WORMHOLES
Reason #145 I want to go to MIT
An MIT team has designed a sleek spacesuit that relies on mechanical counter-pressure instead of using gas pressurization.
A bold new book tackles the ultimate thought experiment: what if there were no humans left?
Walter Haut, the now-deceased former PR representative at the Roswell Air Force base, issued an affadavit to be opened after his death, the text of which has just been released. It concludes: "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space".
"We're kind of a big deal"
Giant Penguins Once Roamed the Earth
Researchers report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found remains of two types of penguin in Peru that date to 40 million years ago. One of them was a 5-foot giant with a long sharp beak.
The Robotarium X in Jardim Central, Portugal, is the first zoo for artificial life. It houses a revolving cast of creatures powered by photovoltaic energy. Unlike with a real zoo, the Robotarium is the ideal environment for its residents, with plenty of sun, smoothness, tranquility and attention. There are no fights or aggression and the only competition is to assure a place under the sunlight.
Lake Dissapears in Central Chile
One casual theory is that an earthquake opened up a fissure in the ground, allowing the lake's water to drain through.
Bacteria Could Help Steady Buildings
Soil bacteria could be used to help steady buildings against earthquakes, according to researchers at UC Davis. The microbes can literally convert loose, sandy soil into rock. And men TO STONE!
I never thought such a thing was possible. Thanks N. Gitomer for the enlightening link.
Check out this joker's spacecraft
As private companies rush to the space travel industry's big bucks, we begin to enounter shitty spaceship design. Thanks Rosten Woo for the link.
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The Omega Point loves us
Archived From April 26, 2006
I heard recently on BBC World Service that the Malaysian space program, itself a weird offshot of a 900 million dollar defense deal Malaysia recently struck with the Russians, is beginning to take shape. The 854 applicants to the program have been narrowed down to four, two of which will start training for a journey to the Internation Space Station in Russia's Star City this summer.
A subject of debate is how these new cosmonauts, three of which are Muslims, will manage the daily rituals of Islam while in orbit. Worship, quite simple on Earth, is a huge inconvenience in outer space (like most accidentals of human life). Of course, this hasn't usually been much of an issue in the past -- "Western" astronauts, generally, have seperated their faith from their work. However, Islamic prayer necessitates a series of important observances. The Malaysian space program, Angkasa, is the first to grapple with the implications of ritual in space: a subject which will only become more relevant as we begin to broaden space programs internationally. The issues at hand, however, are perplexing. How can one face Mecca when Mecca is only a tiny point on a planet thousands of miles below? Further, prayer is determined by the movements of the Earth in relation to the sun -- one prays five times throughout the day including sunset, sundown -- yet in orbit, the sun rises and sets over a dozen times in the span of one "day." Do you pray 60 times?
I can't help but think of Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, returning from the first manned space mission and saying, "I looked and looked but I didn't see God." This statement represents the classic first foray into outer space theology. "I looked and didn't see God" is of course irrelevant if you believe, like the Catholic Church, that God exists in a realm outside of physics, of the physical world. However, If you define the Universe as the totality of all that exists, the totality of reality, then (by definition) if God exists, (S)He either is the Universe or is part of it. I'm no theologian -- my own spirituality is limited to severely dubious notions of New-Age connective crystal orgone meta-energies, or whatever -- but this notion, presented here (to me) by Frank J. Tipler, a cosmic eschatologist and mathematics professor at Tulane, might become pressing in a world where faith and science are perpetually butting heads.
Of course, Tipler takes it to a weird place. In his 500 page book, "The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead," which I read so that you don't have to, he posits that theology and physics become quite entangled when we begin to think about the ultimate fate of our Universe. Clearly, Tipler argues, our planet is not immortal -- the sun will destroy it sooner or later. If we are -- or rather, if life is -- to survive past this point, we/it must find a way to adapt itself to conditions outside of planet earth. This much is not particularly revolutionary. Tipler, like many left-field physicists before him, hyphothesizes a future scenario in which humans send self-replicating robot probes (known as Von Neumann probes) out into space, which would seed human life, plant colonies, and eventually engulf the entire Universe with life. However, if the Universe is finite (this is called the "Tipler Scenario," as opposed to the "Dyson Scenario" of an infinitely expanding Universe), then it will recollapse into a Big Crunch after a finite amount of time.
Life, which by this time will have completely abandonned Earth (or "Gaia" if you're a space-hippie), will be forced at this moment of critical mass to adapt and restructure itself to the imminent Big Crunch. Tipler suggests a whole series of insane things at this point:
1. Right before the Universe reaches its maximum size, life will have coalesced into a unified whole of undifferentiated artificial and human intelligence, called the "Omega Point," computationally powerful enough to control the differential collapse of the Universe. The Omega Point will be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and, further, will use the Universe's collapsion as a source of energy.
2. If, while controlling the collapse, this unified whole of life-consciousness can use its energy to accelerate the speed its mental processes accordingly, it can experience a subjective infinite time during the last stages of the collapse -- which is to say, there will be (in some form) eternal life.
3. Since the computational capacity of life will be accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out (futurists call this the "singularity," which is epic), a massive and unified conscious computer could, hypothetically, run a simulation of the Universe including all human beings alive and dead forever, even though the actual Universe the computer is in lasts only a finite time. This all-powerful artificial intelligence will ("must," claims Tipler, if life is to survive) provide us with "virtual time." The Omega Point will be capable of running computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our Universe, effectively ressurecting the dead.
4. The Universe-Computer, run by the artificial intelligence that is the Omega Point, will be both personal and benevolent. It will be, or is, God.
Tipler (above), sort of summing it up: "the Earth itself must be transferred from what I shall call 'ulimate reality,' into a virtual reality, from real space into a cyberspace in the computer's memory. If this is not done before the Sun leaves the main sequence, not only will much of the Sun's total energy reserve be wasted, but the Earth will be completely destroyed by the expanding sun to no purpose. The Earth's annihilation in real space is certain."
Theories like Tipler's aren't, essentially, that much weirder than half of the shit I wholeheartedly believe in: Nikola Tesla being responsible for the Tunguska event, for example, or even String Theory. In fact, I sort of appreciate the Omega Point Theory because it is so destined to join the ranks of hundreds of other, great, fully marginal theories which made a similar attempt to find "scientific" justifications for matters of pure human subjectivity, such as religion. I'm thinking of Wilhelm Reich's theory of Orgone Energy, or the archaic (even occult) "noosphere" theory ofTeilhard de Chardin, who, incidentally, coined the phrase "Omega Point." Or Tesla. Or, you know, all the astronomers before Copernicus.
Whether any of these ideas ever held any ground or ever will is almost irrelevant; they come and go, their science always shaky and devastatingly earnest. What matters, it seems, is their pressing desire to remind us of the urgency of our cosmology, or lack thereof. Tipler is probably wrong, or at least partially wrong, but I admire physicists who have the courage to completely betray their discipline in favor of a much grander, more beautiful, worldview. The really tripper Web-pundit Anders Sandberg, a Swedish Ph.D of Computer Science, wrote of the primary failing of Tipler's theory that "Tipler has made the mistake of not only taking his theory seriously but also to believe in it. Belief in a theory tends to make us blind to all the assumptions which underlie it, and take them for granted, since the theory is 'obviously reasonable.'"
Sandberg is probably saying that physicists must be objective in their postulations (rarely the case) but I think he's also raising the point that belief, in all its ramifications, becomes complicated as soon as we leave the safety of our planet, which is so (obviously) central to our metaphysics. In any case, it makes trying to figure out how to do ritual Islamic ablutions while in zero-gravity with limited water supplies seem completely beside the point.
<< | Posted on April 26, 2006 at 10:34 AM | >>
Comments (5):
category: wo skullface life? have you seen the incredible gwar film skulhedface? w jello biafra as the corporate evil. anyways, not my point.
i got really into evolutionary studies in high school just because of these kinds of failed theories. i got to see stephen jay gould speak a year before he died (did you see brian greene speak that year?), and was completely blown away at the accidental character of our origins. it seems the more that we know, the less important we become as players in the universal game. i cringe at the anthro-compu-centric leanings in tipler, as i'm not hearing about all the organisms and resources it takes to keep ourselves and our technologies breathing. there are so many particles and chunks pumping through and around us that give us our energies, i say it's time to give some props.
i think that's why crystals are so important, and moreso, an increasing leaning towards neutral monism (the notion that both the mental and the physical can be reduced to some sort of third substance, or energy), as we should just give up our intent on imposing energy on the universe. that hobbesian sentiment is soooo old school.
i have to say i love that idea of collective energies saving life as we know it. it may not solve the problems that you bring up in this essay, but i think taken to a micro realm, it can say a lot about communal forces. and anyways, i love to hear the compu-posi alliance growing!!!
Posted by ashby @ April 26, 2006 3:14 PM
have you, by chance, read the sci-fi book "grass" by sheri s. tepper? it's totally about this concept. or at least part of it is.
Posted by sarah @ April 27, 2006 10:04 PM
Congratulations - you wrote about Frank Tipler without once mentioning Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Nice job.
Posted by Colin @ April 30, 2006 12:32 PM
Steven Weinberg, in his book on the Big Bang, The First Three Minutes, famously noted that "the more the Universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
Posted by claire @ May 3, 2006 1:22 PM
While I find the idea of a sentient Omega Point comforting, I hope that it remembers me. Or at least remembers to write.
Posted by Marcus @ April 26, 2006 3:12 PM