project that NASA has undertaken.

If NASA is serious about understanding the whole spectrum of weird life, maybe it should also search our own backyard. Weird life may not only be "out there" (in Jupiter and other gas giants, on the Sun and other stars) but it may very well be in your living room.

NASA's astrobiology team would need to categorize the life forms that have been described as ghosts, angels and deities as weird plasma-based life forms and study them within a scientific framework to the extent allowed by current technology.

Any confirmation of their existence would revolutionize our understanding of the scope of evolution at many different levels of existence, not just the biochemical level ... and, oh yes; it could have far reaching implications on our own existence, if any, after the death of our carbon-based bodies.

Technology Singularity in the 21st Century

2007-12-25T18:25:00.000-08:00

Predictions by Ray Kurzweil:

2010:

Supercomputers will have the same power as human brains. Computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, meaning many will have nontraditional shapes and/or will be embedded in clothing and everyday objects. Full-immersion virtual reality will exist.

2010s:

Computers become smaller and increasingly integrated into everyday life. More and more computer devices will be used as miniature web servers, and more will have their resources pooled for computation.

High-quality broadband Internet access will become available almost everywhere.

Glasses that beam images onto the users' retinas to produce virtual reality will be developed. They will also come with speakers or headphone attachments that will complete the experience with sounds.

The VR glasses will also have built-in computers featuring "virtual assistant" programs that can help the user with various daily tasks.

Virtual assistants would be capable of multiple functions. One useful function would be real-time language translation in which words spoken in a foreign language would be translated into text that would appear as subtitles to a user wearing the glasses.

Cell phones will be built into clothing and will be able to project sounds directly into the ears of their users. Advertisements will utilize a new technology whereby two ultrasonic beams can be targeted to intersect at a specific point, delivering a localized sound message that only a single person can hear. This was demonstrated in the movie Minority Report.

2014:

Automatic house cleaning robots will have become common.

2018:

1013 bits of computer memory--roughly the equivalent of the memory space in a single human brain--will cost $1000.

2020:

Personal computers will have the same processing power as human brains.

2020s:

Computers less than 100 nm big will be possible. As one of their first practical applications, nanomachines are used for medical purposes. Highly advanced medical nanobots will perform detailed brainscans on live patients. Accurate computer simulations of the entire human brain will exist due to these hyperaccurate brainscans, and the workings of the brain will be understood.

Nanobots capable of entering the bloodstream to "feed" cells and extract waste will exist (though not necessarily be in wide use) by the end of this decade. They will make the normal mode of human food consumption obsolete.

By the late 2020's, nanotech-based manufacturing will be in widespread use, radically altering the economy as all sorts of products can suddenly be produced for a fraction of their traditional-manufacture costs. The true cost of any product is now the amount it takes to download the design schematics. Also by the later part of this decade, virtual reality will be so high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real reality.

The threat posed by genetically engineered pathogens permanently dissipates by the end of this decade as medical nanobots--infinitely more durable, intelligent and capable than any microorganism--become sufficiently advanced.

A computer passes the Turing Test by the last year of the decade (2029), meaning that it is a Strong A.I. and can think like a human (though the first A.I. is likely to be the equivalent of a very stupid human). This first A.I. is built around a computer simulation of a human brain, which was made possible by previous, nanotech-guided brainscanning.

2025:

The most likely year for the debut of advanced nanotechnology. Some military UAV's and land vehicles will be 100% computer-controlled.

2030s:

Brain uploading becomes possible. Nanomachines could be directly inserted into the brain and could interact with brain cells to totally control incoming and outgoing signals. As a result, truly full-immersion virtual reality could be generated without the need for any external equipment.

Afferent nerve pathways could be blocked, totally canceling out the "real" world and leaving the user with only the desired virtual experience. Brain nanobots could also elicit emotional responses from users. Using brain nanobots, recorded or real-time brain transmissions of a person’s daily life known as "experience beamers" will be available for other people to remotely experience.

This is very similar to how the characters in Being John Malkovich were able to enter the mind of Malkovich and see the world through his eyes. Recreational uses aside, nanomachines in peoples' brains will allow them to greatly expand their cognitive, memory and sensory capabilities, to directly interface with computers, and to "telepathically" communicate with other, similarly augmented humans via wireless networks.

The same nanotechnology should also allow people to alter the neural connections within their brains, changing the underlying basis for the person's intelligence, memories and personality.

2040s:

Human body 3.0 (as Kurzweil calls it) comes into existence. It lacks a fixed, corporeal form and can alter its shape and external appearance at will via foglet-like nanotechnology. Organs are also replaced by superior cybernetic implants. People spend most of their time in full-immersion virtual reality (Kurzweil has cited The Matrix as a good example of what the advanced virtual worlds will be like, without the dystopian twist). Foglets are in use.

2045:

The Singularity$1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are infinitely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.

The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on.

The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.'s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.

The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

Post-2045: "Waking up" the Universe

The physical bottom limit to how small computer transistors can be shrunk is reached. From this moment onwards, computers can only be made more powerful if they are made larger in size.

Because of this, A.I.'s convert more and more of the Earth's matter into engineered, computational substrate capable of supporting more A.I.'s. until the whole Earth is one, gigantic computer.

At this point, the only possible way to increase the intelligence of the machines any farther is to begin converting all of the matter in the universe into similar massive computers. A.I.'s radiate out into space in all directions from the Earth, breaking down whole planets, moons and meteoroids and reassembling them into giant computers.

This, in effect, "wakes up" the universe as all the inanimate "dumb" matter (rocks, dust, gases, etc.) is converted into structured matter capable of supporting life (albeit synthetic life). Kurzweil predicts that machines might have the ability to make planet-sized computers by 2099, which underscores how enormously technology will advance after the Singularity.

The process of "waking up" the universe could be complete as early as 2199, or might take billions of years depending on whether or not machines could figure out a way to circumvent the speed of light for the purposes of space travel.

With the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of "life") would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe.

Kurzweil suggests that this would open up all sorts of new possibilities, including abrogation of the laws of Physics, interdimensional travel, and a possible infinite extension of existence (true immortality).

Introduction to Technological Singularity

2007-12-25T18:18:00.000-08:00

The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future at which the rate of technological growth approaches infinity. Moore's Law is often cited to assist in the prediction of the date of the singularity. Theorists are increasingly of the opinion that the singularity will occur via the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities who rapidly accelerate technological progress beyond the capability of human beings to participate meaningfully in said progress.

Intelligence Explosion

Good speculated on the consequences of machines smarter than humans:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

Most proposed methods for creating smarter-than-human or transhuman minds fall into one of two categories: intelligence amplification of human brains and artificial intelligence. The means speculated to produce intelligence augmentation are numerous, and include bio- and genetic engineering, nootropic drugs, AI assistants, direct brain-computer interfaces, and mind transfer.

Potential Dangers

Some speculate superhuman intelligences may have goals inconsistent with human survival and prosperity. AI researcher Hugo de Garis suggests AIs may simply eliminate the human race, and humans would be powerless to stop them. Other oft-cited dangers include those commonly associated with molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These threats are major issues for both singularity advocates and critics, and were the subject of Bill Joy's Wired magazine article "Why the future doesn't need us".

Bostrom discusses human extinction scenarios, and lists superintelligence as a possible cause:

“When we create the first superintelligent entity, we might make a mistake and give it goals that lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question.”

Moravec argues that although super-intelligence in the form of machines may make humans in some sense obsolete as the top intelligence, there will still be room in the ecology for humans.

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are one of the earliest examples of proposed safety measures for AI. The laws are intended to prevent artificially intelligent robots from harming humans.

Asteroid Threats to our Planet

2007-12-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Whether you call it the Big One, the Great Exterminator, Lucifer's Hammer, or Extinction Level Event -- there's much to be said about big chunks of space rock slamming into the earth. One thing's for sure, however. It happened so many times before, that it's only likely it will happen again...

It all comes about within moments. Suddenly, there's a big, fiery ball in the sky, just for a few seconds. And then: impact.

The atmosphere will be on fire. A huge column of fire and debris towers up miles into the sky. Hundreds of thousands die instantaneously. For thousands of miles around, everyone outdoors is incinerated. People nearby simply evaporate.

The impact sends out a shockwave around the globe, just like a stone thrown into a pool makes a circle of waves. But this wave rolls through the Earth's crust itself, causing death and destruction everywhere. There are massive earthquakes. Huge tsunamis. Volcanoes popping open. Millions die, cities are shaken into oblivion. On the opposite side of our planet, the waves of destruction slam into each other again, causing the earth's crust to tower up, forming a massive mountain-ridge within seconds.

And that's just the beginning. As the tremor and the seas calm down and the fires extinguish, there's more to deal with: the huge, black cloud of debris that's thrown up into the stratosphere from the impact site. The debris spreads through the stratosphere, covering the Earth with a thick blanket of burnt carbon, dust and debris. The Sun is blackened.For months or even years to come, the world is covered in darkness, the Sun being no more than a vague blot of light in the pitch-black sky. Temperatures drop about twenty to forty or even fifty degrees everywhere. The Earth's surface freezes. Plants cannot produce oxygen anymore by photosynthesis and die. Animals relying on the plants die too. And we -- relying on both the animals and the plants -- are in BIG trouble.

Oh, there are a few pockets of people still hanging on. They're hiding in bunkers, or in caves. They hold on for years, as long as their supply of tin cans lasts. But when they return to the surface after the endless winter night, they find their planet is turned into a barren, lifeless sheet of land, with only some deserted ruins reminding of what once was.

Sure: in the end, the Sun returns and temperatures start rising again. So there may be a new beginning for mankind after all? Think again. The odds run against such optimism. The only thing alive is bacteria and mosses and -- if we're lucky -- some insects, rodents and fish. With luck, civilization is `only' thrown back into the Stone Age. More likely however is that humanity becomes extinct.

A Brief History of Meteors Going Whammo

Oddly, until twenty years ago, no one took meteors quite serious. It was widely believed that those mean clumps of rock and ice that zoom across the galaxy are not a real threat to our planet. A comet entering our atmosphere would instantly burn up, and that would be it.
All that changed in 1978, when two paleobiologists, Louis and Walter Avarez, went to Italy to study the so-called K/T barrier: the transition between the Cretaceous period (the age of the dinosaurs) and the next prehistoric era, the Tertiary period. The K/T Barrier had always been a big mystery. Within only several thousands of years -- a twinkling of an eye, in geological terms -- all the dinosaurs suddenly vanished and nature switched from one geological period to the next.

Digging around in the Apennine Mountains, father and son Avarez suddenly realized something extraordinary must have happened. Everywhere on Earth, the K/T Barrier is marked by a tiny layer of iridium in the ground -- `iridium' being a rare chemical substance mostly found in meteorites. It began to dawn on Louis and Walter that the dinosaurs didn't just die out because of some evolutionary reason. The dinosaurs were simply squashed by a huge meteorite!

The killer meteorite must have slammed into our planet 65 million years ago. It must have been an event much like the one described above. There was a long, mean period of darkness, while it rained iridium all over the world. Life on our planet was almost completely wiped out. All plants and animals bigger than a blade of grass became extinct. Just picture that! No wonder the Avarezes coined the killer meteor `The Great Exterminator'.

For the decade to come, the Exterminator theory was highly controversial. If a meteor big enough to kill all the dinosaurs really went boom on our planet, surely you should notice an impact crater somewhere? Then, in 1991, Nasa sattelites indeed spotted the crater.

It was a huge scar known as the `Cenote Ring', underneath the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, almost impossible to detect by the eye because of millions of years of erosion and tectonic movement. Judging by the size of the impact crater, scientists calculated the Great Exterminator must have had the size of a mountain.

It hammered the world of those poor dinosaurs with the impact force of about 100 million megaton of TNT. That's the equivalent of 5,000,000,000 atomic bombs! By now, some people really started to get itchy about meteors.

Next came the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. For the first time in history, man could see what actually happens when a colossal comet starts to mess around with your planet. In July 1994, the meteor slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere, snapped into pieces, and bombarded the planet for days. Huge balls of fire and dust rose up from the planet's surface, and the debris darkened parts of Jupiter's atmosphere for weeks.

The biggest impact crater, carved out by the piece of meteor known as Hale-Bopp, had a size no smaller than the entire Earth! By now, everyone realized that the danger of a meteor suddenly ending your world is as real as can be. It could happen next year, or next month. And well, it could also happen tomorrow.

From those days on, attention for meteors grew and grew. Were the dinosaurs just unfortunate? The troublesome answer is a loud and clear `no'. As a matter of fact, the meteor that killed the dino's wasn't the first big piece of rock hitting our planet -- and not even the biggest, scientists began to realize.

For instance, just over 4,5 billion years ago, when our planet was still very young, an enormous body hit Earth with such unimaginable force our planet literally broke up. A huge piece of Earth was launched into space. You can still see that lump of earth when you look out of your window: the debris rolled up into a ball, and is what we today call the Moon.

The next massive space attack came a half billion years later: our planet was bombarded so heavily with asteroids that the entire crust actually melted. That would explain why the oldest rocks on Earth are only 3,9 billion years old, while the planet itself is five billion years old.

And then there was another apocalyptic event, some 590 million years ago. One day, a meteorite of incredible proportions slammed hard into what's now South Australia, digging a crater about four kilometers deep and some 40 kilometers wide (currently known as Lake Acraman). Within seconds the whole thing vaporized into a huge firestorm. The impact was so devastating, it must have created massive earthquakes and 100-meter high tsunamis even hundreds of kilometers away. Oh boy!

Actually, it literally rained Big One's on our little planet. As recently as January 2002, geologists discovered a huge impact crater out of the Australian coast: no less than 120 kilometers wide. The meteor that carved out the crater slammed into our planet 360 million years ago, wiping out 85 percent of all species.

And in 2001, Norwegian researchers suddenly realized that their coast had once been the scene of a similar event. A huge meteor went kaboom over Norway 150 million years ago - speaking in geological terms, right before the Great Exterminator. The explosion slammed a 40-kilometer wide bump in the seabed of the Barents Sea, the so-called `Mjoelnir Crater'. Researchers still wonder how it was possible that anything survived.

Oh, and even when humanity was around, the meteors kept hitting us. For example, according to some researchers, the legendary floods of Deucalion, the Sumerian Gilgamesh-epos and the biblical Deluge may very well have been caused by a big comet plunging into sea somewhere.

More recent, in the year 1490 A.D., the city of Ch'ing Yang in Central China was the scene of a weird disaster. The event was recorded in at least ten ancient textbooks, all claiming that the event killed many thousands of people as it `rained stones and fire'. Likely cause: an asteroid as big as a modest sky scraper, going kaboom high up in the Earth's atmosphere.

On June 30th of 1908, a loud explosion shook the village of Tunguska in Middle-Siberia. Local inhabitants saw a huge blast of fire in the sky. There was a sudden temperature rise, and a blazing forest fire, lighting up the horizon. No less than two thousand square miles of forest were devastated. As we know now, a twelve story building sized piece of rock hit the atmosphere over Siberia and exploded at a height of some eight kilometers. The energy set free at the event was equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT -- a thousand atomic bombs!

So, it's no pessimistic estimate that our planet can bounce into a freaky piece of space rock again. Cosmologists estimate an extinction type comet hits the earth once every 20 million years. The odds for a smaller, Tunguska-type impact are much higher. On average, this kind of thing happens once in every 300 years.

Of course, the effect of a meteor impact depends on the place where it hits the Earth. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs, for example, hit a soil loaded with sulfuric rock, which enormously boosted the comet's devastating effect. Had it hit the planet several hundreds of miles westwards, it would have plunged into the ocean -- and the dinosaurs probably would have survived.

On the other hand, if a Tunguska-type meteor happens to hit an inhabited area, it will definitely wipe it off the face of the Earth entirely. Considering that some 10 percent of our planet is inhabited, you could assume that once in every 3,000 years a meteorite will destroy an inhabited area.

Meanwhile, the people at Nasa try to reassure us, by claiming they keep an open eye to the sky. The message they propagate is that a meteor that wants to hit our planet surely will be spotted in time and destroyed -- whether it is by a nuclear bomb or by a team of Bruce Willis-like he-men going out in a space shuttle.

No offense -- but that's pure propaganda. The harsh fact is that such `protection' is far less reliable than Nasa wants us to believe. For example, in March 1998, a BIG comet nearly hit us. Remarkably, no one saw it coming. Because it came straight at us, the thing was only visible as a tiny speck in the sky, not as a distinct, moving object traversing the cosmos from left to right. Consequently, no one noticed it -- until it passed.

(Meteor Size) (Impact Force) (Destruction) (Chance)
(50m) (15 Megaton of TNT) (City sized) (1:300)
(200m) (100 Mt TNT) (Continent sized)
(1,000m) (100,000 Mt TNT) (Half of the world) (1:2,000,000)
(10,000m) (100,000,000 Mt TNT) (Extinction level event) (1:30,000,000)

The Norwegian meteor was 2 Kilometers across; the meteor that carved out Lake Acraman in Australia 4 Kilometers, and the comet that killed the dinosaurs 10 Kilometers. The impact force also depends on the velocity of the object, which ranges roughly from 50,000 to 100,000 Kilometers per hour.

Then there's the eerie problem of ice comets. Many comets are in fact `dirty snowballs' made of dust and ice. The problem is we cannot really detect these comets, because conventional equipment sees right through them. You can only spot an ice comet when it comes so close to the Sun that it begins to melt. We'll recognize it by its tail by then. But according to many critical astronomers, this will be much too late to take any action.

Besides, there are no reliable ways of getting rid of a comet racing at us. Pleas for a kind of `space shield' protecting us from big pieces of rock have not yet raised any political backing. And it is doubtful whether Bruce Willis is willing to go out to kill the Big One if it's coming.

Oh, and talking about Big One's: in 2039, another HUGE comet will pass us by `only' some millions of Kilometers. However, this estimate is not completely fireproof, for one thing because comets are very sensitive to variations in their trajectory.

Here's what to do. Put on your best helmet -- and keep your fingers crossed.

Proposed Resolutions to the Ship of Theseus Theory

2007-12-18T01:44:00.000-08:00

Aristotle's causes

According to the philosophical system of Aristotle and his followers, there are four causes or reasons that describe a thing; these causes can be analyzed to get to a solution to the paradox. The formal cause or form is the design of a thing, while the material cause is the matter that the thing is made of. The "what-it-is" of a thing, according to Aristotle, is its formal cause; so the Ship of Theseus is the same ship, because the formal cause, or design, does not change, even though the matter used to construct it may vary with time. In the same manner, for Heraclitus's paradox, a river has the same formal cause, although the material cause (the particular water in it) changes with time, and likewise for the person who steps in the river.

Another of Aristotle's causes is the end or final cause, which is the intended purpose of a thing. The Ship of Theseus would have the same end, that is, transporting Theseus, even though its material cause would change with time. The efficient cause is how and by whom a thing is made, for example, how artisans fabricate and assemble something; in the case of the Ship of Theseus, the workers who built the ship in the first place could have used the same tools and techniques to replace the planks in the ship.

This probably won't do as a solution to the problem, though, since the material cause does change over time, and we have been shown no reason to privilege one of the causes over another in the determination of continuity of identity.

Definitions of "the same"

One common argument found in the philosophical literature is that in the case of Heraclitus's river we are tripped up by two different definitions of "the same". In one sense things can be qualitatively the same, by having the same properties. In another sense they might be numerically the same by being "one". As an example, consider two bowling balls that look identical. They would be qualitatively, but not numerically, the same. If one of the balls was then painted a different color, it would be numerically, but not qualitatively, the same as its previous self.

By this argument, Heraclitus's river is qualitatively, but not numerically, different by the time one attempts to make the second step into it. For Theseus's ship, the same is true.
The main problem with this proposed solution to problems of identity is that if we construe our definition of properties broadly enough, qualitative identity collapses into numerical identity. For example, if one of the qualities of a bowling ball is its spatial or temporal location, then no two bowling balls that exist in different places or points in time could ever be qualitatively identical.

Likewise, in the case of a river, since it has different properties at every point in time—such as variance in the peaks and troughs of the waves in particular spatial locations, changes in the amount of water in the river caused by evaporation—it can never be qualitatively identical at different points in time. Since nothing can be qualitatively different without also being numerically different, the river must be numerically different at different points in time.

Four dimensionalism

One solution to this paradox may come from the concept of four-dimensionalism. David Lewis and others have proposed that these problems can be solved by considering all things as 4-dimensional objects. An object is a spatially extended three-dimensional thing that also extends across the 4th dimension of time. This 4-dimensional object is made up of 3-dimensional time-slices. These are spatially extended things that exist only at individual points in time. An object is made up of a series of causally related time-slices. All time-slices are numerically identical to themselves. And the whole aggregate of time-slices, namely the 4-dimensional object, is also numerically identical with itself. But the individual time-slices can have qualities that differ from each other.

The problem with the river is solved by saying that at each point in time, the river has different properties. Thus the various 3-dimensional time-slices of the river have different properties from each other. But the entire aggregate of river time-slices, namely the whole river as it exists across time, is identical with itself. So you can never step into the same river time-slice twice, but you can step into the same (4-dimensional) river twice.

A seeming difficulty with this is that in special relativity there is not a unique "correct" way to make these slices -- it is not meaningful to speak of a "point in time" extended in space. However, this does not prove to be a problem: any way of slicing will do (including no 'slicing' at all), provided that the boundary of the object changes in a fashion which can be agreed upon by observers in all reference frames. Special relativity still ensures that "you can never step into the same river time-slice twice", because even with the ability to shift around which way spacetime is sliced, you are still moving in a timelike fashion, which will not multiply intersect a time-slice, which is spacelike.

Metaphysics of quality

Robert M. Pirsig's metaphysics of quality, presented in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, defines a hierarchy of patterns and uses it to offer another solution to the paradox: the ship is simultaneously a set of lower-order patterns (the parts) which change, and a single higher-order pattern (the ship as a whole) which remains constant.

Cultural differences

This concept may differ among different cultures. As an anedocal evidence it seems that in the east this is not a paradox. Quoting Douglas Adams from the book Last Chance to See:
I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

"So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.
"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
"But it's burnt down?"
"Yes."
"Twice."
"Many times."
"And rebuilt."
"Of course. It is an important and historic building."
"With completely new materials."
"But of course. It was burnt down."
"So how can it be the same building?"
"It is always the same building."

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

Ship of Theseus and related Theories

2007-12-18T00:10:00.000-08:00

The Ship of Theseus is a story used to illustrate how different systems for choosing which elements to use in defining the identity of a thing can disagree about whether or not that thing still exists under certain conditions. First it defines a thing's identity as the sum of its component parts (as a simple unstructured inventory), then shows how that contradicts with the usual intuition by gradually replacing those parts, showing that we actually tend to identify such things by higher patterns of their form and purpose.

Greek legend

According to Greek legend as reported by Plutarch,
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. As a corollary, one can question what happens if the replaced parts were used to build a second ship. Which, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus?

Heraclitus's river

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is notable for his unusual view of identity. Arius Didymus quoted him as saying:
“Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.”

Plutarch also informs us of Heraclitus' claim about stepping twice into the same river, citing that it cannot be done because "it scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes."

Locke's socks

John Locke proposed a scenario regarding a favorite sock that develops a hole. He pondered whether the sock would still be the same after a patch was applied to the hole. If yes, then, would it still be the same sock after a second patch was applied? Indeed, would it still be the same sock many years later, even after all of the material of the original sock has been replaced with patches?

Grandfather's old axe

"Grandfather's old axe" is a colloquial expression of unknown origin describing something of which little original remains: "it's had three new heads and four new handles but it's still the same old axe." The phrase has also been used in banter as in: "This is George Washington's original axe...", while holding up an apparently new axe. This example is used explicitly to explain significant points of the plot in The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett. A similar example was also seen in Only Fools and Horses, where Trigger (a central character) won an award for using the same broom to sweep the streets for twenty years, even though he’d replaced the head 17 times and the handle 14 times. The meaning of the expression and its relationship to murder are questioned in the opening of the novel John Dies at the End by David Wong.

Other examples

One can think of many examples of objects which might fall prey to Theseus's paradox: buildings and automobiles for example can undergo complete replacement whilst still maintaining some aspect of their identity. Businesses, colleges and universities often change addresses and residences, thus completely "replacing" their old material structure for a new one, yet keeping the same purpose and often the same people that keep the organization functioning as it was. If two businesses merge, their identities merge (or one is consumed by the other). Similarly, the human body constantly creates new cells as old cells die. Average age of cells in an adult body may be less than 10 years.

If we relate identity to actions and phenomena, identity becomes even harder to grasp. Depending upon one's chosen perspective of what identifies or continues a hurricane, if a hurricane Evan collapses at a particular location and then one forms again at or near the same location, a person may be totally consistent to either choose to call the latter mentioned hurricane the same as the former (as in "Evan" was reinvigorated), or choose to call the latter a new hurricane "Frank" or "Georgia".

One could also see the bands Napalm Death, Zao and The Little River Band as contemporary examples of Theseus's paradox. Both band's current line-ups contain none of the founding members, yet they continue to use the same name.

A somewhat, more layman's example is in most Herbie films. In these films, when any part of the protagonist (a "living" car named Herbie) is replaced, no one thinks anything of it, however; if one were to replace all of Herbie's parts at once, which part would contain his "soul", and if a certain car part did contain his soul, would it be transferred if the part were attached to another car?

The Human Virus

2007-12-17T23:40:00.000-08:00

Humans are viruses. It is that simple.

Viruses feed off the material of a host body, draining it, and using it to sustain itself for growth and development.

We are the same. Stripping our planet of its resources we grow as a civilisation, advancing our technology and evolving along with it.

Our cities and buildings are like the sores and wounds that erupt from the flesh when the host's body reacts to the parasite feeding off of it. Our structures are an eye-sore on a landscape torn by the work of our construction machines. The pus that spews from the host are like the fumes that our factories release into the air, polluting it.

When a virus attacks the body, it heats up, causing a fever, attempting to destroy the parasite. This is similar to the Global Warming that is affecting the Earth at the moment. Nature is attempting to destroy us. We, are the parasites now.

A virus survives by infecting other bodies when its first host dies from the work of the parasite. Likewise, for Humanity to survive after we have completely turned this planet into a barren wasteland, we would need to abandon it and search for new worlds to survive on.

We are contagious. We are the viruses, never-ceasing to devour whatever we come into contact with, ever-taking, rarely contributing.

We are the plague, the epidemic, which would inflict a thousand worlds in the future with our scum.

We, then, are no better than the diseases which we fight.

Hedonism & The Experience/Pleasure Machine

2007-12-17T23:21:00.000-08:00

Hedonism is the philosophy that pleasure is the most important pursuit of mankind. The basic idea behind hedonistic thought is that pleasure is the only thing that is good for a person. This is often used as a justification for evaluating actions in terms of how much pleasure and how little pain (i.e. suffering) they produce. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize this total (pleasure minus pain).

The Experience Machine is a short section of Anarchy, State, and Utopia published by Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick. The text is one of the best known attempts at a refutation of ethical hedonism.

If the primary thesis of hedonism is: "Pleasure is the good", then any component of life that is not pleasurable does nothing to increase one's well-being. This is a view held by many value theorists, but most famously by certain classical Utilitarians. Nozick seeks to attack hedonism by means of a thought experiment. If he can prove that there is something other than pleasure that has value to us and affects our well-being, then hedonism can be seen to be defeated.

The thought experiment

Nozick asks us to imagine an experience machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences that we could possibly want.

"Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening. Would you plug in?"

Initial concerns

Nozick attempts to quell our initial concerns by shrugging them off on the basis of the intelligence of the experience machine scientists. For instance, a primary worry would be something like: who would run the machines if everyone plugs in? Nozick asks us to ignore these concerns, as they do not adversely affect the thought experiment.

The experiment is actually open to multiple interpretations. For instance, Nozick himself claims that you could either map out the rest of your life in the machine before plugging in, or you could go in and then step out for ten minutes every two years or so to choose your programming for the next cycle. While these different takes on the experiment are interesting, they do not directly affect the argument.

The Argument

The argument runs somewhat along these lines:

P1: Hedonism means that the only thing that affects our well-being is pleasure

P2: If hedonism were correct, then we would plug into the machine because we would want pleasurable experiences

P3: We would not plug into the machine because we are concerned about the reality of our experiences

C: Therefore, there is something other than pleasure that affects our well-being and hedonism is therefore defeated.

Reasons to not plug in

Nozick provides us with three reasons not to plug into the machine:

1)
We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.
"It is only because we first want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them." (Nozick)

2)
We want to be a certain sort of person.
"Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob." (Nozick)

3)
Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality (it limits us to what we can make).
"There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated." (Nozick)

Nozick's conclusion

Nozick firmly believes that there are components of our lives that matter to our well-being in addition to our experiences. We can learn this, he claims, simply by imagining the machine, and then deciding that we would not use it. If this is true, then, Nozick claims hedonism is defeated.

Human evolution is speeding up

2007-12-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

Humans have moved into the evolutionary fast lane and are becoming increasingly different, a genetic study suggests.

In the past 5,000 years, genetic change has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period, say scientists in the US.

This is in contrast with the widely-held belief that recent human evolution has halted.
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Professor Henry Harpending, an author of the study from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US, said: "The dogma has been these [differences] are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influences.

"Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin," he added. "We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity."

This is happening, he said, because "there has not been much flow" between different regions since modern humans left Africa to colonise the rest of the world. And there is no evidence that it is slowing down, he added.

"The technology can't detect anything beyond about 2,000 years ago, but we see no sign of [human evolution] slowing down. So I would suspect it is continuing," he told BBC News.

Researchers found evidence of recent selection in 7% of all human genes, including lighter skin and blue eyes in northern Europe and partial resistance to diseases, such as malaria, among some African populations.

"Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time," said co-author Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "It's 100 or 200 generations ago. That's how long since some of these genes originated, and today they are [in] 30% or 40% of people because they've had such an advantage."

The researchers propose that there are two factors causing human evolution to speed up.

"One of them is there are a lot more people - the more people you have the more opportunities there are for an advantageous mutation to show up," said Professor Harpending.

A large population has more genetic variation and allows for more positive selection than a small one.

"The second is environmental change - our diets have changed, we are in radically new environments," he added. "With a large population size comes lots of new diseases."

However, geneticist Professor Steve Jones of University College London said suggesting a large population size could increase the speed of evolution was "a contentious issue".

"Once a population gets above a very small size it is not very clear if its ability to respond to natural selection depends on size," he told BBC News.

"The general picture that evolution has speeded up in the last 10,000 years as we change from, to put it bluntly, being animals to being humans is clearly true," he explained. "To suggest it is happening at this instant, I would suggest, is probably wrong."

He said natural selection needed difference - either in the ability to stay alive or in the number of offspring born.

"The fundamental observation is that this difference has gone," said Professor Jones.
"At the moment we are in an evolutionary interval. We are in between two storms. One storm has more or less blown itself out, the storm of farming.

"The question is whether we are going to stay in the calms or whether another great storm will start. And if there is one, I would say it is most certainly to do with epidemic disease."

The study looked specifically at genetic variations called "single nucleotide polymorphisms," or SNPs. These are single-point mutations, or changes, in the genetic sequence of DNA on chromosomes.

If the mutation is advantageous then it will spread rapidly in the population, along with DNA on either side of the mutation.

The authors argued that if the same chromosome from numerous people had a segment with an identical pattern of SNPs this would indicate that the segment of the chromosome had not been broken up (recombined) recently.

Therefore, a gene on that segment of chromosome must have evolved recently and fast, they believe. If it had evolved long ago, the chromosome would have broken up and recombined.

The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain

2007-12-09T05:01:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html

Society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism, i.e. a "global brain".

It is an old idea, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks, that the whole of human society can be viewed as a single organism. Many thinkers have noticed the similarity between the roles played by different organizations in society and the functions of organs, systems and circuits in the body.

For example, industrial plants extract energy and building blocks from raw materials, just like the digestive system.

Roads, railways and waterways transport these products from one part of the system to another one, just like the arteries and veins.

Garbage dumps and sewage systems collect waste products, just like the colon and the bladder.

The army and police protect the society against invaders and rogue elements, just like the immune system.

Such initially vague analogies become more precise as the understanding of organisms increases. The concepts of systems theory provide a good framework for establishing a precise correspondence between organismic and societal functions.

The fact that complex organisms, like our own bodies, are built up from individual cells, led to the concept of superorganism. If cells aggregate to form a multicellular organism, then organisms might aggregate to form an organism of organisms: a superorganism.

Biologists agree that social insect colonies, such as ant nests or beehives, are best seen as such superorganisms. The activities of a single ant, bee or termite are meaningless unless they are understood in function of the survival of the colony.

Individual humans may seem similar to the cells of a social superorganism, but they are still much more independent than ants or cells. This is especially clear if we look at the remaining competition, conflicts and misunderstandings between individuals and groups. Thus human society is still an ambivalent system, balancing between individual selfishness and collective responsibility. In that sense it may be more similar to organisms like slime molds or sponges, whose cells can live individually as well as collectively, than to true multicellular organisms.

However, there seems to be a continuing trend towards global integration. As technological and social systems develop into a more closely knit tissue of interactions, transcending the old boundaries between countries and cultures, the social superorganism seems to turn from a metaphor into a reality. Although many people tend to see the super-organism philosophy as a totalitarian or collectivist ideology, the opposite is true: further integration will basically increase individual freedom and diversity.

Most recently, the technological revolution has produced a global communication network, which can be seen as a nervous system for this planetary being. As the computer network becomes more intelligent it starts to look more like a global brain or super-brain, with capabilities far surpassing those of individual people. This is part of an evolutionary transition to a higher level of complexity.

A remaining question is whether this transition will lead to the integration of the whole of humanity, producing a human "super-being", or merely enhance the capabilities of individuals, thus producing a multitude of "meta-beings".

A World Without Men

2007-12-08T05:07:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

It’s every man’s secret fantasy: a world, exclusively inhabited by women. Well guys, have we got news for you. One day, the dream could come true! But before you straighten your tie, there’s something you should know. In a world without men... Well, humanity dies out.

Chances are you haven’t noticed it, but there’s a war between the sexes going on. A foul, chemical war it is, a bitter battle to the death. Gladly, it’s a rather small-scale war. The parties doing the fighting are sex chromosomes: tiny, curled-up molecules of DNA, that lay hidden within each human cell.Still, the future of mankind is what’s at stake. You see, it’s a war between boys and girls -- literally. And here’s the latest news from the battlefield: the women are winning. At least, that's what it looks like. The girls are about to wipe the boys from the face of the earth.

As you may know, there are two kinds of sex chromosomes: X and Y. If you inherited two X’s at conception (one X from every parent), you’re a woman. When your father gave you a Y-chromosome, it adds up to XY -- which stands for man. All in all, the Y-chromosome is the thing that makes a man a man. Well, apart from that other thingy, that is.On Y, you’ll find all the stuff that a man needs. You’ll find genetic instructions for how to brew semen, and how to grow a trunk -- no, a little lower, if you please. If there exists a gene for watching football and telling lame sex jokes, you’ll definitely find it on the Y-chromosome.

But on Y, you’ll also find stuff that is harmful to women. For example: sperm contains chemicals that attack the woman’s body. Really! Semen comes with chemicals that shut down the woman’s immune system, so that it can make it into the womb alive.

That's why X, the female chromosome, hates Y. In response, X is constantly throwing all kinds of wicked chemicals at Y. X is killing Y.Take a look through the microscope, and you can immediately see Y is in trouble. Y is a tiny, crumpled chromosome -- not exactly a proud symbol of manliness. Ever since Y split off from the other chromosomes, some 300 million years ago, its number of genes went down from about 1,000 to 80. How did it ever get so tiny? You guessed it: that's because of the female chromosome's attacks.But even without a microscope, the signs are clear. The fact that some people are gay or transsexual could be a direct consequence of the battle between the X- and the Y-chromosome, some geneticists think.

And there are more grizzly clues. For example, every now and then, doctors coincidentally stumble upon a woman who has XY for chromosomes -- the ‘male’ combination. Somehow these ladies' X-chromosomes have found a way to disable the Y-chromosome.And in 1947, a French hospital admitted a female patient who gave birth to a baby girl. The woman wasn’t the least surprised. All births in her family were females, she told the doctors. Scientific investigation confirmed this. Somehow, the family’s genes had found a way to overcome the ‘man-problem’. Her family had learned how to kill Y. And now, the family's women no longer gave birth to any boys.

Perhaps the most spine-chilling clue comes from the men. As we speak, 1 to 2 percent of all men is infertile because of a malfunctioning Y-chromosome! That doesn't seem like much, but it is an astonishing number, because the defects cannot have been inherited (because they lead to infertility). So in other words: 1 to 2 percent of all men have their Y-chromosome disabled during their life! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see where that could lead. A couple of thousands of years more, and Y could be history. Suddenly, you would see the number of men dropping sharply. According to an estimate of the British geneticist Brian Sykes, it could take only 5,000 generations before the world turned into a place almost exclusively inhabited by women.

No, you dirty little sod, that’s NOT a man’s paradise. Indeed; with the numbers of men falling, probably everyone around will be craving for your semen. But it will most likely not be quite like you picture it. Instead of endless erotic nights, think of handing your goody over to the nearest fertility clinic, where the female doctors will try to impregnate as many women as possible with your increasingly rare sperm cells.

They won’t encourage you to start a harem or so. Sex would be an intolerable waste of sperm cells. And besides, you can’t afford risking a heart attack while practicing the world oldest sport. Your semen has become the most valuable fluid on earth now! The women might even decide to keep the last men captive, like a priceless piece of kettle.And how’s this for your world-without-men. There will be no one to watch the games with. No one to talk about cars with. In fact, there will be no football anymore and no fight movies.

You will be heavily discriminated against by all these giggling, chit-chatting GIRLS you’ll see everywhere. It will be a lonely existence. If you’re a guy, that is.And the obvious downside: in the end, everyone will be dead. Without men, no babies. Without babies, no mankind. So we’d clone ourselves, you say? Well -- not too many people know of it, but the latest scientific insight is that this is very, very problematic. Clones are full of genetic errors, causing them to die early. And it’s still undecided if that’s a problem that can ever be solved.

Gladly, the theory with the Y-chromosome is still very controversial. Many researchers don't really believe men will run out of oomph. For one thing, only recently it was discovered that Y has an unexpected defense mechanism against X. The Y-chromosome has made a secret back-up of itself in reverse. It has its key genes tattooed backwards on its own body, so to say. Shoot a hole in Y, and it simply repairs itself by copy-pasting the back-up onto the wound. It seems that the Y-chromosome is less vulnerable than most people think.

On the other hand: the sex chromosome mishap isn't unique. We know of at least three animals where the women are winning. Take the eggfly butterfly (Hypolimnas bolina) of Australia. In the 1970s biologists discovered that most of the butterfly’s offspring is female -- almost half of all males mysteriously die before birth. Exactly the same sinister effect was found for the two-spot ladybird (Adalia bipunctata).

Even more eery is the case of another insect, the buterfly Acrea encedon. As we speak, there’s only 3 percent boy butterflies left, with the ladies taking on 97 percent of the population -- and rising!On the other hand, there's the case of a small rodent from Turkey called the mole vole (Ellobius lutescens). Millions of years ago, the X-chromosomes in this animal succeeded in eliminating the Y-chromosome. But the rodent did something remarkable. It evacuated all male genes to other genes. This quirk of nature still astounds biologists. But it also indicates that men in theory should be able to overcome the attack of the girls.

So in the end, what will happen?

Nobody knows, the jury is still out. On the one hand, some geneticists point out that X is in the majority. Since women have two X’s and men one X and one Y, X outnumbers the Y-chromosomes by three to one.But on the other hand, some researchers suspect foul play. Perhaps the doomsayers are only making fun of Y's small size. While having a smaller one doesn't necessarily mean that it won't function. (Yes, yes, I know...)

Still, like most of the scenarios outlined on Exit Mundi, the one with the chromosomes already happened once - almost. Somewhere in our prehistoric past, X seems to have launched a massive attack on Y. It must have been a very close call. But Y succeeded in repairing itself at last. We can tell this has happened because of certain scars that are still detectable on the male chromosome.

Is that comforting, proof that Y can deal with the attacks of the girls? Or has it weakened Y, and should we worry all the more about the next attack? Better keep an eye on those birth statistics, guys...

Global Warming & The Dark Apocalypse

2007-12-07T05:43:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

You thought the Dark Ages are well behind us? Think again. As we speak, the world is getting darker. One day, we might even perish in a frozen, depressing shadow world. In fact, 'global dimming' may have killed hundreds of thousands of people already.

It’s some decades later. Things on Earth have gotten out of hand -- totally. Our planet has turned into a cold, terrible place. Outside, a dark gray ceiling of clouds permanently covers the sky. The Sun hasn’t shone for many, many years. It’s twilight out there, always. And it’s cold: a devastating ice age has come upon the planet.

Trust us: you don't want to live here. In the eternal night outside, people die by the millions. Those who survive, have turned into pale, sickly, depressed, lost souls who could do with a sunny vacation. In isolated bands, they stumble about through the darkness, cuddled together, clinging to life as good as they can. The stuff we call ‘culture’ has all but slipped away from them; the world's economy has long collapsed. Today, men live much like our ape-like ancestors did, always hungry, and always looking for food. They feed on a disgusting diet of slimy funguses, insects, rodents and mosses -- the only edible things that survive.

And frankly, without sunlight, mankind doesn’t stand a chance. Oxygen levels will drop, and food will get ever scarcer. In the end, we’ll die a horrible death, one man after the other, one community after the next. Probably, we will have forgotten what kind of a lush, sunny planet Earth once was.

Still, out there, above the clouds, the Sun is shining as bright as ever. It’s the thick clouds, that are causing all the trouble. They bounce back the sunlight into space, preventing it from reaching the Earth’s surface and its inhabitants. The result: darkness, and cold.
So, who put those clouds up there in the first place? Well, blame yourself: you did. You guessed it: it’s those humans and their pollution again. The Dark Apocalypse even has an official name: ‘global dimming’.

Already, the Earth is a bit darker and shadowyer than it should have been. Global Dimming was first discovered in the 1980s. In Israel, agricultural biologist Gerald Stanhill coincidentally discovered something weird: the sun shines about 22 percent less in Israel than it did in the 1950s. It is as if someone is slowly turning off the lights!

Then came 9-11. In the days following the terrorist attacks, air traffic was grounded. This led to a sudden, remarkable change in American weather. For three days, it was unusually sunny in the US. The nights were exceptionally bright. On average, it got one degree Celsius warmer in the US during those days. That doesn’t sound like much -- but it’s huge, in terms of climatology: the biggest jump in temperature ever witnessed.

After that, more evidence poured in that the world is really getting darker. Scientists discovered that water evaporates less readily than it did before. And the evidence came from all over the planet: the US is 10 percent darker now than it was in the 1950s, Western Europe 16 percent, and Russia almost 30 percent.

In fact, global dimming may have made its first victims already. In the 1980s, about a million Africans in the Sahel died during a massive drought. According to one theory, it was global dimming’s doing: the Sun simply didn’t shine hard enough to ‘power up’ the system that should have given the Sahel its rainy season. Poor Africans.

Freeze or fry?

But hey, wait a minute, wasn’t the world getting warmer, instead of colder? How about global warming? You’re absolutely right. There’s massive evidence that the world is indeed getting warmer. But it’s also getting darker. In fact, many scientists believe that global dimming puts the brakes on the warming of our planet. Without global dimming, global warming would be much, much worse!

And there’s no telling which will win in the end, heat or cold. Roughly speaking, global dimming is faster and heftier, while global warming is slower and more gradual. Somewhere down the line, there could be a threshold, a point where Dimming beats Warming. Suddenly, we’d see temperatures drop. We’d be preparing that rodent soup in the dark in no time -- say, within several generations.

On the other hand, maybe we will be fine. There’s an upshot: the particles in the sky that bounce back the sunlight, don’t live that long. They’ll rain down on Earth and get washed away, and that will be it. No ice age, no chewing on rats and bugs. (Well, unless the so-called ‘Hydroxyl Collapse’ kicks in)

What’s more, we’re killing global dimming already. In Europe and the US, more and more laws forbid the use of fuels and chemicals that puff noxious particles in the air. Off with you, you mean, sunlight-blocking clouds of dirt!

But hold it. There could be a horrible backlash. Didn’t we just say that global dimming very likely holds back global warming? There you go: if we stop polluting the skies and put that sunlight back on, the consequences could be truly apocalyptic. Global warming will fiercely kick in again. Suddenly, the Sun will shine abundantly, pushing temperatures up by several degrees. We’d have savage summers, and lukewarm winters.

According to several studies, this would sort of... well, kill us, really. By 2030, the poles, the glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet would melt. Sea levels would jump up, flooding billions of homes. The Amazon rainforest would whither and turn into desert. The northern parts of Europe and the US would get an African climate. We might even have a runaway greenhouse effect, a spine-chilling climate mishap that would literally kill every living on Earth.

So, what do you prefer? To fry or to freeze? Would you like to get roasted, or would you rather die in the dark, chewing on bugs? Hmm... Perhaps it’s a better idea to cut down a little on both pollution and greenhouse gases, after all.

Human Extinction by Population Decline

2007-12-07T05:19:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

You may not have noticed it, but at this very moment humanity is going a little… well, extinct, really. For the first time in history, our species is in decay. A handful of centuries more, and it could all be over.

This time, the doom saying doesn’t come from some wacko prophet. No, it’s high-ranking UN-officials and respected economists that ring the alarm bell. The extinction we’re dealing with is locked away in alarming government reports and ill-omened scientific statistics. Far too few people read them.

Here are the figures. By the year 2100, 83 percent of all Spaniards will be gone. There will be 86 percent less Italians, while in Germany, only 17 percent of the population will be left. And how about this one: three generations from now, there will only be half as many people than today.

The doing of some kind of virus or climate mishap? Far from it. This time, the extinction goes all by itself. `Demographic meltdown’, is what they call it. Or `birth collapse’. Or `baby bust’.
It goes like this. On average, a couple should have at least two children to ensure the continuation of the species – or more precise: 2,1, to compensate for children that die early. But all over the world, couples decide to have fewer children. From 2050 on, this will cause the world’s population to shrink. And shrink, until there may be no one left.

So why on earth would humanity want to do that? The reasons are manifold. And in fact, quite understandable. In the old days, you needed children to work on your farm, and to look after you when you grew old. You needed lots of them, because many children died young.

But with better health care and with social security, that’s all changed. You don't really need children anymore. What's more, when you live in a city, children cost you time and money. Besides, more and more women work. They’ll have children at a later age and bear fewer children – if they decide to have any children at all, that is. Anti-conception has nothing to do with it. A religious lifestyle doesn't stop the trend either. It’s just the course of history that’s doing us in.

Not impressed yet? Please let us throw some more figures at you. At this very moment moment, the populations of over sixty countries are falling. Fifty years ago, women throughout the world on average had five children. Today, the average has diminished to 2,7 kids. And all the experts agree on one thing: that’s just the beginning.

Obviously, this will change the world we live in completely. Expect a world where everybody’s ageing and youngsters and children are becoming rare. Expect empty streets, and empty stores. Expect the world economy to come to a grinding halt, as there are less and less people around to buy stuff. Expect governments urging their people to have children, for heaven’s sake, please do! Expect a world where every country is begging third world immigrants and refugees to come over.

But then again, no immigrant would come. The statistics show that the baby bust also strikes in the poorer half of the globe. In Asia and China, birth rates are falling alarmingly fast. In the Southern Americas – the same story. Africa is the only continent where the birth numbers are still high. But then again, the AIDS epidemic causes people to die at an early age – and this actually is slowing down population growth tremendously.

That’s neat, you say. So we’re about to join the Woolly Mammoth. Exactly the sort of thing you wanted to hear when you thought to relax a bit while surfing the web, right?

Well, here’s something to cheer you up a little. In fact, it’s very hard to say if the baby bust that’s hitting us today will actually bring about the end of the species. With six billion people around today, we don’t exactly have to wet our pants yet. And then there’s this: 70,000 years ago, when humanity was still wearing bear skins and saying ‘oomph, oomph’, humankind also survived near-extinction. Back then, a supervolcano erupted and cut humanity down to a slim total of 10,000. But we survived all of that.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely no indication the trend will change. With fewer and fewer people around, women will be under even greater pressure to find a job – and have even less children. We can be sure about one thing: women will never ever again voluntarily have themselves locked away in their role as child-attendee and kitchen maid.

And then there is this other nagging problem. As explained elsewhere on this blog, there is a possibility men are becoming less fertile. Just picture it: a world where women don’t want to have children, and men just can’t. Now wouldn't that be a pity?

Verneshot Phenomenon - Mass Extinctions?

2007-12-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

If you think you’ve seen it all, just picture this: your entire country, launched into space. Sounds weird, right? Still, it could happen any day, scientists say. In fact: the country-launching thing may be responsible for the death of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

Not too many people know about it. And perhaps it’s better that way. For if a new, bizarre theory has it right, the dinosaurs weren’t killed by a meteor impact after all -- but by a much scarier phenomenon, known as a ‘Verneshot’.And that’s not all. If Verneshots are for real, the dreaded phenomenon should happen again one day. Or, who knows, tomorrow.

That doomsday will begin like just any other. But then, suddenly, you’ll hear a big, rumbling noise -- that deep, roaring, earthquake kind of sound. And then, there’s a MASSIVE explosion. It will be a disaster unlike anything ever witnessed by mankind.The earth literally caves in underneath your feet. Next thing you know, you find yourself falling into this colossal, gaping hole, many kilometers deep and hundreds of kilometers wide. You, your house, yes: your entire country is sucked in. Deep down below, you might just be able to see the red hot flicker of the Earth’s restless bowels.

And if that spoils your day -- just wait. For deep down underneath you, the gaping hole starts to collapse. Starting from below, the crater squeezes tight, like some ridiculously large gullet contracting. Traveling at the speed of sound, the squeezing comes straight at you.

And then, it’s: POP! You’re blasted out of the hole, like a piece of wet soap, catapulted out of someone's hand. And you’re not the only one that is launched. In fact, your entire country pops out, along with tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of rock and soil. The debris -- and you -- fly off into the stratosphere.

Let’s face it: by now, you’re probably dead. But for arguments sake, let’s say you’re not. Next thing you know, you find yourself hovering over the Earth, like some oddball DIY astronaut, sitting on a chunk of debris. You fly and fly, and then, just when you’re beginning to appreciate the view -- oh boy, going doooooooown!

The Earth’s gravity pulls you back in again. You impact on the other side of the planet, together with your entire country. Ka-boom!

And that’s the end of it. Or not quite: the planet is a complete mess. Where your country once was, a huge lake of lava, a ‘flood basalt’, blobs out of the ground. The atmosphere is suffocated with soot and sulfur. The ozone layer is wiped away.

And on the other side of the planet, things aren’t any better. Where you and your meteor have impacted, a vast crater remains. A massive shockwave travels across the globe, setting the atmosphere on fire. And when the fires dim, the Earth’s climate is plunged into a numbing nuclear winter, because of smoke blocking the sun. Obviously, humanity never stood a chance against this double-whammy. Most likely, everything bigger than an insect dies.

But are Verneshots for real?

By now, you probably understand why the German geologists who described the disaster in 2004 named it ‘Verneshot’. Jules Verne was the writer who once dreamt up a cannon capable of shooting rockets to the moon. And a HUGE cannon, that’s exactly what the Verneshot is. Well, kind of.

But could it be true? Can we really end up on the other side of the planet? Surprise, surprise: that possibility is real. In fact, there’s tantalizing evidence that the Earth is struck by Verneshots at least four times before.

For starters, you should know that the prehistoric past of our planet shows a very weird pattern. Four times in a row, almost all life on Earth suddenly vanished. Just like that. And scientists just can’t seem to agree what did the killing. There’s evidence that four huge meteorites banged into our world. But there’s evidence that the soot from ‘supervolcanoes’ choked our world to death, too.

Take the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Obviously, around that time a huge chunk of rock smashed into what’s now Mexico -- you can still see the impact crater. But equally obvious, there was a massive volcanic eruption in India around that time, too. Now ask yourself: how big are the odds that these two events occur simultaneously? According to the Germans, the odds that volcanism and meteors coincided four times in a row are 1 to 3500.

So bring in the Verneshot. Perhaps the volcanism caused the meteor impact! The German research shows that it could be possible.Basically, it all begins when deep under the ground, gas seeps up -- a fairly common thing, in geology. But this time, the gas gets trapped underneath what’s known as a ‘craton’: a solid, impenetrable, massive slab of ancient earth crust.

Next to the craton, a HUGE supervolcano may erupt. But the craton itself is in even bigger trouble. The gas has no place to go. More and more pressure builds up. Until one day, the entire craton goes pop - much like the cork blown off of a pressurized bottle of champagne. But this time your planet is the bottle. And you, you’ll be the cork!

After the initial bang, you'll have this huge, gaping, vacuum hole in the Earth. Like all vacuum holes, the hole slams shut. From the bottom up, it implodes. A huge ball of debris is squeezed out. The debris catapults into space. And slams back into the planet elsewhere -- just like a real meteorite.

The German scientists hope to find more evidence for their theory, by closely studying the soil underneath India and Siberia -- sites where Verneshots must have gone off in the past.

Worryingly, they have found some evidence to support their case. In Siberia, India and on the ocean floor near Sierra Leone, you can see these weird, circular structures in the ground. They look a bit like, well... the barrels of three huge, ancient cannons.

On the other hand, the Verneshot theory is still new, controversial stuff. For one thing, the theory doesn’t explain why there seems to be only one meteor impact crater near Mexico. A Verneshot would throw up more than one ‘comet’.

Perhaps it’s all the better we don’t know. For there's a little problem. At this very moment, pressure is slowly building up underneath the craton of Siberia once again. Could it be just some innocent display of nature? Or are those poor Russians about to get shot in the bum in a way that hasn’t been seen on Earth since the days of the dino’s?

Events:

‘Frasnian-Fammian’ extinction, 364 million years ago. 60 Percent of all marine life dies.
(Meteor Evidence:
The ‘space element’ iridium and stressed (‘shocked’) quartz is found in the ground. The Siljan impact crater in Sweden was formed around the same time.
Supervolcano Evidence:
In the Ukraine, a major outpoor of lava forms the Pripyat-Dniepr-Donets highlands.)

‘Perm-Triassic’ extinction, 251 million years ago. 96 Percent of all species vanish.
(Meteor Evidence:
Shocked quartz and rare carbon molecules called ‘fullerenes’ are found in China and Australia. Also, in the seabed near Australia there is a hole that looks like a meteor crater (the ‘Bedout’ high)
Supervolcano Evidence:
In Siberia, a major outflow of lava forms the Siberian Traps.)

‘Triassic-Jurassic’ extinction, 200 million years ago. 20 Percent of all species die.
(Meteor Evidence:
Iridium, shocked quartz and a likely impact crater: at Manicougan, Canada.
Supervolcano Evidence:
The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, off the coast of Sierra Leone, is formed.)

‘Cretaceous-Tertiary’ extinction, 65 million years ago. 60 Percent of all species, including the dinosaurs, meet their maker.
(Meteor Evidence:
Well-defined iridium layer, shocked quartz and fullerenes, and a famous impact crater at Chicxulub, Mexico.
Supervolcano Evidence:
In India, massive volcanic activity creates the chain of mountains called the Deccan Traps.)

Human Extinction by Infertility

2007-12-07T02:42:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

It would be a bit of an anticlimax. Instead of some huge catastrophe doing us in, humanity may simply go extinct all by itself. Actually, the Big Decay may have already begun. Human fertility seems to be declining frighteningly fast. A couple of generations more -- and the human race could be history.

You would hardly notice it at first. Gradually, street life is becoming calmer than it used to be. Less people, less traffic. It’s a relief at first: no more housing problems, no more traffic jams, no more queues for the movies.

But after a while, your cheerfulness subsides. Slowly it begins to dawn on you what’s happening. You’re witnessing the demise of a species -- your species, to be precise. Humankind is about to join the Dodo, the Woolly Mammoth and the Neanderthal Man. The human race is heading for extinction.

OK, so you decide you’ll have kids, in an attempt to turn the tide. But then the grimness of the situation really lashes out at you. No matter how hard you and your partner try – no pregnancy. You turn to one of the fertility clinics that are by now very common. But the doctors can’t help you out. You’re infertile, the two of you. If you’re a man, you’re the one to blame: your sperm is of no use. You can have sex all you like, but your semen just doesn’t do the trick.

It’s a generation or two later. The world has changed completely. The fertility clinics are all deserted now – well, there’s animals living in them, and weeds growing all over them. In what used to be crowded streets, trees now grow. Wild dogs and rats stroll the deserted cities. Erosion gnaws at what used to be buildings. And outside the city, roads and farms lay barren, like a fading memory of what once was.

Sure, if you look hard enough, you’ll find some small pockets of humans that still survive. Mankind is a bewildered species by now, largely outnumbered by the birds, the rats, the dogs, the wolves perhaps. And the human species is degenerating fast: there are so little people left, they inbreed all the time, giving birth to children that are ever more mentally retarded. If they give birth to any children at all, that is.

But in the end, there’s no survival. Human is simply no longer viable. There will be a last group of humans – and then, the very last human being. Eventually, the last human gets old and dies. And that will be it. There will be no more laughter, no more voices, no more thoughts. The only thing left is a couple of ruins, scattered over the face of the planet.

Feel sad already? You should. The slow extinction outlined here is definitely one of the most depressing Apocalypses you could think of. Well, the good news is we aren’t about to witness it any time soon: with five billion people living on the planet today, overpopulation is more of a problem than extinction.

But that could change. Actually, the first signs of the Big Demise are already here to be seen. Men are becoming less fertile, several studies indicate. In only fifty years time, the number of sperm cells per milliliter of semen has halved, from 113 million cells to 66 million. Sure, that’s still a lot of sperm cells. But it could also mean that in another fifty years, men will no longer be able to make any babies at all.

It’s a big mystery why male fertility is declining. Many researchers blame the pollution: there’s all kinds of chemicals everywhere, in the air and in our food, and we just don’t know exactly what all these substances do to the human body. Others blame the human habit of wearing clothes: men have their testicles outside their body because sperm can’t stand high temperatures, and pants and underwear undo this. Clothes warm up your balls, so to speak.

A more exotic – and frightening – theory has it that evolution itself is turning against us. In nature, the biologically `fittest' individuals survive, leading to an ever more `fit' offspring. But among humans, this works different. How many kids you get doesn't depend on biology, but rather on where you live and what culture you’re in. Western city-dwellers get less kids than inhabitants of traditional societies. It doesn't matter who has the best sperm; the Not-So-Fit survive as well. So basically, the biological quality of our species may be in decline -- and the sperm problem could be a result of it.

Oh, it is probably a combination of things, the demise of our fertility. The chemicals, plus the ball-warming pants, plus the evolutionary knock-back, plus who-knows-what. Whatever the reason, we should worry. If the present trend continues, we could be history well before the next Millennium.

And it doesn’t help that the decline of our species is sped up by demography. More and more people adopt the industrial, Western lifestyle: more women working rather than having kids, and with reliable contraceptives widely available, more and more couples choosing to have children at a later age -- and less children. Eventually, this trend will lead up to the point when the number of humans will no longer grow, and actually start to shrink. The turning point is supposed to be around the year 2150.

So bring out the clones, you say. If we’re running out of humans, just make some new ones in a laboratory somewhere. Oh, come on, be real! Cloning doesn’t work as well as the media and the scientists like us to believe. What they don’t tell you in the news papers is that most clone attempts simply fail.

For example: it took two hundred attempts before CC the cat, the world’s first cloned pet, came along. And then there’s the still insurmountable problem of old age. You see, old age is locked in your DNA. So your clone will look like a baby, but its DNA will be as old as you! So by the time you die of old age, so does your clone. It’s as simple as that.

So... We're doomed, right?

Well, not necessarily. Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel: the claim of science that men are becoming infertile may be dead wrong. The findings of the sperm counting studies are still controversial. One study says we’re doomed, the next study says that’s all rubbish. It will take some time before we know for sure what’s going on – if there’s anything going on at all, that is.

But don’t relax yet. Our species has a reputation for being not particularly good at reproduction.

One out of four couples have serious problems getting pregnant. And even if you have sex at the height of female fertility, there’s only 10-20 percent chance of pregnancy. That’s probably the reason why humans are the only mammals that have sex throughout the year, instead of only during spring. Now, given these problems, you just DON’T want our species to become less fertile as well.

And then there’s this. We already mentioned the possibility that chemicals render us infertile. But yet, we come up with ever more chemicals. And it doesn’t help that the atmosphere’s cleaning up system that rids us of pollution is on the verge of breaking down (in a so-called `hydroxyl collapse’).

Finally, there’s the eerie possibility our technology makes us infertile by mistake. As we write this, the US biotechnology firm Epicyte experiments with a new breed of contraceptives: corn that is designed to render the men that eat it infertile. There’s also a real possibility lab crops like these `escape’ into nature, turning more and more crops into contraceptives. It would be some choice. Either you starve, or you go infertile.

The Eternal Universe?

2007-12-05T05:26:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

What will eternity look like? Think of a place where everything has ceased to exist, where golden parkings pop out of nowhere, Napoleon Bonaparte comes back to life and the Twin Towers resurrect themselves. Still, this incredible place is exactly where we are heading, physicists expect.

Empty your mind. We’re about to take a BIG leap into the future. Not just a lousy few billions of years, but 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years!

One ‘googol’ years, is the official word for that number. It’s the current age of the Universe, one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion times over. Squeeze the entire history of our Universe into the thickness of a dollar bill, and one googol years would give you a pile of money that reaches one hundred quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion light years high. It wouldn’t even fit in our Universe.

One googol years. That’s truly staggering. Beyond anything a human can comprehend.
First, let’s fast-forward to the not-so-awfully-far future. For the coming billions of years, scientists predict quite a ride. The Sun will explode, the Milky Way will slam into another galaxy. The Cosmos might collapse, or get torn apart -- scientists can’t seem to decide yet which is more likely. And even if the Universe doesn’t do that, we’re destined to face a weird and horrible crisis, which involves us spending our lifetime as sleeping robots.

The problem is that the Universe gets bigger and cooler. Ever since the Big Bang, it expands, much like an expanding ball of fire after an explosion. Right now, the Universe is still young. It has these cute stars and twinkling galaxies. But in the long run, that will change. Slowly but inevitably, the Universe will empty itself.

First, the galaxies will fly out of sight, beyond the horizon of what we can possibly see. Next, the stars in our own galaxy will burn out, one after the other. The only thing that will remain, is a dull graveyard of cold planets, dead suns and black holes. In about one hundred trillion years, the Milky Way will go black, astronomers expect.

And eventually, even this graveyard decays. One after the other, the dead stars and planets are eaten by black holes, or kicked out of the Milky Way by collisions. Astronomers expect that in one hundred to one thousand billion billion years, our galaxy has dissolved completely.

Time goes on. After a while (more trillions of years) something else will kick in. You’ll notice that even the very stuff nature is made of, isn’t stable. A proton, the particle you’ll find in the core of atoms, has an average lifetime of 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. Wait long enough, and it will suddenly vanish. Poof, gone. The same goes for light particles, the so-called ‘photons’. They’re expected to last a few zero’s longer, but in the end, they too will kick the bucket, one after the other. Isn’t that just bizarre? The light will go out, literally.

The last thing that survives, are the black holes. But in the end, they too will vanish. They will evaporate in a puff of radiation.

So there we are, at our unimaginable one googol years. Finally, the Universe is totally and utterly empty. You won’t see any light or spot any planet -- in fact, you won’t even find the tiniest speck of dust. The Universe has sterilized itself. All there is left, is emptiness, and darkness. Total oblivion. And worst of all: there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can build fancy machines or futuristic devices all we like -- but in the end, they’ll all get kicked out of existence, when the matter they are made of simply vanishes.
So there you have it: infinity. Booooring, we must add.

But don’t sob. There’s an upside.

As the quadrillions of years pass by, something very odd should happen. In eternity, even the rarest events get a chance to occur. Weird, bizarre phenomena that only happen once in a zillion years or so, become quite normal.

For example: the nothingness should yield a few surprises. Already, physicists know that in a vacuum, there are sometimes tiny little energy ‘blobs’. Little, random fluctuations of the so-called ‘quantum vacuum’. Out of nowhere, tiny particles pop in and out of existence. But theory predicts that on very, VERY rare occasions, the fluctuations should be a bit larger. Out of nowhere, an entire atom might appear! Or hey, the vacuum may even spit out a few of them!

Think of it like the static on TV. Wait long enough, and out of the random fuzz, a recognizable image might materialize. Wait REALLY long, and one day a complete episode of The Bold And The Beautiful should accidentally show up!

In the Universe, this should give some really surprising results. With eternity at hand, the vacuum should begin to yield all kinds of objects. Incoherent lumps of random garbage, most of the time. But on very, very rare occasions, you’ll see other objects popping into existence. The Eiffel tower. A purple camel. A golden parking garage filled with chocolate Cadillacs. Napoleon Bonaparte sitting next to Mike Tyson on top of a stack of comic books. As the googols of years pass by, it’s all there.

In the VERY, VERY, VERY long run, the vacuum will even belch up complete planets, and beautiful stars, burning and all. Theoretically the vacuum should even churn out a complete solar system one day, identical to ours, with a planet Earth inhabited by people. "In an infinite amount of time, one day, I will reappear", as physicist Katherine Freese of Michigan University once put it. "An crazy thought, but true."

One day the black nothingness should even produce a new Big Bang. Admittedly, we’ll have wait really long for it to happen. Researchers of the University of Chicago once tried to calculate it. And according to their best estimates, it should happen somewhere over the next 10^1056 years.

Finding Extraterrestrial Life?

2007-12-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

First, there's some kind of freakish UFO hovering over the planet. Then it's pow, blast, boom. And then? Then we're all dead.

Yeah, right, dead. What happened? A little while ago, some alien civilization decided Earthlings are a major pain in the ass. And now, they shot the Earth to bits with some kind of doomsday weapon out of hell. The planet incinerated, or evaporated, or was turned into a self-annihilating chunk of anti-matter -- whatever you think of. One little push on a button by a green hand, and gone we were.

But wait. First, you'll need alien life smart enough to go out in a space-ship and gun our planet to custard powder. And of course, some kind of motive would be nice. A disagreement over something, to say the very least.

So, how about the existence of alien life? Without letting fantasy take over, most serious scientists agree by now that there should be some kind of life somewhere out there. And they don't say this because they have seen to many shows of the X-Files.

First, the Universe of course is, to put it mildly, rather big. And there's the cosmological principle: no matter what chunk of universe you take, it will always be roughly the same stuff, with galaxies and stars and planets around those stars. There's plenty of evidence for this.

Astronomers have spotted quite a lot of exoplanets: planets around distant stars. And if there's planets everywhere, surely planets that are inhabited can't be so unique, you may argue.

And then there's this. Life on our planet suggests that the existence of life is no big deal. Life is way older than we always thought: some 4 billion years. This means that life popped into existence almost immediately after the Earth stopped being plowed over by comets, volcanic eruptions and cosmic radiation. So life is something that very easily emerges.

But. Yes, there's a `but'.

When scientists say `life', they usually mean: unicellular life, bacteria. A wide-spread misconception about nature is that evolution is about going from single-celled bacteria to more complex beings. It is not!

The sole thing that makes evolution tick is diversity. More evolution means more diversity among those invisible, tiny bacteria that make up more than ninety percent of all life forms on Earth. In the first place, evolution means more species of bacteria. Ducks, bumblebees, fig trees and humans are more likely a side-effect, an odd waste product of natural selection.

Even more humbling, intelligence is a very rare phenomenon among animals. Out of fifty million species on Earth, only one knows what the Internet is. And to be sure, if that big comet didn't wipe out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, thinking apes calling themselves men wouldn't even have existed! In nature, intelligence is so fucking rare.

You're not amused? Well, here's some more. Intelligence isn't even really a good tool for playing Darwin's `survival of the fittest'. In fact, the human race almost got extinct right after learning how to walk on two legs, when our species was diminished by hunger and drought to a slim total of some ten thousands!

It's very obvious intelligence has a lot of evolutionary downsides. Because of our ridiculous large brains, we are super-vulnerable to cold, heat or wounding. Because of our huge heads, we are the species that has most trouble with being born.

And there's more. Try wrestling with a lion. Try catching a rabbit, using only your bare hands. Try surviving in a forest. Just peel away all `culture', and you'll see what humanity really is: a rather clumsy, weak and ill-equipped species with a ridiculously big head.

So, to wrap things up: ET is very likely out there. But it's very unlikely ET has a light sword, a space ship or an index finger that lights up in the dark. ET is more likely a bacteria -- or at its best, a multicellular organism with no particular intelligence at all.

Hey, and besides. Just suppose there is, in spite of all the problems, intelligent life out there somewhere? Would we be at risk of being killed by them?

Surely, they'd have to be able to travel around. That's not an easy one, although science-fiction freaks carelessly say that such a civilization undoubtedly will use `worm-holes' for inter-dimensional travels. Or warp-drive, or teleportation. The cold fact, however, is that such things may well appear to be just impossible by physical law. It is so very easy to say: `Well, they're ahead of us, so they must have come up with something.'

Even then, the aliens have to find us. That too is a tough one. The Universe is so big. And our planet is only a tiny speck of dust in the endless nothingness. Okay, we send out signals into space, from our satellites, radio's and TV-sets. But our transmissions have a tiny reach in the vastness of the cosmos.

And even within reach of Earth transmissions, an alien would have to listen extremely closely to pick up our faded-away signal. Let alone the problem of which frequency to choose. Or the problem that an alien might prefer a very different technique than `radio signals'.

Okay, okay. Against all odds, our hypothetical alien has overcome all these difficulties, and has finally found us. What's up next?

Nothing much, probably. The aliens may want to study us -- a civilization that builds spaceships and has found out how worm holes work definitely is in it for science. They would study us in much the same way we study the microbes we'll undoubtedly find on Mars or Europa.

Yeah, some Independence Day-fans might grumble. But they might also be here to colonize our planet, to steal our mineral goodies!

O yeah, sure. What nonsense. Do you really think a civilization that builds intergalactic spaceships and opens worm holes doesn't know how to solve problems like shortage of minerals in some technical way? They'd have to be a race of real dumb-ass aliens, if you ask me.

Evolution of Humanity into another species

2007-12-05T01:32:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

It could take several decades, or perhaps many thousands of years. But we can be sure of one thing: sooner or later, the human race as we know it will no longer be here. Don't panic, it's just good old evolution that's doing us in. Humanity will go extinct -- but who would care?

Whatever inhabits the planet in several millions of years -- it won't be humans. The human race will have been replaced by... well, something else.

It's easy to see why. There's plenty of evidence we are still evolving. Europeans are getting taller. Northern Europeans are becoming more resistant to disease. And although it's controversial, there's some evidence we're getting smarter.

Still, we are also 'devolving' -- getting worse at certain things.

Our limbs have become feebler. Our bodies are getting stiffer, and less agile. Our senses, and especially our nose, have deteriorated big time. There's evidence our sperm is getting worse.

Our jaws and teeth have decayed over time (that's why we need constant dental care).
That's because evolution is not about improving living things -- but simply, about adapting to the circumstances. And we're adapted to walking, and thinking, and working with our hands.

The cost is that we have become lousy tree-swingers, and bad monkeys. Try eating a banana using only your feet, and you'll see what we mean.

Where will this take us in another million years? Nobody knows! It all depends on the circumstances.

Perhaps our brains will continue to grow, giving us ridiculous, enormous heads. Perhaps our planet will one day be inhabited by sentient brains sitting in a wheelchair, who knows?
But evolution could also demolish us. Say for some reason we are forced to live underground. This could, in theory, yield a humankind with no eyes! This is what happened to certain species of cave-dwelling fish.

Experts agree on one thing, though. Our kind could transform a lot quicker than you think. We're already tinkering with the evolution of our species, for example by healing the sick. And that's just the beginning. Roughly speaking, there are two trends here: technology and gene tinkering.

1. Technology

Already, we are stuffing up our bodies with all kinds of goodies: artificial limbs and organs, plastic heart valves, titanium joints, contact lenses, hearing aides -- you name it. And no doubt we will continue to replace body parts with high tech gadgets. Already, scientists are experimenting with brain implants that help or even replace part of your brain!

Futurologists expect we will one day upgrade our minds with chips that boost our brain power, or even upload our mind to a computer. Or we would replace our vulnerable organs at birth, just to be sure.

So, how's that for evolution. In a few decades, we may have got to the point where we are no longer humans -- but machines. As astronomer Seth Shostak likes to put it: "You can improve horses by putting four-cylinder engines in them. But eventually, you can do without the horse part."

2. Genes

Or we could upgrade our DNA.At this very moment, we're entering the age of genetic modification. Already, we're upgrading the DNA of certain plants and animals -- and we, humans, are next. We're about to improve our genetic code, just like you would upgrade an outdated piece of computer software.

At first, this will lead to new cures for certain diseases. We will teach our DNA to fight off hereditary conditions, and in the longer run, viral infections and cancer. But it should also be possible to actually improve our bodies. Sportsmen will instruct their DNA to make more muscles, a feat already accomplished in animals. Others will tweak their DNA in order to lengthen their lives, or to become smarter.

Ultimately, the sky is the limit. Want bigger brains? Healthier organs? Bigger penises, larger breasts? Just tell your DNA to make it so. And hey, think big! Why not grow yourself wings, enhance your vision or make your body solar powered, so you can do without food?

In principle, it's all possible. Just think of our bodies as computers, the DNA being its software. We're about to upload software from other species. Almost every trick nature has ever programmed into DNA software in other species, could be running on our bodies soon. It's Mother Nature's freeware!

So, where will it take our species? Our guess would be: to a point where humans are no longer human. Scholars expect 'Numans', 'Transhumans', 'Unihumans', 'Astrans' -- and lots of other shiny sci-fi words. It will be the end of mankind. But with some luck, it will at least be a happy end!

Assimilation of minds with the Internet

2007-12-05T01:23:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

In Star Trek, they come in a cube. A huge space ship it is, filled with millions of people. Well -- they’re not really people. They are the Borg. The people in the cube have no free will, no mind of their own. They are One. They’re plugged into the mainframe computer called ‘the Borg’. They’re cyber slaves. Poor little creatures.

But that’s science fiction, right? Not so. In fact, as we speak, the Borg is lurking just around the corner, waiting for its chance. It won’t come in a cube from outer space though, but from the very place you’re on right now: the Internet. And if it comes, resistance will, indeed, be futile.
The signs are disturbing. Let’s do a little experiment. Please, find out what ‘auparishtaka’ is.
Done that?

Ok, all of you readers have probably followed exactly the same routine. You’ve opened Google and entered ‘auparishtaka’. All of you will have found the same search results. You will have visited the same websites. Have absorbed the same information. For a very brief and fleeting moment, you were One.

Silly example, you snort.

But hold on -- that was just to warm you up a little. The real stuff is yet to come. Brace yourself: what you are about to read, could change the way you see your humble computer and the Internet forever.

One: We are being cyborged

Already, there are many experiments with simple implants being inserted into people’s brains. Most of them are there for our health: the implants bring back (some) hearing or even some eyesight, or cure you from terrible conditions like depressions or extreme phobia’s.

But some implants have a more ‘luxurious’ function. They connect to your brain in order to make you move your artificial limb, if you happen to be missing one. Or they make you control the cursor of your computer by mind control, if you’re paralyzed.

Most experts agree that that's just the beginning. Eventually, we will see more and more implants. Need to learn Greek? Just have a cyber doctor plug a tiny chip into your brain, much like a memory stick. Want better eyesight? The doc will upgrade your visual cortex a bit, Vision 2.2. And so on, and so on.

Of course, these are exciting, good things. But there’s a downside. Computer hardware isn’t going to be the only thing that’s entering your brain. Along with it, the Web enters your mind.

Two: We are being assimilated

In small, high-tech countries like Singapore and The Netherlands, the Internet is everywhere you go and everywhere you look already. Gaming, shopping, dating, e-mailing, working, reading about the end of the world -- it’s all done over the Internet.

And the Web is still on the rise. Not only is it on ever more home computers. As we speak, it is entering our TV-sets. It is conquering our laptops and our cell phones. It is sneaking into our car computers and household machinery. In fact, the Internet is about to incorporate every device we associate with ‘communication’.

It is only likely the last ‘device’ will be us. Of course, the computers implanted in our brains will be connected to the Internet. The advantages are just too big not to let this happen. We will have Internet in our ears, and Internet on our eyes -- literally. Our brains will be permanently online.

So, you think of ‘aupraishtaka’, and instantly know that it is just another word for... Ehm, yes, that. You think of your auntie in Timbuktu, and your auntie thinks back at you, setting up a telepathic chat session, brain-to-brain. You think of captain Jean-Luc Picard, and his photograph will instantly pop up in your mind's eye. It is sent straight into your visual cortex, where it is translated into ‘image’ by your brain. You can hear Jean-Luc's voice saying ‘Make it so’, if you like, or think up information about the actor playing Jean-Luc, and what movies he’s in. Convenient!

That's pretty difficult to imagine, don't you think? Well -- it gets a bit weirder. With your brain online, ‘you’ will no longer be exclusively ‘yours’. You will, in a way, become a local cache for the Internet. Your brain will become the Internet’s work memory. And that’s where things turn, well... pretty nasty.

Three: We are being Borged

So, here you are. You’ve got a computer plugged into your brain. Your mind is online all of the time. You’re one smart cyborg, that’s what you are!
But what is online, is vulnerable. Someone could actually hack your head. Some evil genius could virus your mind, or spyware your thoughts. We can agree on one thing: that would be, well, more than a bit confusing.

Probably the biggest danger are viruses that build themselves. Already, there are many experiments with software that becomes smarter -- software that evolves, by constantly improving itself. With every inhabitant of the planet online, such a virus will have at its disposal plenty of calculating power.

It is speculative, but perhaps you could call a virus like this ‘alive’. Perhaps you could say it has a will of its own. You might even call it The Borg.

So, just picture it: one moment, you’re doing fine -- and then, suddenly, you loose control. In the mild case, you’ll start having weird, uncontrollable hallucinations. You’ll hear some internal voice telling you that resistance is futile, or you will experience some reality that isn’t there. You will go insane. In the more extreme case, you’ll suddenly find your body is no longer under your control. Somebody -- or something -- is controlling you, like a puppet. You will have become a prisoner, locked up in your own body.

The Borg might order you to do all kinds of things. For starters: to eliminate everyone who isn’t assimilated yet. Against your will, the Borg will force you to hunt down everybody who hasn’t got an internal brain computer. You will be forced to operate on them and turn them into cyborgs, too. So there you are: suddenly, you find yourself operating on somebody’s brain -- without neither your nor the patient’s consent.

Perhaps the Borg will even order you to build a cube-shaped space ship and go out, in search of more life-forms to assimilate. To the Borg, more slaves means: more calculating power.

So: to Borg or not to Borg?

Perhaps you shrug your shoulders. Really, how bad can it be? People being assimilated by the Internet... C’mon, that’s just too much.

Then again -- maybe it isn’t. Remember the Internet as a mass medium is only some 10, 15 years old. That’s less than 0,001 percent of the time our species is around on this planet! Already, computers and the Internet have totally re-shaped our world. And we can be sure of one thing: it won't stop there.

Of course, the Internet, as it is now, has little to do with Borgs and cube-shaped space ships. It is as dead as a doornail. It doesn't 'want' anything. The Web is still just a bunch of bits and bytes, sitting passively on hard disks around the world.

But the self-learning software we mentioned before could change all that. Say, we’ll make a self-learning piece of software that has one assignment: "Find a cure for cancer". Actually, software like this already exists: it is software that automatically checks certain molecules to see if their shape is suitable for curing cancer.

Ok, now suppose this software gets smarter. It could find new, creative ways to do its task. Like: "Hey, let’s enslave all these silly little humans. Let’s force them to build a giant cube and go out in space to look for a cure for cancer!" Aw, that would be so dumb...

Still, there’s one small straw of hope to cling on to. Nobody can foresee the future. The Borg Problem seems realistic. But so do other scenarios. Perhaps we will be able to erect some kind of advanced firewall between our computers and the thing we call our mind. Or perhaps we will be able to see the Borg coming, and manage to stop it in time.

And if we don’t... Well, there’s always this. Perhaps going out in a cube and monotonely saying "resistance is futile" to everyone we meet will turn out a funny thing to do after all. We will see all the corners of the Galaxy, scare the shit out of everybody we encounter, know what ‘aupraishtaka’ means and find a cure for cancer.Really, being the Borg isn't all bad.

Is Suicide the logical end to Intelligent Evolution?

2007-12-05T01:14:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Now here’s something different: what if we all killed ourselves in the end? We agree: after all we’ve been through, it would be a ridiculous way to go. But suicide could also be the inevitable, perfectly logical outcome of evolution...

Mass suicide. Oh, come on! What on Earth would we do that for?

Well: because somewhere in the distant future, we would reach the conclusion that it’s the best thing to do. The only thing that makes sense. We would decide to kill ourselves – and do it. We wouldn’t even leave a suicide note. After all, who will be there to read it?

Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. First, a lot of dramatic changes will take place. Right now, we’re not too keen on dying. In fact, we hate it!

Luckily, that will change over time. Slowly, we will defy death. We will beat disease after disease, and live longer and longer. We will fool the Grim Reaper with anti-ageing chemicals and fantastic, new cures.

And in the end, we will beat Mr. Death. We will need technology to do it. In the long run, we will replace our entire bodies by technology. Already, we replace our teeth and the occasional limb that has gone missing with artificial stuff. In the near future, science expects to invent replacements for our organs. A little later, and we will be able to replace our brain by computer technology. Really! Already, some futures researchers expect that by the year 2050, we will be able to upload our mind into a computer! We will become machines – and be immortal.

Trust us: it’s gonna be fun. When our minds have become pieces of software, we will be able to copy ourselves! We will be able to upload ourselves into… well, whatever we like. We will go out in space, in the shape of a conscious space ship. Or in the form of a purple cloud of thinking smoke particles. No, seriously! Respected scientists like Freeman Dyson and Carl Sagan already wrote about it in the 1970s.

And we will interact with each other, big time. With our biological bodies gone, we will no longer need MSN, Hyves or Myspace to get in touch with each other. Rather, our minds will start to… well, blend, actually. We will become one consciousness. Some researchers have dubbed this The Singularity, as we detail elsewhere on this site.

Ok, that sounds very vague – but hey, it’s no reason to kill ourselves! Well: there is this one crucial detail. Once we’re immortal, we’ll be booooooored!

To us simple, mortal humans this may be a bit hard to grasp. But once we’ve reached Perfection and Singularity and Oneness and all that blah blah, we will have no goal in life. Yes, we will go out and discover the Universe. But after a while, we will have seen it all. With our mortal bodies gone, we will have all the time of the Universe. We will know every corner of the Universe and say: so what?

So there you have it. You’ve become a God-like purple space cloud, but only to find that it is soooooo depressing.

And in fact, it’s even worse than that. Once we will become machines, our processing speed will increase hugely. Simply put, we will think bloody fast. Within a split second, we will realise that our existence, literally, has become useless. A split second later, we will realise it’s best if we didn’t exist.

To a Purple God Cloud it will be as logical as getting off a train that has reached its final destination. And the final destination is what we will have reached: the endpoint of evolution.

Even harder to comprehend, the God Cloud won’t have any special feelings about it. When we think of suicide, we immediately think of terrible things like high buildings, speeding trains and shotguns. But to a Purple Cloud, it’s a different matter. Conscious clouds don’t feel pain have no reason to feel fear, least of all of death.

If you’re immortal, dying might seem like a fun thing to do. Just like to us it is a challenge not to die.

So, there we go. After a long period of contemplation – say, a whole millisecond – we will realise we have become useless. Right there on the spot, we will kill ourselves.

And hey, you’re doing it again! You picture a weeping purple cloud throwing itself in front of a speeding train. But it won’t be like that. Rather, we will terminate ourselves in a way yet beyond our imagination. We will step out of the Universe, fold ourselves up, switch ourselves off – something like that. In a split second after we’ve reached immortality and Oneness and all that, we will be gone. Click. Exit.

So – is that it? Is suicide the only inevitable outcome of evolution? Well, actually: there is another way out. But it is so strange and so disturbing, that it will blow your mind. Therefore we really urge you: if you’re mentally unstable or have a psychiatric history, please don’t read any further. It’s at your own risk.

For what else is there to do if you’re a Super Human that is Super Bored? What do you do when you’re bored? Indeed: you distract yourself. You play a video game, or watch TV.

Exactly this is what a superhuman intelligence may do. But of course, it will do so in a superhuman way: it will create a new Universe, break down its intelligence, and seed it with the spores of its Presence. Basically, such a ‘game’ will be a Universe that is destined to bring forth life and intelligence.

But wait a minute… Isn’t that exactly the kind of Universe we’re living in?

As we outline elsewhere on this site, it is. Scientists have noticed for long that our Universe has unmistakable clues that it is artificial. Everything around us, everything you do or see or feel or experience, may be fake! We may be part of a kind of Sims Game, an illusion, set up by some kind of Superhuman intelligence long before the Universe began…

Well, at least it would be a weird choice if we reach Superhumanity again. We’ll ask ourselves: “Ok, what’s it gonna be? Another game of Universe? Or should we go to bed now and kill ourselves?”

Non-existant Reality?

2007-12-05T01:10:00.000-08:00

Source:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Welcome to the outskirts of reality. Welcome to the place where theoretical physics and philosophy meet, and where religion and science loose their meaning. Better fasten your mental seatbelts. What we’re about to tell you is just too weird. Too mind-boggling. And quite disturbing, really.

Here we go: the place we call reality may not be real at all. It may look real, and feel real, and smell real. But if you know where to look, and you look real close, you can see the cracks. Just like a Hollywood actor that suddenly realizes he's not surrounded by real buildings -- but by props made of cardboard paper.If that sounds like lame science fiction; I agree. Indeed, we’ve all seen The Matrix. But could such a thing be conceivable? Could it be true? Are we really here? Or are we, as one reader of Exit Mundi suggested, only a computer simulation, run by an alien race?

Perhaps the simulation is getting boring, and the guy running the program is about to switch it off. We’d see some kind of huge ‘game over’-sign, and that would be it. One moment, we’re here. And the next – we aren’t. If you’re easily disturbed, or prone to paranoia, better stop reading now. You may not like the answers to questions like these. What you are about to read may change the way you see things -- forever.

Why is the Universe Fine-Tuned?

First, there’s a very, VERY peculiar thing about the place we live in – something so weird and profound it sends shivers down your spine. For in fact, the Universe seems to be ‘fine-tuned’ to make life possible!

It has to do with the stuff most people find boring in school: the laws of physics. Ultimately, all of these laws are founded upon the ‘physical constants’. Such as the force of gravity, the ‘strong force’ that glues atomic nuclei together and the electromagnetic force, the driving hand behind stuff like lightning and computers. But why do these fundamental ‘presets’ have the values they have? Why aren’t they a little bigger, or smaller?

The British cosmologist Fred Hoyle was the first to realise this is no coincidence. A very peculiar thing about the fundamental constants is that they appear to have exactly the right values. If they were slightly smaller or bigger, atoms, stars, planets and people simply wouldn’t exist!

Take the strong force inside atomic nuclei. If the force were just slightly stronger, it would boost up the burning of stars so much, that they would explode only seconds after they were formed. We wouldn’t have a sun – or even a planet. If on the other hand the force were a tad weaker, it would be too weak to hold together elements like the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium. Stars wouldn’t light up. And we wouldn’t be here either.Astonishingly, the same goes for all other constants.

As the famous British astronomer Martin Rees put it: “Wherever we look, we see examples of fine-tuning. Most of the physical constants and the initial conditions of the Universe examined so far appear to be fine-tuned to some extent.”That leaves us with a gnawing, unsettling question: Why? Why are all physical contants exactly the way they are? Every cosmologist agrees that this can hardly be a coincidence. So what, or who, set the rules?

Matter: Chunks Of Music?

Next, you should know the stuff our Universe is made of isn’t very real at all. Sure, you can feel the chair underneath you, and see the monitor in front of you. But what we feel and touch and see in everyday life is actually a manifestation of some deeper, completely different kind of underlying reality.

One way to explore what matter is, is to take it apart. First, you’ll find tiny chunks of matter that are called molecules. Then, if you take the molecules apart, you’ll find the atoms the molecules are made of. And then, if you take apart the atoms, you’ll see it’s made of a nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of electrons.

And what if you take apart that nucleus? You’ll be in for a big surprise. For inside an atom’s nucleus, reality as we know it actually ceases to exist.An atom’s nucleus is made of tiny entities we call ‘particles’. But that’s just for lack of a better word. When you say ‘particles’, you think of little balls. But in quantum physics, there’s no such thing as solid `balls’ you can touch or see.In fact, ‘particles’ like quarks, electrons and photons are so incredibly and utterly different from everything we know of, our language lacks the words to describe them.

Particles can be in two places at the same time, and behave both like a wave and a tiny chunk of matter, depending on what you do with them. Particles can pop in and out of existence from nowhere. And ‘grabbing’ them is impossible: it is simply not possible to both know where a particle is and how fast it moves about.
But still, a particle has to be something, right?

That’s why more and more physicists turn to `string theory’. In string theory, matter is ultimately made of extremely small elastic circles, called strings. These strings vibrate. But not like anything we know: the strings vibrate in at least ten dimensions! Our particles are the vibrations of the strings. They are the music the strings make.

The Universe: Bubbles Of What?

Okay, hold that thought: matter is ultimately the manifestation of something else.Gladly, there are also things that are normal. Take the Universe. Again, it is something we think we know. The Universe is that big black thing with all the lights in it over your head. Perhaps you’ve even heard it’s expanding: first, there was a kind of blast (called the ‘Big Bang’), and from that moment on, the Universe grew bigger and bigger.

But hold it right there. Once more, the real story is far stranger than that. For starters, the Universe has no ‘outside’. To ask what is ‘outside’ the Universe is a meaningless question – it would be like asking what continent lies ‘outside’ our planet. ‘Outside’ the Universe there are no dimensions, and there is no time. The Universe is best seen as an expanding bubble of dimensions in a sea of nothingness – although ‘nothing’ isn’t really a word you can use to describe what is ‘outside’ the Universe.

It is extremely difficult to fully comprehend what that means. According to one theory, there are many dimensional bubbles like the one we live in. Our Universe could be the result of two of such bubbles – or ‘planes’ – colliding. And wait, now you’re doing it again: you’re picturing a place with bubbles floating around. But there’s no such thing as a ‘place’. Instead, the other Universes should be wrapped up within our own reality, remember?

An even more bizarre theory has it the place we call the Universe is actually best compared with a hologram. Our Universe could be some kind of optical illusion, the result of several dimensions resonating.And it goes even further. For in fact, it could actually be possible to create a Universe! Basically, the only thing you’d have to do is squeeze a huge amount of energy together into a very dense, small spot. This would lead to a Big Bang, the theories predict. We wouldn’t see it happening: the Big Bang would create a new dimensional bubble, far beyond reach of our own bubble.

OK, let’s pause for a second. Just think about it. Is it possible that our reality is actually made by some other civilisation, in some other Universe? It would explain why the fundamental constants are fine-tuned…And You? How Real Is Your Mind?

So, to wrap things up: we live in a place that’s not really a ‘place’, we’re made of stuff that’s not really ‘stuff’ and what we see is only a small part of what’s really there. Matter, time, dimensions, the Universe – it’s all lucid, unreal. And to make things even more bizarre, for some reason, our Universe is exactly preset to make our existence possible. Pretty confusing, don't you think?

Gladly, you can cling to this one security: that you are here. No matter how weird the stuff around you is, you are definitely for real. No need to explain: you just know you are.
But do you really?

Let’s do an experiment. Speak out your name over and over and over and over again. After a while, you’ll notice something weird. Your name will begin to sound strange. It’s no longer something that is you – your name is just a word, a random sequence of syllables and sounds that other people utter when they want to catch your attention. If your parents had given you another name, you would listen to another sequence of sounds.

The same happens when you look in the mirror. Stare at your own face long enough, and you’ll suddenly realize it’s just another face. The face in the mirror is, of course, yours. But after a while, it won’t feel like that anymore. The face you see could be anybody's.

Most neuroscientists agree the same applies for your consciousness. The thing you call your ‘self’ is most likely an illusion, created by your brain. Your brain gives you vision, sound, speech, feelings, and thoughts. When you add all these things up, you’ll have some overall feeling of awareness you call your consciousness. But still, your brain is the thing running it. Your feeling of ‘self’ is best compared to a software program running. It looks very real – but it isn’t.

Of course, most people believe there is something like a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’ living inside of you. But when it comes down to facts, there just isn’t any evidence for that. Every thought you have, every move you make, every emotion you feel - it’s just brain, brain, brain.

There are actually experiments that prove it. When you disturb your brain in a certain way, your feeling of ‘self’ can get detached from your brain. Suddenly, it will feel as if ‘you’ are not inside your body anymore. You experience what is known as an ‘out of body experience’, or a ‘near death experience’.But you don’t have to be nearly dead to feel it. The sensation can easily be created in a laboratory, by placing a helmet with rotating magnetic fields on your head. The magnetic field acts like a ‘jam signal’ on your brain. Suddenly, you'll feel like you're floating outside your body. But you aren’t. It’s just your brain going confused.And you don't really need a helmet to do the trick. Visiting a place where the movement of the Earth's crust generates magnetic fields can give you the experience. Being in a situation where your brain doesn't get enough oxygen sometimes does it. Certain brain operations bring out the experience. Meditation and intensive prayer can generate it.

In fact, exactly this is why some people see ghosts, or Maria, or feel like they are visited by aliens. It is an incredible weird experience to be ‘outside of your brain’. Your brain will try to make sense of it. Immediately, the rational part of your brain will come up with an ‘explanation’ for the experience. You will sense a ‘presence’ near you. If you’re religious, you might see Maria, or Jesus. If you believe in UFOs, your brain might tell you you’re visited by aliens. If you believe in ghosts, you’ll feel the presence of a ghost of a dead person. But in reality, it’s your own feeling of self you’re experiencing.

So... Are We A Game Of Sims?

So there you are. You’re just a walking piece of matter that’s pretending to be someone. But in reality, things like matter, or self, or the Universe, or time, or dimensions are all illusions. Everything we see and everything we feel are, in fact, the manifestations of some underlying reality.

That leaves you with an unsettling question: what exactly is that reality?

The truth is: we don’t know. Could be almost anything, really. A dream, even. Or a simulation. Or a kind of computer game, an advanced kind of Civilization or Sims. There’s no way of knowing if there’s someone or something pushing the buttons. There’s no way of knowing if there isn’t, either.

And then, there’s this other thing most theorists agree on: our reality could suddenly end. Our universe could fold up. The dimensions we live in could be wrapped up. The very fabric of our physical world could be disrupted by some unprecedented, weird physical event. From one second to the other, our reality would no longer be there. Sounds like fun, right?

But then again, why bother? For that’s the deeper consequence of these things. If there is no such thing as a place we call Earth, we needn’t really worry about its end. Would the characters of a Sims-game feel sad or disappointed when you turned off the computer? Or would the people you dream of at night mind if you wake up? You guessed it: they probably wouldn't. What isn’t really there, doesn’t really end.

That being said, there’s only one small problem. You see: you have to be a good philosopher to really feel it that way!

Tomorrow's High-Tech Clothing

2007-12-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

Fashion always keeps at least one eye on the future. Now scientists are lending a hand, developing tomorrow's super-powered clothing such as garments that can recharge your MP3 player and exoskeletons that enhance strength.

For instance, electronics could get recharged in the future simply by plugging them into your outerwear, because Australian researchers are designing clothing that can harvest energy from a person. The garments would incorporate devices to convert vibration energy from a person's movements into electricity. Advanced conductive fabrics would carry this energy to flexible batteries.

"It will look like an ordinary garment but have extraordinary capabilities," said Adam Best, principal research scientist with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s energy technology division. CSIRO scientists announced US$4 million in funds for such research Oct. 17.

"This kind of technology has important applications for soldiers in the field and could mean they no longer need to carry heavy batteries," Best added. "Essentially, they’d be wearing the battery, not carrying it."

Besides helping soldiers, these garments could also have civilian applications, such as powering radios, mobile phones, MP3 players or medical devices such as vital-sign monitoring systems. Solar-powered handbags could accomplish the same thing.

Underwear and sports uniforms could go weeks without washing thanks to self-cleaning fabrics developed by scientists working for the U.S. Air Force. The new technology attaches particles just nanometer or billionths of a meter wide to fibers using microwaves. These nanoparticles repel water, oil and bacteria.

Advanced materials could also help serve as armor. For instance, future yarns made with carbon nanofibers could yield bulletproof uniforms stronger than Kevlar, and complex compounds could lead to soft helmets that turn hard in a crash.

Not all the potential fabrics of tomorrow are necessarily high-tech. For instance, chicken feathers, rice straw and other castoffs of the farming industry could get transformed into fabrics resembling wool, linen or cotton, helping reduce the use of petroleum-based synthetic fabrics such as polyester.

Scientific advances are also creating wool that doesn't itch or shrink. Researchers at the USDA developed a "bio-polishing" technique that bleaches and partially digests wool, smoothing out the fibers.

And robotic exoskeletons could help soldiers shoulder heavy packs and help people walk. But not all electronic garments have such serious aims—some might serve as video gaming consoles in a perfect blend of high technology and haute couture.

Cybernetic Revolt

2007-11-24T04:54:00.000-08:00

Cybernetic revolt, more commonly known as "the computers take over", is a science fiction scenario in which AIs (often a single supercomputer or a computer network) decide that humans are a threat (to either themselves or to the machines) and try to destroy or enslave them, potentially leading to Machine Rule. In this genre, humans often prevail using "human" qualities, for example using emotions, illogic, inefficiency, duplicity, or exploiting the postulated rigid ruled based thinking and lack of innovation of the computer's black/white mind.

While so far a fictional scenario, major academics and researchers have called for humanity to confront the possible ramifications of AI before they could occur.

The fear of humanity being made obsolete by technology taps into some of modern human's deepest fears. This can be shown to have been the case even before the computer became prominent, such as Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times and Fritz Lang's Metropolis shows.

However, even as he was slowly being displaced from most physical tasks, man has always prided himself on his brain, taking the mechanistic 'thoughts' of early computers as proof that he would not be overtaken by his 'Frankenstein' creations.

While artificial intelligence is still a remote concept at this time, successes in simulating parts of intelligence -- as for example in the victories of the Deep Blue chess computer -- have shaken mankind's certainty about its permanent place at the top of sentience.

Computing power

As Moore's law has shown, computer power has (seemingly) limitless growth potential. While there are physical constraints to the speed at which modern microprocessors can function, scientists are already developing means to eventually supersede these limits, such as quantum computers.

As futurist and computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil has noted, "There are physical limits to computation, but they're not very limiting." If this process of growth continues, and existing problems in creating artificial intelligence are overcome, sentient machines are likely to immediately hold an enormous advantage in at least some forms of mental capability, including the capacity of perfect recall, a vastly superior knowledge base, and the ability to multitask in ways not possible to biological entities. This may give them the opportunity to -- either as a single being or as a new species -- become much more powerful than humans, and to displace them.

Necessity of conflict

For a cybernetic revolt to occur, it has to be postulated that two intelligent species cannot coexist peacefully in a single society - especially if one is of much more advanced intelligence and power.

While a cybernetic revolt (where the machine is the more advanced species) is thus a possible outcome of machines gaining sentience, neither can it be disproven that a peaceful outcome is possible.

The fear of a cybernetic revolt is often based on interpretations of humanity's history, which is rife with incidents of enslavement and genocide. However, there are some examples of less powerful or advanced societies or groups existing in parallel to advanced or powerful ones, such as the relationship between the Amish and English societies.

Such fears stem from a belief that competitiveness and aggression are necessary in any intelligent being's goal system. Such human competitiveness stems from the evolutionary background to our intelligence, where the survival and reproduction of genes in the face of human and non-human competitors was the central goal.

In fact, an arbitrary intelligence could have arbitrary goals: there is no particular reason that an artificially-intelligent machine (not sharing humanity's evolutionary context) would be hostile -- or friendly -- unless its creator programs it to be such (and indeed military systems would be designed to be hostile, at least under certain circumstances).

Some scientists dispute the likelihood of cybernetic revolts as depicted in science fiction such as The Matrix, claiming that it is more likely that any artificial intelligences powerful enough to threaten humanity would probably be programmed not to attack it. This would not, however, protect against the possibility of a revolt initiated by terrorists, or by accident.

Artificial General Intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky has stated on this note that, probabilistically, humanity is less likely to be threatened by deliberately aggressive AIs than by AIs which were programmed such that their goals are unintentionally incompatible with human survival or well-being.

Another factor which may negate the likelihood of a cybernetic revolt is the vast difference between humans and AIs in terms of the resources necessary for survival. Humans require a "wet," organic, temperate, oxygen-laden environment while an AI might thrive essentially anywhere because their construction and energy needs would most likely be largely non-organic.

With little or no competition for resources, conflict would perhaps be less likely no matter what sort of motivational architecture an artificial intelligence was given, especially provided with the superabundance of non-organic material resources in, for instance, the asteroid belt. This, however, does not negate the possibility of an disinterested or unsympathetic AI artificially decomposing all life on earth into mineral components for consumption or other purposes.

Technological singularity

Some groups, called Singularitarians, who advocate what might be defined as a peaceful (non-violent, non-invasive, non-coercive) cybernetic revolt known as a 'technological singularity', argue that it is in humanity's best interests to bring about such an event, as long as it can be ensured that the event would be beneficial. They postulate that a society run by intelligent machines (or cyborgs) could potentially be vastly more efficient than a society run by human beings.

A society led by friendly, altruistic sentiences of this type would therefore be to humanity's great benefit. To this end, there has been much recent work in what has become known as Friendliness Theory, which holds that, as advocate and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky states, "... you ought to be able to reach into 'mind-design-space' (i.e. the hypothetical realm which contains all possible intelligent minds) and pull out a mind (design an intelligent machine) such that afterwards, you're glad you made it real."

Alien Life Can Survive Trip to Earth, Space Test Shows

2007-11-15T04:36:00.000-08:00

We could have alien origins, say scientists who sent fossilized microscopic life-forms into space and back inside an artificial meteorite.

The researchers attached the baseball-size rock to the outside of the European Space Agency's Foton M3 spacecraft to test whether biological material could survive the round-trip journey.

Sculpted from stone from the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, the rock contained fossilized microbes and the molecular signatures of microbes.

The unmanned spacecraft was launched by rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying 43 experiments. The craft landed in Kazakhstan on September 26 after orbiting the planet for 12 days.

"In the bit of rock we got back, some biological compounds have survived," said project leader John Parnell from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Preliminary findings suggest that it's possible simple organisms could arrive via meteorites, he said.

The research also suggests that living microbes would likely have survived in a slightly bigger rock, he added.

"This study of organic material is completely new," he said.

Previous artificial meteorite experiments have examined only the degree to which rocks melt upon entering the atmosphere.

The new experiment is part of European Space Agency's STONE program, which tests effects of reentry on artificial meteorites.

A rock measuring 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) across was fitted to the exterior of Foton M3.

"It was shielded when it went up into space but exposed when it came back," Parnell said.

The rock had similar properties to a type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite. Such meteorites contain water and carbon compounds, both essential to life.

"We wanted to see if a rock that was rich in carbon and water would suffer a lot of mass loss," Parnell said. "That was certainly the case. About three-quarters of the mass of our sample disappeared."

Living microbes probably wouldn't have survived in a meteorite this size because it reached temperatures of about 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), the project leader said.

But "if our rock was bigger, say 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) across, then we can be quite confident that [the] temperature would not penetrate to the middle, so that if anything had been living there, it would have survived."

A much larger meteorite, however, would completely melt and vaporize on impact, according to Parnell.

"There's a sort of window of opportunity in terms of size, between being too small and too big," he added.

Microbes are known to live deep inside rocks, and are found several kilometers down in Earth's crust, Parnell noted.

The theory that says interplanetary organisms seeded life on different planets, such as Earth, is known as panspermia.

If panspermia explains the origins of life on Earth, astrobiologists believe that Mars is the most likely source.

For instance, studies suggest about 5 percent of meteorites from Mars eventually end up hitting Earth.

"That journey can take anything up to 15 million years, but there are a few that will make it very quickly," Parnell said.

"A very few will make it in a year or so. Those are the ones which could conceivably bring something interesting with them."

"The surface of Mars is quite inhospitable, due to dryness and low temperature, but one could conceive of subsurface life still being on Mars," he added.

In the experiment, microbes were also dried onto the undersides of several artificial meteorites.

"This biological material didn't survive, but it may have been preserved, or its signatures may have been preserved," said STONE scientist Charles Cockell of the Open University in the United Kingdom.

The rocks are still being analyzed, Cockell added.

"We know that life can make it from continent to continent, but what about from planet to planet?" he said.

"Of course, at the moment we don't know of life on another planet, but this experiment is an intriguing test of an interplanetary version of an old ecological question."

David Morrison is a senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Moffett Field, California.

Parnell's project lends credibility to the idea that meteors from outer space can give rides to hitchhiking microbes, he told National Geographic News by email.

Whether exchange of life has ever occurred following the meteorites' impact is a more complex question, but "we should be open to the possibility that there is microbial life on Mars that shares a common ancestor with Earth life," he said.

"It may not be likely, but we cannot exclude the possibility that we are, in effect, all Martians."

The Rules of Living

2007-11-15T04:17:00.000-08:00

These are the rules of living which I have set.

The Rules of Living:

Appreciating who you are and the beauty of your existence

Pleasuring yourself without damaging your mind and body

Doing the things you like without endangering the lives of others

Being compassionate towards other living beings

Being happy, calm and free from evil desires

Putting community before self unless the latter is endangered by doing so

Being tolerant of others' imperfections

Looking for ways to love rather than hate

Appreciate your life while you can, but don't get too attached to it, because it will not last forever...

Plasma Life-Forms

2007-11-12T04:34:00.000-08:00

Life-Like Qualities of Plasma:

Bohm, a leading expert in twentieth century plasma physics, observed in amazement that once electrons were in plasma, they stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were a part of a larger and interconnected whole. Although the individual movements of each electron appeared to be random, vast numbers of electrons were able to produce collective effects that were surprisingly well organized and appeared to behave like a life form.

The plasma constantly regenerated itself and enclosed impurities in a wall in the same way that a biological organism, like the unicellular amoeba, might encase a foreign substance in a cyst. So amazed was Bohm by these life-like qualities that he later remarked that he frequently had the impression that the electron sea was "alive" and that plasma possessed some of the traits of living things.

The debate on the existence of plasma-based life forms has been going on for more than 20 years ever since some models showed that plasma can mimic the functions of a primitive cell.

Plasma cosmologist, Donald Scott, notes that "...a [plasma] double layer can act much like a membrane that divides a biological cell". A model of plasma double layers (a structure commonly found in complex plasmas) has been used to investigate ion transport across biological cell membranes by researchers.

Researchers noted that "Concepts like charge neutrality, Debye length, and double layer [used in plasma physics] are very useful to explain the electrical properties of a cellular membrane". Plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén also noted the association of double layers with cellular structure, as had Irving Langmuir before him, who coined the term "plasma" after its resemblance to living blood cells.David Brin's Sundiver also speculated on plasma life forms.

This science fiction proposed a form of life existing within the plasma atmosphere of a star using complex self-sustaining magnetic fields. Similar types of plasmoid life have been proposed to exist in other places, such as planetary ionospheres or interstellar space. Gregory Benford had a form of plasma-based life exist in the accretion disk of a primordial black hole in his novel Eater.

Plasma Life Forms in Space

An international scientific team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures which can interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic life. Using a computer model of molecular dynamics, V N Tsytovich and his colleagues of the Russian Academy of Science showed that particles in plasma can undergo self-organization as electric charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized in their paper entitled From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures towards Inorganic Living Matter, published in the New Journal of Physics in August 2007.

Past studies, subject to Earth's gravity, have shown that if enough particles are injected into a low-temperature plasma, they will spontaneously organize into crystal-like structures or "plasma crystals". Tsytovich's computer simulations suggest that in the gravity-free environment of space, the plasma particles will bead together to form string-like filaments which will then twist into helical strands resembling DNA that are electrically charged and are attracted to each other. The helical structures undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers.

They can, for instance, divide to form copies of the original structure; which then interact to induce changes in their neighbors that evolve into other new structures. The less stable structures break down over time leaving behind only the structures that are most adapted to the environment.

"These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter", says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve". He adds that the ionized conditions needed to form these helical structures are common in outer space. If that is so, then it will mean that plasma life forms are the most common life form in the universe, given that plasma makes up more than 99% of our universe which is almost everywhere ionized.

This is in stark contrast to carbon-based life forms, which according to the Rare Earth hypothesis proposed by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, would be rare in the universe due to a number of factors – including the need for an acceptable range of temperatures to survive.

Plasma, on the other hand, is associated with high temperatures. Plasma life forms would be much more adapted to environments which would be considered hostile to carbon-based life forms. It is possible that plasma life forms were already present in the gas and materials that formed the Earth 4.6 billion years ago. Carbon-based biomolecular life forms only appeared 1 billion years later. Tsytovich and other scientists (including Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu, discussed below) have proposed that plasma life forms, in fact, spurred development of organic carbon-based life on Earth.

In this connection, Tsytovich pointed out that plasma life forms can develop under more down to Earth conditions such as at the point of a lightning strike. The researchers hint that perhaps a plasma form of life emerged on the primordial Earth which had a highly ionized atmosphere, which then acted as the template for the more familiar organic molecules we know today. A plasma bubble could form at the end of a lightning strike and act as a mould for chemicals to conform with to form a primitive biological cell.

Plasma Life Forms in the Laboratory

This is not the first time in recent years that plasma life forms have been studied. In 2003 physicists; Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu of Cuza University, Romania, described in their research paper Minimal Cell System created in Laboratory by Self-Organization (published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, volume 18, page 335), how they created plasma spheres in the laboratory that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. They are convinced that these plasma spheres offer a radically new explanation of how life began and proposed that they were precursors to biological evolution.

The researchers studied environmental conditions similar to those that existed on the Earth before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionized gases to form in the atmosphere. They inserted two electrodes into a chamber containing a low-temperature polarized plasma of argon - a gas in which some of the atoms have been split into negatively-charged electrons and positively-charged ions. They applied a high voltage to the electrodes, producing an arc of energy that bolted across the gap between them, like a miniature lightning strike. Sanduloviciu says this electric spark caused a high concentration of ions and electrons to accumulate at the positively charged electrode, which spontaneously formed spheres.

Each sphere had a boundary made up of two layers - an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions. Trapped inside the boundary was an inner nucleus of gas atoms - which was surrounded by a luminous sheet. An electric field was present between the boundary and nucleus, within which electrons are accelerated. The evolved sphere appears as a stable, self-confined, layered, luminous and nearly spherical body - much like the "orbs" described in the paranormal literature and discussed below. The amount of energy in the initial spark governed their size and lifespan. Sanduloviciu grew spheres from a few micrometers up to three centimeters in diameter.

Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu describe a rhythmic "inhalation" of the nucleus which mimics the breathing process of living systems and results in pulsations. The spheres could replicate by splitting into two. Under the right conditions they grew bigger, taking up neutral argon atoms and splitting them into ions and electrons to replenish their boundary layers.

Finally, they could communicate information by emitting electromagnetic energy, making the atoms within other spheres vibrate at a particular frequency. "This is no different from the vibrating diaphragm in a telephone which enables information to be communicated from one point to another," says David Cohen, reporting in the journal New Scientist. This would give these plasma spheres an ability which would be described as telepathic if we did not know how electromagnetic waves worked.

Sanduloviciu insists that although the spheres require high temperature to form, they can survive at lower temperatures. "That would be the sort of environment in which normal biochemical interactions occur."

According to Sanduloviciu, these plasma spheres were the first cells on Earth, arising within electric storms, and he believes that the emergence of such spheres is a prerequisite for the evolution of biological cells. He says that the cell-like spheres could be at the origin of other forms of life we have not yet considered.

"There could be life out there, but not as we know it" he says. Indeed, according to plasma metaphysics, the microscopic orbs (described in the paranormal literature) and the macroscopic subtle bodies (described in the metaphysical literature) are plasma-based life forms.

Plasma Orbs in Paranormal Literature

In 2004 (as reported in the Physical News Update by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein) an experiment was conducted where particles in a plasma crystal arranged themselves into neat concentric shells (or rings - from a two-dimensional perspective), to a total ball diameter of several millimeters. These orderly Coulomb balls, consisting of aligned, concentric shells of dust particles, survived for long periods. This structure was described as an "onion-like architecture". (Dark matter halos around galaxies also have similar structures.)

Paranormal analyst, Allan Danelek (in his book The Case for Ghosts) says, "One could think of orbs as 'tiny ghosts' moving around a room, their essence being contained within a tiny sphere of pure energy, like air inside a bubble." This description matches the description of life-like pulsating plasma spheres generated in the laboratory by Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu.

According to the paranormal literature "orbs" are light anomalies that appear on photographs and video as spherical balls of light but as flashes of light to the naked eye because of their rapid speed of motion. They exhibit intentional behavior - suggesting some consciousness or awareness of the environment.Orbs often travel in groups or clusters i.e. they exhibit swarm behavior - also a characteristic of particles in plasma - a characteristic observed by Bohm (see above).

Orbs also can dart back and forth rapidly like amoebic life-forms in a Petri dish. The balls can be transparent, translucent or in a bright solid form. These are signature features of magnetic plasma which has the natural property of being able to change its degree of opacity when internal frequencies change. Magnetic plasma would also allow orbs to change their output of light or luminosity.

Looking at these balls in close-up reveals that they possess an onion-like layered structure i.e. they have concentric shells - a signature feature of plasma crystals. Danelek says, "...'true orbs' do not reflect light the same way a dust particle or flying insect does, but are instead generally more opaque and, in some cases, even appear to have rings within them."

Experienced ghost hunter Joshua Warren (in his excellent book How to Hunt Ghosts) says, "Often, orbs appear to have a nucleus, just like a cell. The nucleus might be surrounded by 'bands' - concentric circles emerging from it. In fact, it might appear like an onion that's been chopped in half." All these characteristics are identical to plasma crystals generated in the laboratory.

Some believe that an orb is a human soul or the life force of those that once inhabited a physical-dense body. Psychics claim to be able to communicate with them on a regular basis, and ghost hunters encounter them quite frequently in photographs and video.

It is thought that they are conscious spirits that have stayed behind because they feel bound to their previous life or previous location for whatever reason - a typical characteristic of "Earth-bound" physical-etheric ghosts. According to plasma metaphysics, (genuine) orbs are plasma life forms and are identical to the physical-etheric nuclei observed by metaphysicists Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant that are released from dying persons.

Subtle Bioplasma Bodies in the Metaphysical Literature

The Subtle Body is a Bioplasma Body

The subtle bodies described in the metaphysical literature have signature features associated with plasma.

These include:

• Networks of filamentary currents (known as "nadis" or "meridians" in the metaphysical literature).

• Helical currents, aligned with the spine, which resemble helical pinches and "snakes" often found in plasma.

• Plasma vortexes (know as "chakras" in the metaphysical literature) caused by the helical movement of particles entering the bioplasma body.

• Jets or beams of collimated light that issue out from these vortexes which evidence a plasma discharge (similar to what issues out of a plasma gun).

• A magnetized plasma ovoid which surrounds and shields subtle bodies from the environment (just as the Earth is protected by the magnetosphere - a sphere composed of collisionless magnetized plasma).

• A plasma (Langmuir) sheath (know as an "auric sheath" or "auric shell" in the metaphysical literature) which encloses the ovoid.

• The ability of subtle bodies to pass through each other suggesting that they are composed of collisionless plasma.

• The ability of subtle bodies to emit light (not simply reflect them) that generate colorful halos.

• The ability of subtle bodies to change their degree of opacity - becoming transparent or translucent.

• The electrical feel of subtle bodies.

• The responsiveness of subtle bodies to electromagnetic fields.

All these features were described and documented more than 2,000 years ago, mainly in the Hindu and Chinese acupuncture literature; but also alluded to in the Buddhist and Christian scriptures and literature - long before the age of electricity and magnetism which was only sparked-off in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the list above is not exhaustive - it is only meant to be a sample of the features of subtle bodies which unmistakably points to plasma. Details of the above observations can be found in the previous articles and books by this author.

The Spark of LifeAccording to plasma metaphysics, subtle bodies live in a magnetic plasma sphere (an ordinarily invisible counterpart Earth) - an environment similar to the early (physical-dense) Earth.

During in vitro fertilization the human embryo is given an electrical jolt to spark-off cell division. The purpose of this routine electrical intervention is not known. All is known is that cell division is unlikely to occur in the absence of this electrical intervention. According to plasma metaphysics, this electrical spark is necessary to generate a plasma bubble which acts as a catalyst during embryogenesis.

Unlike a biomolecular environment, a plasma environment allows long-range correlations, without which a 3 dimensional structure could not be projected from a 1 dimensional gene. An embryo within a human body is protected by the plasma bubble (i.e. the physical-etheric double) of the mother and inherits a bubble within this environment. (In this process, it acquires what the Qigong literature refers to as "prenatal qi".)

Accelerated Morphogenesis of the Bioplasma Double

An embryonic bioplasma body is projected into the plasma bubble based on information in the physical-etheric double of the DNA. In fact, subtle radiation containing holographic information was observed by researchers at the Russian Academy of Science as a surprise effect during experiments when they were measuring the vibrational modes of DNA in solution using a sophisticated laser photon correlation spectrometer.

According to Sue Benford, their research suggests the existence of a subtle radiation linked to physical DNA that supports the hypothesis of an intact energy field containing relevant 'organismal information'. The Russian experiments produced different measurements when DNA was present and removed from the scattering chamber. These results were contrary to the expectations of the experimenters. After duplicating the initial experiment many times with re-calibrated equipment, the scientists were forced to accept that some new field structure existed.

This embryonic bioplasma body within the plasma bubble (which contains helical currents) grows together with the physical-biomolecular body but at an accelerated rate, being aided by the long range correlations present in the plasma but absent in the biochemical field.Morphogenesis of the Physical Biomolecular BodyThere is mutual affinity between the bioplasma and physical-biomolecular bodies.

In fact, the term "plasma" is derived from a Greek word meaning "to mould" and was coined by Langmuir based on his observations of the manner in which the positive column of a glow discharge tended to mould itself to the containing tube. Similarly, the bioplasma fetus wraps around the physical-biomolecular embryo while undergoing an accelerated morphogenesis (relative to the physical-biomolecular embryo).

The physical-biomolecular body therefore is cued by the bioplasma body which acts an electronic matrix and a time-resolved hologram that guides its development. The bioplasma body, in turn, acts as a mould or a template body for the development of the single-celled physical-biomolecular embryo to the adult body. This has frequently been pointed out by metaphysicists, including Leadbeater, Besant and Barbara Brennan.

Complex biological evolution could not have taken place on Earth without the aid of the templates provided by subtle bioplasma bodies which interacted with biochemical fields via weak electromagnetic fields. These bioplasma bodies are composed of high energy particles and inhabit (magnetized) plasmaspheres which share the same space and gravitational field as the physical-dense Earth. The lowest energy plasmasphere has been described by metaphysicists as the physical-etheric Earth.

Conclusion

As proposed by Tsytovich, Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu, the physical-dense plasma cell was a precursor to the biological cell in the early (physical-dense) Earth - acting as a template or mould for the biological cell to form in 3 dimensional space. However, the lightning strikes that generated the physical-dense plasma cells also generated physical-etheric plasma cells in the physical-etheric Earth.

As the conditions on Earth changed and the environment became progressively less ionized, the physical-dense plasma cell was less frequently generated. However, the physical-etheric plasma cell (existing in the physical-etheric Earth) remained as it participated in the development of the biological body to which it was attached to and subsequently was transmitted together with the biological cells in various forms of reproduction - both asexual and sexual.

Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050

2007-11-09T23:16:00.000-08:00

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.
"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.

The idea of romance between humanity and our artistic and/or mechanical creations dates back to ancient times, with the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion falling in love with the ivory statue he made named Galatea, to which the goddess Venus eventually granted life.

This notion persists in modern times. Not only has science fiction explored this idea, but 40 years ago, scientists noticed that students at times became unusually attracted to ELIZA, a computer program designed to ask questions and mimic a psychotherapist.

"There's a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans," Levy said. "At first robots were used impersonally, in factories where they helped build automobiles, for instance. Then they were used in offices to deliver mail, or to show visitors around museums, or in homes as vacuum cleaners, such as with the Roomba. Now you have robot toys, like Sony's Aibo robot dog, or Tickle Me Elmos, or digital pets like Tamagotchis."

In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," Levy conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them.

"It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."

In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that's quite likely. There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, "and it's just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration," he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. "That's fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there."

As software becomes more advanced and the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal, marriage could result. "One hundred years ago, interracial marriage and same-sex marriages were illegal in the United States. Interracial marriage has been legal now for 50 years, and same-sex marriage is legal in some parts of the states," Levy said. "There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with."

"The question is not if this will happen, but when," Levy said. "I am convinced the answer is much earlier than you think."

Levy predicts Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize human-robot marriage. "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."

Although roboticist Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta does not think human-robot marriages will be legal anywhere by 2050, "anything's possible. And just because it's not legal doesn't mean people won't try it," he told LiveScience.

"Humans are very unusual creatures," Arkin said. "If you ask me if every human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry sex toys."

The main benefit of human-robot marriage could be to make people who otherwise could not get married happier, "people who find it hard to form relationships, because they are extremely shy, or have psychological problems, or are just plain ugly or have unpleasant personalities," Levy said. "Of course, such people who completely give up the idea of forming relationships with other people are going to be few and far between, but they will be out there."

The possibility of sex with robots could prove a mixed bag for humanity. For instance, robot sex could provide an outlet for criminal sexual urges. "If you have pedophiles and you let them use a robotic child, will that reduce the incidence of them abusing real children, or will it increase it?" Arkin asked. "I don't think anyone has the answers for that yet—that's where future research needs to be done."

Keeping a robot for sex could reduce human prostitution and the problems that come with it. However, "in a marriage or other relationship, one partner could be jealous or consider it infidelity if the other used a robot," Levy said. "But who knows, maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, 'Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,' you could get 'Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?'"

Arkin noted that "if we allow robots to become a part of everyday life and bond with them, we'll have to ask questions about what's going to happen to our social fabric. How will they change humanity and civilization? I don't have any answers, but I think it's something we need to study. There's a real potential for intimacy here, where humans become psychologically and emotionally attached to these devices in ways we wouldn't to a vibrator."

Levy is currently writing a paper on the ethical treatment of robots. When it comes to sex and love with robots, "the ethical issues on how to treat them are something we'll have to consider very seriously, and they're very complicated issues," Levy said.