Category: science

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Roundup of interesting articles, April 2018

U.S. guided missiles are now this small.

Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now…
https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s

Some estimates about how powerful alien telescopes would be if they used “gravitational microlensing.”
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.06351.pdf

The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

‘Project Cyclops was a 1971 NASA project that investigated how SETI should be conducted.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cyclops

A machine that can detect dark matter has been invented. This paper appeared in one of the world’s premier scientific journals.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/09/admx-detection-technology/

Lakes in northern Canada could be similar to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701375

Venus’ atmosphere might harbor microbial life.
http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-ponders-possible-life-adrift-in-venus-clouds

‘Leo Aerospace plans to revive a decades-old method of putting satellites into space. They’re using hot air balloons to lift the rocket and its micro-satellite payload 18 km (11 miles) above Earth. At that altitude, there’s 95% less atmosphere. This means much less drag on the rocket, which translates into smaller rockets with less fuel.’
https://www.universetoday.com/138966/launching-rockets-from-balloons-is-about-to-be-a-thing-but-we-need-a-better-name-than-rockoons/

China’s first space station crashed. They have a second, slightly larger and newer one in orbit and want to someday launch a third.
https://apnews.com/6fb6a34f6e844f85beca6afbf79ea7b8

Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar

Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395

Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos

Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751

About 80% of male pattern baldness is purely genetic. Everything else (smoking, stress level, diet, exercise, type of shampoo you use) barely moves the needle.
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006594

IQ is about 50% genetic. The weight of scientific evidence about this has grown to be overwhelming, and we’re now moving on to identifying the genes responsible for human intelligence.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/selective-schools-meritocracy-and-genes/

Depression is about 40% genetic, with the rest of the risk explained by non-genetic biological factors and negative life experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/26/gene-map-for-depression-sparks-hopes-of-new-generation-of-treatments

The Bajau people, who have been living on boats and diving into the sea to catch food for 1,000 years, have genetic adaptations for that lifestyle.
https://economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21740737-meet-bajau-group-people-amphibious-life-have-evolved-traits

Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html

The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830

Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women.
https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351

A lesson in “you get what you pay for”: Russia’s T-90 tank is slightly inferior to America’s M1 tank, but that’s because the T-90 is smaller, cheaper, and has a smaller crew.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-t-90-dangerous-weapon-could-it-beat-americas-best-25379?page=show

Marine Corps F/A-18s are old and falling apart, but through ingenuity and hard work, their ground crews keep them flying. The article should help you understand why readiness levels are so bad in cash-strapped militaries that operate even older planes, like the Indian Air Force and its MiG-21s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

An offer not for the faint of heart: India plans to donate obsolete military equipment to its allies in Asia and Africa.
http://www.janes.com/article/79564/india-to-offer-dated-refurbished-materiel-to-friendly-countries

And at the other end of its military technology spectrum, India has finally backed out of its partnership with Russia to develop a stealth fighter. Among other problems, they the fighters weren’t stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20347/its-no-surprise-india-finally-ditched-its-stealth-fighter-program-with-russia

The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles.
http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet

DARPA is working on a new weapons system comprised of a conventional cargo plane that launches swarms of small flying drones, which complete their missions against the enemy and then fly back to their “mothership” and dock with it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20058/this-is-our-first-glimpse-of-a-darpa-gremlins-drone-being-launched-or-recovered-from-a-c-130

Plasma weapons are infeasible, but laser cannons and particle cannons that fire streams of neutrons (we can already kill with neutron bombs) are theoretically possible.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html

100 years after WWI, the Triple Entente is still fighting the Ottoman Empire, and chemical weapons are still being used. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/13/politics/trump-us-syria/index.html

The recent American airstrikes on Syria used some basic but effective distraction tactics to keep the enemy guessing where it would come from.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-navy-fooled-russia-and-syria-with-a-warship-ruse-before-the-strike-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T

U.S. Special Forces have built a base in northern Syria to defend Kurdish rebels against the Turks. There’s no way this news footage could have been aired without the permission of U.S. forces, so this is a deliberate leak intended to send a message to somebody.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19929/u-s-special-operators-in-syria-have-set-up-futuristic-computer-assisted-mortar-turrets

The esteemed “Graham-Talent Commission” predicted in 2008 that terrorists would use nuclear or biological weapons before the end of 2013.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510559.pdf

‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/

“What may happen in the next hundred years” (John Elfreth Watkins’ amusing predictions from the year 1900). Most of them were right, or “essentially right.”
http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf

A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/

Government just can’t do drug policy right: California’s legal marijuana industry is so heavily taxed that the black market still thrives in the state.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2018/04/02/californias-new-recreational-marijuana-m

Cookies that made day care staff feel high on drugs didn’t contain drugs.
https://www.apnews.com/75959b080785434792561eedeb0377af

We might never cure every type of cancer, but we could get so good at detecting and treating it that cancer would become just another chronic, manageable condition like diabetes.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/04/18/curing-cancer-not-realistic-goal-doctors-focus-on-managing-instead-curing-disease.html

A combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy (pembrolizumab) raises survival rates for people with some types of lung cancer by almost 50%.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/health/lung-cancer-immunotherapy.html

A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514

The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html

‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits

MIT severed ties with Nectome over the latter’s announcement that it wanted to experiment with destructive human brain scans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43642786

A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/

Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf

A step towards Google’s mission: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
https://qz.com/1252664/talk-to-books-at-ted-2018-ray-kurzweil-unveils-googles-astounding-new-search-tool-will-answer-any-question-by-reading-thousands-of-books/

“Simulation capture” is a creepy theory about how an AGI would push you around. Whenever we finally invent an AGI, it will probably say “I’ve got a million more like this…”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c5GHf2kMGhA4Tsj4g/the-ai-in-a-box-boxes-you

“You can’t get from narrow AI to AGI.” Likewise, even if we can’t invent AGI, we can surely make multitudes of very good, task-specific narrow AIs that could collectively put the human race out of work.
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2018/04/no-you-cant-get-from-narrow-ai-to-agi/

There’s a reason why established car companies still have humans on their assembly lines.
https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-1825264384

Machines that milk cows radically improve the lives of dairy farmers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/07/599259931/when-robots-milk-cows-farm-families-taste-freedom

Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice.
https://www.economist.com/node/21541717

Researchers have built a DNA-based nanomachine that has a rotary motor and can move in a specific direction.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/nanomachine-made-from-dna-nanorings.html

‘Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.’
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

‘Grand Theft Auto 5 has made money than any other form of media in history, with over 90 million units sold and $6 billion in revenue.’ If games get good enough and jobs get scarce enough, is a Ready Player One future really so unrealistic?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/04/09/gta-5-has-made-more-money-than-any-film-book-or-game-says-analyst

33% of Britons don’t like their jobs, and 37% think their jobs are meaningless. What if this keeps getting worse as time passes?
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/

Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike.
https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k

‘That’s what happened last week to a 31-year-old man who was held by police for questioning over an “economic dispute” as he waited with more than 60,000 fans of Hong Kong’s Jacky Cheung for a night of pumping Cantopop.’
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/facial-recognition-used-catch-fugitive-094342186.html

Multiple cell phone wiretapping stations are around the White House and Capitol Building.
https://www.apnews.com/d716aac4ad744b4cae3c6b13dce12d7e

One positive use of mass surveillance will be the tracking of wildlife populations, including endangered species. Someday, we’ll have highly accurate counts of entire animal populations.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/science/drones-infrared-cameras-animals.html

The rental car market will REALLY be upended once average people own self-driving cars and some peer-to-peer app lets them rent out rides at random times throughout the day. For example, if you were sitting around at home doing nothing on Sunday, you could push one button and make your self-driving car available as a taxi for any local people who wanted it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/03/30/airbnb-for-cars-is-here-and-the-rental-car-giants-are-not-happy/

With the recent news about Tesla autopilot cars killing two people, has anyone considered how many lives they might have SAVED?
https://insideevs.com/watch-autopilot-save-tesla-model-x-from-collision/

Didi, China’s version of Uber, is going to buy fleets of cars suited for different types of cab rides. ‘Didi considers ordinary cars to be “overspecced” for normal trips, featuring more passenger space, engine power, and other features than are required.’
https://qz.com/1261415/chinas-didi-partners-with-carmakers-to-design-vehicles-for-ride-sharing/

 

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Review: “End of Evangelion”

Cryptic imagery from “End of Evangelion.”

A few nights ago, I watched the film End of Evangelion, which Netflix recommended I rent based on how I had rated similar films. “Evangelion” is the name of a famous Japanese sci-fi anime from the 1990s, and the film is actually the final two episodes of the series (there’s a break in the middle where credits roll, and then you see the intro for the second episode). Hence, the totally literal title of the film, End of Evangelion.

Unfortunately, the content of the film was just as abstract to me as its title was straightforward, both due to the fact that the director made a deliberate (and controversial) effort to leave it open to interpretation, and because I had no clue who the characters were or what the back story was since I had never watched any Evangelion episodes. For any fans of the series, I hope you appreciate my ignorance and puzzled perspective for what it is.

Nonetheless, I figured out that Evangelion is essentially the same thing as Power Rangers: A powerful, alien force is trying to take over the world, and it’s up to a team of hormone-raging teenagers to get in their giant, humanoid battle robots and fight off the latest space monster each week. Evangelion gets deeper than Power Rangers though, thanks to adult-level subplots about scorned romance and people going crazy, and to weird religious themes and recurrent female nudity.

But enough with that, and on to my analysis of how well End of Evangelion depicts the future (the series was technically set in the future as it was filmed in the 90s but took place in 2015).

Giant, humanoid battle robots will exist. These were clearly an important element to the series. It looked like each teenager had their own designated battle robot, and they piloted them from internal cockpits that were either in the robot heads or upper torsos. They would get into frenzied rages inside the cockpits, and would use hand joysticks and buttons to move around their robots and kill enemies. In End of Evangelion, the preferred mode of combat was to beat up enemy robots and helicopters with bare hands and feet, or giant swords and spears. All the robots were hundreds of feet tall. While I don’t think it would be impossible to build giant robots like this, I think they would be a poor use of resources and therefore would never be constructed.

A giant combat robot clutching a spear-like weapon

The problem with giant, humanoid battle robots is that they’re huge targets that everyone can see from a hundred miles away–or even from space. Old fashioned fighter planes, artillery guns, and nuclear missiles could see them and hit them from long distances, out of range of the robots’ own weapons. Another problem with giant robots is there’s no way to hide if you get in trouble, unless maybe you can dive into a large body of water or into a deep, jagged canyon. Giant humanoid robots would be top heavy and unsteady on their two feet, which would be major problems. Just imagine how well you’d make out if you were sitting on the very top branch of a 200-foot tall redwood tree, and then a logger cut it at the base, and you had to endure a (seemingly) slow tip-over that ended with your top branch slamming into the ground at high velocity. Not pretty, and it’s exactly what would happen to you inside your cockpit every time your robot tripped or got knocked on its back by an alien. So human pilots won’t do. The bipedal layouts of the robots would also make their legs and feet major weak points, which enemies would surely target and be able to cripple using relatively weak weapons. Note that these same problems with poor concealment, top-heaviness, and vulnerable drive systems would also apply to smaller bipedal robots, like the “AT-ST” from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. This might also help explain why no military has tried to build armored vehicles that walk on legs instead of roll on wheels. Finally, the use of giant robots for combat might also be unethical given the high risk of collateral damage caused by the robot accidentally stepping on people or falling on them. I imagine you’d feel pretty guilty if an alien body-slammed you and your giant robot into a skyscraper full of thousands of people.

Destroyed robots will come back to life. End of Evangelion’s pivotal battle happens when the good guy base is attacked by the Japanese military, which hitherto had been their friends. The Japanese military has nine of its own giant humanoid battle robots, but they’re piloted by computers instead of humans. Caught off guard, the best the good guys can muster forth is one of their own combat robots, piloted by a redheaded teen chick who is in need of bipolar medication. Redhead uses karate and a giant spear to beat/chop up all the enemy robots, and then her own robot runs out of power. Unfortunately for her, the seemingly dead enemy robots slowly start twitching back to life, and they get up–in spite of severed limbs and other visible damage–and kill her and her helpless robot. This is actually realistic. Not only will future military machines be able to keep fighting in spite of enormous amounts of damage, but it will be possible to fix them–perhaps without leaving the battlefield–even if they’ve suffered “fatal” damage.

As a precedent, it was common practice in WWII for armies to fix their destroyed tanks and to return them to service as fast as possible, with new crews. After all, tanks are large, expensive pieces of machinery, and it makes no economic sense to abandon them if they can be repaired. Tanks that had been incapacitated and defeated in combat had the burn marks scrubbed off, the dead bodies and body parts inside of them removed, the damaged systems identified and fixed, and any holes made by enemy weapons patched with liquid metal or welded-on sheets of armor. As WWII progressed, tanks that had gone through multiple “restorations” and multiple dead human crews became common sights.

A U.S. tank that was disabled by several German artillery rounds. The holes could be patched by repair crews and the tanks sent back into action.

Feigning death to either wait until the enemy goes away, or to get the enemy to lower his guard, come near you, and open himself to your surprise attack will also probably be common tactics for combat machines. This is because it’s much easier to pretend you’re dead if you don’t have externally detectable life signs (e.g. – chest movements from breathing), and it’s easier to risk a feigned death sneak attack on an enemy if you are a machine who fears nothing. In WWII, the Japanese soldiers were viewed as fanatics because they used tactics like this to ambush unsuspecting American troops (usually the “corpse” would suddenly wake up as you were walking by and detonate a grenade). It terrified and demoralized the Americans and forced them to laboriously shoot or bayonet every seemingly dead enemy soldier they passed, “just to be sure.”

A technological Singularity could happen so abruptly that you wouldn’t understand what was happening. Right after redhead dies, another of the teens gets his battle robot online and goes out to fight the Japanese military robots. When he sees his dead comrade, he has a mental breakdown because he had a crush on her. At that moment, the enemy battle robots grab his robot, levitate him far above the Earth, and start some type of “crucifixion” ceremony. The teen is the only person who can initiate a global transcendence event, and the enemy robots have been programmed to help him along. For some reason, killing his girl in front of him and rendering him distraught was also needed in order to ensure he would make “the right decision” regarding the transcendence. All of this was part of some incredibly complicated plan formulated by a secret cabal that only now–at the end–is revealed to be pulling all the strings. Yes. Ridiculous. Anyhow, we hear the teen’s rush of thoughts at this critical moment, and partly because he wants to end the suffering inherent to life, he decides to send out an energy pulse that travels across the whole planet, causing every human and animal to instantly burst into pools of red goo, which contain the souls and “essences” of each living being. The pools of liquid all run together, and Earth’s seas become red with them. Humans and all Earthly life transcend into a new form, where thoughts and feelings are directly shared, and there is no more suffering. Without ever using the term, this ending sequence of End of Evangelion depicts a possible future event called the “technological Singularity,” often shortened to “the Singularity.”

The “Red Goo Scenario”?

While there are many different theories about what form a Singularity could take, most thinkers believe it will happen thanks to machines achieving superhuman levels of intelligence. The reasoning is that, once machines get smart enough, humans wouldn’t be able to grasp the former’s thinking anymore or to anticipate their actions, and the machines would be capable of suddenly doing anything, like taking over the Earth, exterminating all humans, or elevating the human race to a superior state of being. Some believe that machines will achieve this level of intelligence and power very abruptly, so whatever changes they decide to make will happen without notice from the perspective of slow-thinking humans. A Singularity could be as abrupt and as life-changing to you as having an energy wavefront suddenly sweep over you from behind while you’re eating your breakfast waffles, converting you into a puddle of conscious, psychic, red liquid. Moreover, a future scenario where a superpowered entity (whether a distraught teenager or a superintelligent machine) decides to pursue a benign mandate like ending human suffering and then starts doing confusing and even scary things to achieve its goals is plausible. We simply don’t know how an AI with an IQ of 1,000 would act. For the record though, I think a Singularity is unlikely, and changes to technology and our way of life will happen slowly enough for humans to keep up and to have some influence over the course of events. In the far future–perhaps 150 years from now–I think the technology will exist to elevate humans like us to a higher state of being where suffering as we know it would be eliminated and thoughts and feelings could be directly shared, but we’ll get to that point gradually, with each necessary advancement setting the stage for the next.

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, March 2018 edition

This is the 100th anniversary of the German Spring Offensive, the Central Powers’ last, desperate gamble to win WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Offensive

During WWII, the British and Americans were able to accurately estimate how many tanks the Germans were making by analyzing the serial numbers on destroyed German tanks they found on the battlefield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

BAE is pitching its advanced 40mm cannon for light tanks. They claim its ability to rapidly shuffle between ammunition types is a battlefield force multiplier (some interesting case examples are described).
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19671/us-army-eyes-adding-unique-40mm-cannon-to-its-stryker-and-bradley-armored-vehicles

Israel officially admitted it blew up Syria’s sole nuclear reactor in 2007, but even had they left it alone, any Syrian nuclear weapons program would probably have gone nowhere.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/nightmare-avoided-did-israels-air-force-stop-syria-getting-25060

Some clear thinking on Putin’s latest, publicity-driven announcement about Russia’s new nuclear weapons, death rays, and phasers.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/putins-phony-arms-race-217339

Putin has already canceled development of one of Russia’s fearsome experimental nuclear missiles we saw CGI videos of just a few weeks ago. [Drumroll] They don’t have enough money.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19588/russia-halts-years-of-work-on-ballistic-missile-to-pay-for-hypersonic-weapons

As China’s military surges ahead, India’s is stuck in neutral.
http://www.janes.com/article/78584/indian-army-struggles-with-resource-crunch

The “Scenarios” section of the paper describes some interesting cases where drones and AI could be used for crimes and terrorism in the near future.
https://www.eff.org/files/2018/02/20/malicious_ai_report_final.pdf

The U.S.M.C. is upgrading its aging F/A-18 Hornets with vastly better radars.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19508/the-best-of-the-usmcs-aging-f-a-18-hornets-to-receive-aesa-radar-upgrade

Another cool idea on paper that turned out way less cool (and more expensive) in practice.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19237/navy-ditches-its-plan-to-upgrade-34-destroyers-with-hybrid-electric-drives

The Air Force wants to make its nuclear bombs smaller-yield but more accurate. All nuclear bombs will also be smart bombs.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19263/get-to-know-americas-long-serving-b61-family-of-nuclear-bombs

By omitting any design requirements related to low-altitude bombing strikes, the B-21 will be stealthier and higher-flying than the B-2.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14919/the-b-21s-three-decade-old-shape-hints-at-new-high-altitude-capabilities

Photos from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 15 years on. It’s remarkable seeing the hodgepodge of camouflage colors and styles our troops wore during the invasion. In spite of being the world’s best-funded military, apparently there was a widespread shortage of khaki clothing in the run-up to our big invasion of a desert country whose landscape is dominated by shades of brown.
https://qz.com/1232700/iraq-war-anniversary-photos-of-the-iraq-invasion-15-years-ago/

This might be a perfect example of how “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/politics/syria-regime-forces-building-up-us/index.html

Despite rumor, spy satellites can’t read car license plates. However, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build one that could. According to the inescapable laws of optics, its lens would have to be at least 60 feet in diameter (the Hubble telescope’s lens is only eight feet wide, and the Saturn V rockets were only 33 feet wide).
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3868/is-photography-from-a-satellite-good-enough-to-make-out-a-person-on-the-ground

The Predator drone is headed for retirement. (Dang, I feel old.)
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19122/usaf-officially-retires-mq-1-predator-while-mq-9-reaper-set-to-gain-air-to-air-missiles

China demonstrates an add-on kit that allows its 1960s-vintage Type 59 tanks to be remote-operated. I doubt the technology is well-developed, though it does make me wonder if obsolete military gear could be given new leases on life if they were remote-controlled or robot-operated.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/21/china-testing-unmanned-tank/

If we switch to machine armies, social cohesion could weaken since nations would no longer have large institutions (militaries) for indoctrinating their human citizens and infusing them with patriotism and loyalty. If humans no longer died in wars, populations would slowly lose national myths of shared sacrifice and heroism that underpin their national identities.
http://warisboring.com/what-happens-to-us-when-robots-fight-our-wars/

I’m skeptical that air delivery drones will become practical and widespread for at least 20 years. There are simply too many downsides. Self-driving delivery trucks are a more conservative and promising technology in the short term.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/22/amazon-issued-patent-for-delivery-drones-that-can-react-to-screaming-flailing-arms/

Self-driving cars killed their first human this month. It was, of course, inevitable. The investigation is ongoing, but it’s possible human error–in the form of Uber executives deciding not to use the best sensors on their self-driving cabs–was responsible.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-insight/ubers-use-of-fewer-safety-sensors-prompts-questions-after-arizona-crash-idUSKBN1H337Q

One of the world’s most successful roboticists, Rodney Brooks, discusses the future of the field.
https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc

‘Using this iterative algorithm, IBM’s quantum computer successfully calculated the ground state energy of all three molecules, setting a world record for quantum simulation.’
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/quantum-computer-simulates-largest-molecule-yet-sparking-hope-future-drug-discoveries

After being fed data on 12.4 million chemical reactions, a deep learning neural network program was able to correctly create reagent and synthesis steps for other chemical compounds. Human judges couldn’t tell the machine’s work from that of human chemists, meaning a “Turing Test” of sorts was passed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03977-w

AI could be used to analyze microscopy images of cells.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/03/12/images-of-machine-learning

‘Arranging two layers of atom-thick graphene so that the pattern of their carbon atoms is offset by an angle of 1.1º makes the material a superconductor.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02773-w

Some geoengineering proposals for slowing Antarctica’s melting and keeping sea levels the same.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03036-4

Saudi Arabia wants to build the world’s largest solar power plant in the same location where “The Animatrix” predicted that the solar-powered “Zero One” machine city will be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/28/why-saudi-arabia-is-trying-to-pull-off-an-utterly-massive-new-solar-project/

According to some estimates, nuclear power has a smaller carbon footprint than solar or wind.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/wind-energys-carbon-footprint/

Two articles about how much more efficient our machines are at converting energy to work than the human body is.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-fusion/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/McKenziewalking.html

‘For many animals, the potential benefits of drawing free energy from sunlight might be offset by the considerable risks of extra UV exposure and overheating.’
http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2010/12/20/why-animals-so-rarely-photosynthesize/

If you could see ultraviolet light, the world would look more detailed, and people’s faces would look uglier.
https://youtu.be/hsROOnw12AA

Don’t smoke or sunbathe.
https://www.today.com/slideshow/effects-smoking-sun-stress-skin-twins-33422340

Reason #10237 that you don’t want to be obese.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43502144

Many chronically ill people with mild genetic disorders are not being properly diagnosed.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/health/genetic-mutations-diagnosis.html

The humble cockroach’s genome is a marvel of complexity.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/american-cockroach-genome.html

‘Unlike us, hummingbirds can use the glucose that they’re ingesting in nectar and can move it through their guts, through their circulatory system, and to their muscle cells so fast that they can essentially keep that pipeline going in real time.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/hummingbirds-fructose-metabolism.html

‘Dogs can be cloned up to five days after they die and cats up to three, as long as the corpses are kept cool.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pet-cloning-not-just-celebrities-anymore-050630990.html

SETI’s senior astronomer thinks that advanced aliens have gravitational microlensing telescopes that can see the signals sent out by your TV remote control from light years away.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23738

This is a new and slightly insane solution to the Fermi Paradox: “The Planetarium Hypothesis.”
https://computationaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/05/superintelligent-solution-to-fermi.html

A mind-blowing article about the anthropic principle, quantum immortality, and (indirectly) the Fermi Paradox.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/

One of the declassified UFO videos released by the NY Times last December could have just been a fighter plane in the distance, flying with its afterburners on.
https://youtu.be/oO5dP3sF2sw

Stephen Spielberg is skeptical of virtual reality’s potential as a filmmaking tool because it would be much harder to keep viewers focused on the action. I agree there’s less value-add than some people assume: If you were watching “The Matrix” in V.R., what would be the benefit of being able to turn away from a fight scene and look at the brick wall behind you?
https://www.apnews.com/afd5a41e2cb14fc0ab5521fa548e38ae/Q&A:-Spielberg-likes-VR,-but-not-necessarily-for-filmmaking

Microsoft predicts that V.R. goggles capable of displaying lifelike images will exist by 2028, but you’ll still need to have the headset plugged into a bigger computer that does graphics rendering. This is close to other estimates I’ve read over the years.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/creating-perfect-illusion-will-take-create-life-like-virtual-reality-headsets/

Progress in preserving mammal brains. Sometimes I think that human cryonics just needs a few hundred million dollars of R&D to become viable, and once we finally make the necessary advances, we’ll look back and wince hard at the realization that we could have made it work decades earlier with 10% of the money we spend on Air Jordans.
http://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/
http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/

Some examples of chuckle-worthy bad futurism.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-notable-apocalypses-that-obviously-didnt-happen-9126331/

Investing your money according to the predictions of professional money managers yields no better results that investing it in an index fund.
http://www.aei.org/publication/more-evidence-that-its-very-hard-to-beat-the-market-over-time-95-of-financial-professionals-cant-do-it/

In the latest bad news for Bitcoin, someone embedded child porn into the blockchain.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content

Genetics, damage to specific parts of the brain, and direct electrical stimulation of part of the brain can all make people happy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/pleasure-shock-deep-brain-stimulation-happiness/556043/

IBM predicts we’ll soon have aquatic sensors that do real-time monitoring of water quality in oceans, lakes and rivers, and that AIs will be created to spot and counteract bias. I essentially agree with both predictions.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/03/ibm-ai-predictions-include-ai-powered-ocean-microbots.html

Every shipwreck will be found someday. ‘Today’s crews employ devices that can detect the magnetic field of a washing machine buried in sea mud. Their sonar can sweep the depths like a flashlight. Year after year, the number of shipwrecks still lost dwindles.’
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-uss-cyclops-20180312-story.html

Future mass surveillance will mean no more misplaced or stolen things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/new-tracking-technology-could-make-lost-belongings-a-thing-of-the-past/2018/02/28/f7a7e59c-18cc-11e8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html

By the time Africa is ready to industrialize through cheap factory labor and export-driven trade, it might be too late since rich countries will have robots that work even cheaper.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43459138

To receive 5G signal in your house, there will need to be a direct line of sight between your device and a small cell box, which will probably be mounted on an existing light pole or power line pole, so in the near future, we’re going to have to pay much closer attention to trimming trees and bushes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/wireless-firms-seek-to-preempt-local-authority-to-install-5g-equipment-in-neighborhoods/2018/03/18/8f8d5a96-2191-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html

“Digital immortality” will first manifest itself as long-dead actors, resurrected through CGI to star in new films.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/03/17/hollywood-actors-writing-wills-control-cgi-selves-beyond-grave/

200 years after it was published, “Frankenstein” continues to be misused by foes of science.
http://reason.com/archives/2018/03/04/victor-frankenstein-is-the-rea

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Was Stephen Hawking any smarter than you?

…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?

That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961

Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.

As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.

 

In 2017, he predicted:

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.

Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.

Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).

While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.

In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).

And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.

And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:

“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.

In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.

Links

  1. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961
  2. http://www.hawking.org.uk/about-stephen.html
  3. https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/
  4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB
  5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8642558.stm
  6. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/902/1
  7. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
  8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/11/17/stephen-hawking-just-gave-humanity-a-due-date-for-finding-another-planet/
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Roundup of interesting internet articles, February 2018 edition

A recent meta-analysis that “proved” antidepressants work was grossly overhyped by the media.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2018/02/24/about-antidepressant-study/#.WphBmPnwaUm

The media has also be grossly misrepresenting medical progress towards treating Alzheimer’s disease.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/02/15/more-rough-alzheimers-news

Sometimes, the hype-ready headlines are made up by the scientists BEFORE being passed on to the media.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/02/05/where-does-the-news-hype-come-from

An Ivy-league scientist deliberately dressed up shoddy scientific papers about dietetics to attract publicity.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/brian-wansink-cornell-p-hacking

“These observations suggest that despite the overall ability of reviewers to discriminate between extremely strong grant applications and the remainder, they have limited ability to accurately predict future productivity of meritorious applications in the range relevant to current paylines.”
https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323v1

Fake Science Paper About ‘Star Trek’ and Warp 10 Was Accepted by ‘Predatory Journals’
https://www.space.com/39672-fake-star-trek-science-paper-published.html

Fake professors working at a fake college where they run a fake scientific journal:
http://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2017-12-10-csu.html

Generally speaking, the scientific literature about the health effects of specific foods is so self-contradictory and poorly done that it might as well be ignored.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2018/02/26/coffee-causes-cancer-coffee-prevents-cancer-wait-what/#113d9f7915ee

What IS known for sure is that 1) being overweight damages one’s health, 2) eating too many calories contributes more to obesity than lack of exercise, and 3) Americans are getting fatter over time.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2018/02/22/peds.2017-3459#T2

Simple, absolute changes to one’s diet (e.g. “I will never drink sodas, never go to all you can eat buffets, and will only eat whole grain breads”) are the most effective for weight loss.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/well/eat/counting-calories-weight-loss-diet-dieting-low-carb-low-fat.html

The (short) list of nutritional supplements that doctors actually recommend people take and have scientifically proven benefits.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/supplements-are-a-30-billion-racket-heres-what-experts-actually-recommend/

“Biohacking” is bunk.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/biohacking-stunts-crispr/553511/

More on that.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/01/20/the-state-of-biohacking

A brain implant improved memory in lab tests. All the test subjects were epileptics. It’s possible the implants could boost the memories of people with normal brains.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/health/brain-implant-memory.html

Superhuman abilities aren’t always beneficial: Having a hyper-acute sense of smell is hellish.
https://gutsybeautifulcomplicated.com/2017/06/07/hyperosmia-when-odors-rule-your-life/

But the benefits of superior intellect are clear: Long-term studies of people in the top 1% of math ability suggest that there is no known “ceiling” to IQ, and that the benefits of IQ never plateau: All other things being equal, a person with an IQ of 200 should be able to do more complex cognitive tasks, and is likelier to have a better job and more money, than someone with an IQ of 180.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf

Human IQ is heritable, but also tends to regress towards the population mean of 100 across generations (see the “Your Kids and Regression” slide). This means two parents with IQs of 80 are likely to have children that are smarter, and two parents with IQs of 120 are likely to have children that are dumber.
http://particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/seminars/data/media/2012/feb/hsu.pdf

‘According to the political scientist Charles Murray, meritocracy inevitably leads to a genetically-based caste system. Why? Because the traits selected for by the meritocratic sorting principle are genetically-based and, as such, likely to be passed on from parents to their children. Genetic variation means some highly able children will be born to people of average and below average intelligence, but the children of the meritocratic elite will, in aggregate, always have a competitive advantage and over several generations that leads to social ossification.’
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-meritocracy-bbc.html

Among females, educational achievement and fertility are negatively correlated, but the long-term effects on the human genepool could be minimal, and the correlation’s directionality could change in the future.
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-panic-over-women-with-more-education-having-fewer-kids/273070/

Agreeableness is a heritable personality trait, and it influences one’s odds of divorce (which in turn partly determines income, since couples share money).
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21736124-according-study-adopted-children-genes-play-role-likelihood

DNA-based scores are getting better at predicting intelligence, risks for common diseases, and more.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610251/forecasts-of-genetic-fate-just-got-a-lot-more-accurate/

An evolutionary “top 1%er.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43123658

An evolutionary “top 0.001er.” (It makes clones of itself instead of diluting its genome by reproducing with the other sex.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/attack-of-the-crayfish-clones/552236/

Two of Barbra Streisand’s dogs are clones of one of her dogs that died last year.
http://variety.com/2018/film/news/barbra-streisand-oscars-sexism-in-hollywood-clone-dogs-1202710585/

I saw this episode of Black Mirror last night. It’s completely right that killer robots will probably be small (though not necessarily dog-like), expendable, and able to function in spite of massive damage. The only inconsistencies in the depiction are:
1) The robot would have called for backup early on.
2) There would have been flying robots that could have zapped the woman out of the tree. Modern militaries don’t do it all with one type of weapon, and neither will future militaries made of robots.
https://youtu.be/OQFoyeCiMBE

It’s useful to think of future aerial drones as slow-flying, self-guided missiles.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42904204

The McKinsey Group predicts the U.S. economy will soon return to the high productivity growth rates it last experienced in the 1990s, thanks to the rollout/growth of several new technologies we keep hearing about, including autonomous vehicles.
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Global%20Themes/Meeting%20societys%20expectations/Solving%20the%20productivity%20puzzle/MGI-Solving-the-Productivity-Puzzle-Executive-summary-February2018.ashx

‘The robotaxis will be cars that last for 2 million miles and have lower operating costs. The interior seats will occasionally be swapped out or reupholstered. There will be no performance competition.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/02/the-robotaxi-future-will-not-care-about-car-brands-or-luxury.html

Quantum computers could vastly accelerate research in chemistry and materials science.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/microsoft-we-have-the-qubits-you-want-1519434417

A reminder that every exponential growth curve eventually flattens out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/02/weve-reached-peak-smartphone-what-are-apple-and-samsung-going-to-do-now/

The first iSlave has already been born.
‘The wristbands also feature an ultrasonic unit that’s used to track where the worker is in relation to any particular inventory bin. If their hands are moving to the wrong item, the bracelet will buzz.’
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16958918/amazon-patents-trackable-wristband-warehouse-employees

Amazon should combine the wristwatches with the “Jennifer Unit.” And then they should start calling their workers “Borg drones.” (And come to think of it, Amazon warehouses are giant cubes)
https://youtu.be/oC-ReBX0icU

Hitler’s mistakes led directly to defeat at the Battle of Kursk.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/why-the-battle-kursk-might-just-be-the-most-misunderstood-22931

It’s said that WWII played a major role in strengthening our sense of shared national identity because millions of Americans went through the homogenizing institution that was the U.S. military. But look at what happened to Yugoslavia when when it conscripted its citizens into regional militias dominated by different ethic groups.
http://warisboring.com/yugoslav-military-doctrine-hastened-the-countrys-collapse/

While America has largely come to grips over its acts of brutality during the Vietnam War, Vietnam’s communists still cover up their much worse record of wartime atrocities. None of them were brought to justice after the War.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/15/vietnam-war-government-accounts-1968-216973

Armored vehicles can only fit on cargo planes if the vehicles are small and light. To be small and light, armor must be sacrificed. Thin armor means the vehicles are easy to blow up in combat. The U.S. Army will never wish away this basic, physical reality.
http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2009/pdf/army/2009strykermgs.pdf

Diplomatic “end user agreements” partly (or wholly) explain why Turkey and Iraq both have tank fleets consisting of high-tech and low-tech vehicles.
http://warisboring.com/the-west-sold-tanks-to-the-middle-east-and-now-its-frustrated/

On the night of February 7-8, about 500 Russian mercenaries ignored repeated warnings from the U.S. military, and attacked an oil refinery in Syria that was held by American forces and American-friendly Syrian rebels. At least 100 and perhaps over 200 Russians died in the one-sided battle, in which they were torn apart by highly accurate U.S. artillery and ground attack aircraft and then ran away. The Kremlin has comically downplayed the scope of the defeat.
https://www.polygraph.info/a/us-wagner-russia-syria-scores-killed/29044339.html 

…and in totally unrelated news, Russia dispatched two of its stealth fighters to Syria two weeks later.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18773/satellite-imagery-confirms-russia-deployed-stealthy-su-57-fighters-to-syria

The U.S. military’s plans to arm ships with nuclear cruise missiles is so potentially destablizing to international security that it might just be a bluff meant to pressure Russia into abandoning its own nuclear weapon improvement efforts.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18804/us-eyes-adding-nuclear-cruise-missiles-to-zumwalt-stealth-destroyers-as-well-as-submarines

The scientific evidence for the “nuclear winter” theory is surprisingly weak, and may have been clandestinely encouraged by the USSR in the 1980s to strengthen anti-nuclear activists in the West.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/

‘This major upgrade is part of a series of upgrades—which include a new digital countermeasures suite, infrared search and track system, new cockpit, among other enhancements—that are slated to allow the F-15C/D fleet to soldier on till 2040 AND POSSIBLY BEYOND. The aircraft that receive these upgrades are called “Golden Eagles.”‘
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18259/its-back-to-the-future-for-u-s-f-15c-eagles-and-conformal-fuel-tanks

Here’s an interesting argument that America’s costly aircraft carriers would be useless in a war with an advanced enemy (China or Russia), and are just expensive tools for beating up weak countries.
http://cimsec.org/age-strike-carrier/30906

China’s fearsome island bases in the South China Sea could all be destroyed on the first day of fighting with the U.S.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/are-chinas-south-china-sea-bases-pointless-24546

The U.S. Army is developing truck-mounted multiple launch missiles that can be used against enemy ships and ground targets. The Marine Corps might also buy them. They could be used against Russia in the Baltic or against China in the South China Sea.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18427/the-army-eyes-getting-into-the-ship-killing-business-with-this-cruise-missile

Here’s a fascinating trove of declassified U.S. intelligence analyses of captured Soviet weapons. The recurring theme is that the Soviet scientists and engineers were about as smart as ours, but they had to make weapons that were less advanced and more conventional thanks to the inefficiencies and lagging technology of their factories. This philosophy led the Soviets to favor proven weapon designs and incremental upgrades to them. They preferred having an older, less efficient weapon they knew would work to having a higher-tech, more efficient weapon that hadn’t been put through its paces yet. The artificially low cost of factory labor in the USSR also manifested itself in some of their weapon components, which were obviously made by hand and to standards of precision that would be cost-prohibitive in the U.S.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2018-01-31/scavenging-intelligence-us-governments-secret-search-foreign

The differences in design philosophies carry over to the present day: ‘A sociological truth has emerged from the international effort: American engineers are more likely to try to finesse a structure, to make it as lightweight and as efficient as possible, while Russians build things stout.’
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/us-weighing-future-of-international-space-station/

The laws of optics establish inescapable tradeoffs between the size of a spy satellite and its photographic resolution. The size of a spy satellite, in turn, is capped by the sizes of our space rockets. Theoretically, a spy satellite that could read car license plates and discern human facial features from orbit could be built, but it would be massively expensive and an order of magnitude bigger than today’s biggest satellites.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/future-spy-satellites-just-got-exponentially-smaller/140700/
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3868/is-photography-from-a-satellite-good-enough-to-make-out-a-person-on-the-ground

BLAST FROM THE PAST! “China plans moon landing around 2017”
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-11/04/content_491424.htm

The reality: “CHINESE SPACE STATION WILL CRASH TO EARTH IN MARCH CARRYING A ‘HIGHLY TOXIC’ CHEMICAL”
http://www.newsweek.com/tiangong-1-chinese-space-station-will-crash-earth-march-carrying-highly-toxic-770625

Our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, had a massive solar flare last year, which might have fried its planet, Proxima-b.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-proxima-centauri-good-bad-day.html

He makes a great point at the end: A particular star system might be completely unsuited for the rise of organic life, but could still be riddled with non-indigenous aliens that used technology to get there. This weakens the case for focusing SETI’s surveillance efforts on stars that seem to have the “right” conditions for organic life.
https://youtu.be/j2AfvkQi7qI

‘In short, I can see no reason why an iPhone in 2-3 years time couldn’t match the performance of today’s DSLRs for 99% of occasions.’
https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/27/opinion-iphone-replace-dslr/

“Aesthetically, these [AI- taken] pictures aren’t masterworks. Emotionally, they’re on a higher plane.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/technology/future-cameras-ai-brains.html

There’s no reason why biometric recognition software couldn’t be applied to many species of animals just as it is with humans. Pairing that software with a global surveillance network would yield highly accurate, real-time monitoring of wild species populations.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/02/ai-used-to-track-pigs-and-facial-recognize-cows.html

Fish are unevenly distributed across the world’s oceans.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/22/588034042/new-maps-reveal-global-fishings-vast-scope-of-exploitation-of-the-ocean

“In 1942…the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/the-perfect-milk-machine-how-big-data-transformed-the-dairy-industry/256423/

“As a result of high costs, Gordon-Smith said, several vertical farms in North America have failed in recent years.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/vertical-farming-houston/552665/ 

“For the most sensitive pieces of equipment, work could only be done within a clean-room nested inside another, larger clean-room.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/22/assembly-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-x-ray-laser-has-begun-at-slac/

It’s interesting that they’re able to film scenes indoors but make them look naturally lit. Exactly how far are we from 100% CGI films that look completely real? When will the characters be 100% CGI?
https://io9.gizmodo.com/even-tv-dramas-without-dragons-in-them-are-packed-full-1822660136

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Review: “In Time”

“In Time” movie poster

Plot: (borrowed and modified from IMDB)

In a future Los Angeles society, people are genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and after that a biological clock is activated granting one more year of life to each person. Everyone has a digital clock on the inside of one of their forearms that displays how much remaining time they have (the display characters are bioluminescent and are visible through the skin), and people can trade time by shaking hands. Time that can be added to or subtracted from one’s personal biological clock is the new currency: Working-class people are paid extra hours of life in exchange for their labor, everyday goods and services are bought using time, and rich people make money off of businesses that loan time to borrowers. When a person’s time runs out, they instantly die of a heart attack. People can also die from physical injury.

The inside of a person’s forearm displays their remaining lifespan

Poorer people commonly live on the edge of survival, with less than 24 hours of time remaining on their biological clocks each day. Rich people can have eons of time, making them effectively immortal. The rich are completely parasitic upon the poor and there’s no evidence of a democratic government, social programs or human rights. Rich people control all of the businesses and use a combination of low wages, deliberate price inflation, usurious time lending companies, and police violence to keep the masses too poor to think about anything but clocking in to the widget factory to make enough time to not die that day. The rich also occasionally turn those screws tight enough to kill off poor people when the ghettos get overpopulated.

The ultra-stratified socioeconomic order is further cemented by legal housing segregation, with walls separating rich and poor neighborhoods, which are referred to as different “Time Zones” (this movie is full of “time”-related puns like that). Tolls to pass through the gates are set too high for the poor to afford it.

Toll booth at a Time Zone border crossing

In other words, this is liberal Hollywood’s vision of how the world works, taken to a comical extreme.

Justin Timberlake plays a typical wage slave named “Will Salas.” His dad is dead, he lives in a run-down apartment with his mom, and he works on a dreary factory assembly line. One day, he’s hanging out at a local bar when he meets a depressed and suicidal rich guy named “Henry Hamilton.” Timberlake saves him from getting robbed of his 100 years of time, and the two hide from the roving ghetto criminals in an abandoned building overnight. While waiting for daylight, they talk, and Henry Hamilton (who looks 25 years old like everyone else) reveals that he is 105 and sick of living. He also tells Timberlake–who apparently is uneducated and never questioned his bad lot in life–that society is setup in a fundamentally unfair way, and that there’s no reason why time can’t be distributed more evenly throughout the population.
Timberlake’s own life story and personality inspire Henry, so while Timberlake is asleep on the couch, Henry grabs his hand and transfers 100 years of time to him. Henry then jumps off a bridge.

Rather than indulge in a life of luxury for once, Timberlake’s fortunes nosedive immediately: After the police find Henry’s dead body and see surveillance camera footage of Timberlake in the area right after, they assume it was a murder-theft and Timberlake becomes a wanted man, with a stereotypical cold, obsessed detective (played by Cillian Murphy) leading a squad to chase him down. His first day as a rich guy gets worse after he donates 10 years of time to his best friend, who promptly uses it to drink himself to death at a bar, and then even worse that night when Timberlake’s mom runs out of time and dies a few seconds before he can grab her hand and do a time transfer.

A broken man with nothing to lose anymore and a new awareness of the exploitative structure of society, Timberlake sets out to take revenge on the evil rich people. Once he gets into the rich Time Zone, called “New Greenwich,” he sets his sights the tycoon “Philippe Weis,” who made a fortune from a chain of usurious time-lending businesses in the ghettos, and on his beautiful daughter Sylvia.

I won’t totally ruin the ending, but unsurprisingly for a simplistic movie like this, good beats evil and the underdog hero gets the girl at the end. Watch it or not. This is no Citizen Kane.

I thought In Time was a superficial movie that made me a little sick with its moralizing. Its deathism also made my eyes roll, with Timberlake and other characters spouting out epic-sounding lines like “No one should be immortal.” That bravado sounds great until you realize that the same rhetoric could be used to justify denying life saving medical technologies to dying people today. Like a fool who likes to watch boxing matches while yelling at the TV set that he could easily beat up one of the professional fighters, everyone is stoic and tough-talking about death until they have to face it, in which case 99% of people plead for God, weep like babies, and will use any technology to live just one more day. I expected nothing better from this film, but it disappointed me nonetheless.

Also, the movie should have been at least 20 minutes shorter. During the last half of it, I felt stuck in a time loop (pun intended) where Timberlake, Sylvia, and the police played an aimless and repetitive game of cat-and-mouse. The acting was “OK,” but there clearly wasn’t much of a budget since they used the same L.A. River stretch and film studio back lot for shooting most of the movie’s scenes.

A year isn’t given for the movie’s events, and I doubt the filmmakers intended for it to be an accurate depiction of the future (e.g. – humans are still working in factories and no attempt was made to put futuristic technology in the film, except electric cars), so it’s hard for me to gauge the film’s probable accuracy. This is social commentary about capitalism’s exploitation of the poor in the present day. However, let me do a calculation so we’ll have something to go on: I think medical immortality–which is a “close enough” stand-in for an end to aging once you hit 25–will exist in the year 2100. The character Henry Hamilton is 105, making him the oldest person in the movie that we know of. Making the assumption he was 25 in the year 2100 when the cure for aging was discovered, In Time is set in 2180.

For that year, In Time actually depicts the future accurately where it tries to.

Medical immortality will create a world full of young, beautiful people. All of the actors and extras look to be in their 20s and are physically attractive. There wasn’t one obese person in the whole movie. I agree that the overwhelming majority of humans alive in 2180 will look young and attractive thanks to technology.

Where are the ugly people?

Medical immortality, technologies that can halt or reverse the aging process, and advanced plastic surgery techniques should be commonly available by then. In addition, ordinary people will be the beneficiaries of several successive generations of human genetic engineering, meaning congenital health defects and even cosmetic imperfections (baldness, abnormally tall or short height, small breasts, etc.) will be almost entirely excised from the human gene pool. Prices for all of these things should also be very low thanks to patent expirations, free machine labor, and government reimbursement (e.g. – Medicaid pays for genetically engineering your children).

However, just as there are Amish people today, I think in 2180 there will be humans who eschew such technologies for various reasons, meaning there will still be some old-looking and ugly people. There very well could have been such people in the film universe, but they just weren’t shown because the movie only focused on what was happening to a relatively small group of people in Los Angeles.

I’d also imagine the already existing trend for people to generally become more courteous and respectful as they age would continue, even if their looks stayed youthful. The good manners displayed by the rich people in the movie are probably an accurate depiction of how people will act in the distant future, when the average person has over 100 years of life experiences, mistakes, relationships, and hard knocks.

Parents will look and act the same age as their kids. The “ageless” nature of society is hit home early in the movie when Timberlake is first shown in his apartment with a beautiful young woman he startlingly calls “Mom.” She’s actually in her 40s and Timberlake is 28. Even 105-year-old people like Henry Hamilton look to be in their 20s. This would definitely be the consequence of age-manipulation technologies, and in 2180, it will be common for parents, children, and even grandparents/children to look the same age.

Also, radical extensions to human lifespan will upend the natural familial and generational relationships between parents and offspring as the initial maturity and life experience advantages held by the parent get vanishingly small over time. For example, if you’re 10 and your mom is 40, she is definitely wiser than you. But what if you’re 110 and she’s 140? How much of an edge does her extra 30 years of life give her over you at that point? Could you have even caught up to or surpassed her if you spent your adult years being more active and doing more enriching things?

Once we end aging, we will invariably end up in a world where parents and children converge to the same physical and mental state in the long run. It’s likely we’ll come to think of our parents and children more like siblings.

At least two generations of the same family are shown here.

Also, the film highlights a funny consequence of this in a scene where the bad guy tycoon Philippe Weis is at a fancy party with three young beautiful woman at his side, and Timberlake can’t tell at first glance how they’re related to him (Mother? Wife? Daughter? Granddaughter?), which complicates his strategy for approaching them. I actually don’t think this will be a problem in 2180 because humans will have cybernetic enhancements that will automatically scan and identify the people around them.

Eternal life might make people more risk-averse. When Timberlake goes to New Greenwich, he falls in love with Philippe Weis’ daughter, Sylvia. She’s a fusion of the classic Hollywood “forbidden fruit” and “rebellious princess” tropes, and waxes about her boredom with rich life and her uninformed belief that the poor get more out of life since they’re always on the verge of running out of time and dying. To show what a romantic badass he is, Timberlake dares her to go swimming in the ocean at night, which she initially refuses to do because she’s been conditioned to avoid dangerous activities. Medical immortality will indeed make people more risk-averse since they’ll have more to lose in a sense, but I doubt it will get so bad the people won’t want to do common things like swim in the ocean anymore.

By 2180, our bodies and the world around us will be infused with intelligent technology, which will go a long way towards mitigating risks to human life. An average human in that year will probably have cybernetic implants and wearable devices that continuously monitor their environment, calculate risk probabilities, and warn them of unsafe conditions or bad decisions they seem to be contemplating. There will also be robots everywhere that can rescue humans or render medical aid. This might get the point where every human has to be followed around by a helper robot and/or can have their actions canceled out by remote signals sent to their cybernetic implants (think of a technological nanny state where the government can make you instantly pass out if you start acting stupid). Given all the safeguards that will be in place, humans might be able to take more “risks” each day than you might think.

By 2180, humans might also make periodic “backups” of their minds using some kind of brain scanning technology. AIs will definitely back themselves up constantly, along with taking other measures to protect their lives, like distributing their consciousness among many different servers in different locations, which each server heavily protected against physical attack and computer viruses. Even if one server were destroyed, a duplicate could be instantly created and added to the network using a backup of the destroyed server’s data. By the same token, if one of your brain cells dies, your remaining brain cells can quickly do some neural re-wiring to compensate, and your consciousness does not die.

People will be able to transfer things by holding hands. In the movie, people can trade time by holding hands. As one person’s time decreases, the other person’s increases by the same amount, and their forearm digital clocks rapidly change to reflect this. I think by 2180, it will be common for humans to have cybernetic implants, organs, and body parts, and those artificial systems  will allow people to transfer electricity, data, nanomachines, and maybe their thoughts and feelings through physical contact (just imagine all humans having the equivalent of a USB plug built into the palms of their hands). Wireless transmission of data and maybe even electricity will also be possible.

In a way, it might be possible to transfer “life” to a dying person in the future by holding their hand and transferring electricity to recharge their batteries, nanomachines to repair their tissue damage, or data to fix some malfunction in their computer implants.

There will still be poor people and human factory workers. Absolutely not. The poorest person in 2180 will have a much better life in most ways than the richest person today, mostly thanks to better technology. Wealth and income disparities could still exist, and purely biological humans will probably find themselves in the lowest socioeconomic stratum, but poverty as we know it will be a distant memory. Factories will also be completely automated.

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, January 2018 edition

Career chemist sees no reason why chemical synthesis can’t be automated with current levels of technology. This may or may not
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/30/automated-chemistry-a-vision

Alternate headline: “Humans can’t beat a simple computer program at predicting crimes.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/

Microsoft’s CEO says that quantum computing will be an indispensable component of AI.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42797846

The “Nuro” is a Smart Car-sized, remote-piloted delivery vehicle. I think something like this will prove cheaper and more practical than flying drones for autonomous deliveries of cargo.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16936548/nuro-self-driving-delivery-last-mile-google

This is one of those future concepts that I think will 50% completely fail and 50% succeed–albeit taking a different form than the author imagines.
https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1

1997 NYT article: When a computer masters the game of Go, “it will be a sign that artificial intelligence is truly beginning to become as good as the real thing,” but don’t worry since “It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer.” [It happened in 2016.]
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/29/science/to-test-a-powerful-computer-play-an-ancient-game.html?pagewanted=all

In the 20 years since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the Elo scores of the best human chess players have barely improved, whereas machines have gotten vastly better: today’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, has a score of 2834, and the best computer chess programs are in the 3400s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html

‘Once developed, [killer robots] will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/killer-robots-weapons.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&referer

Just five years after Google’s neural network taught itself to recognize cat faces, the company thinks machines are ready to recognize 5,000 species of plants and animals. How many species could you correctly identify from photos?
https://qz.com/954530/five-years-ago-ai-was-struggling-to-identify-cats-now-its-trying-to-tackle-5000-species/

An article about how AIs will replace human workers slowly, and for the foreseeable future, will not destroy more human jobs than they create.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-augments-human-skills/

One of the clearer descriptions of what a blockchain is.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/blockchain-technology-concepts-explained.html

A fascinating description of how a blockchain-based replacement for Uber might work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html

Did someone say…”Predictions”?
https://qz.com/1171977/ten-2018-predictions-from-the-founder-of-the-blockchain-research-institute/

On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it’s worth looking back at the weapons of the Vietnam War, and considering the handful of them that are still not obsolete (most notably, the AK-47 rifle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War

Forty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. is selling warships to its former enemy.
http://www.janes.com/article/76746/vietnam-s-ex-us-coast-guard-cutter-arrives-home

Iraq plans to slap on some upgrades to keep their junker T-55 and Type 69 tanks running. The Type 69 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet T-62, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-55, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-54. If countries like Iraq keep cheapskating their militaries, will we someday have robot crews driving around 100-year-old tanks?
http://warisboring.com/iraq-learned-tank-lessons-in-the-war-with-islamic-state/

This clunker was commissioned in 1970 and will probably stay in service until 2039.
https://www.stripes.com/news/navy-s-oldest-deployable-warship-comes-out-of-yokosuka-dry-dock-after-19-months-1.508005

The first Cash for Clunkers program
http://warisboring.com/49425-2/

Swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones will probably dominate future warfare. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” concept could make a comeback.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17698/chinas-is-hard-at-work-developing-swarms-of-small-drones-on-multiple-levels

BAE is building microwave weapons that can fry the electronics of enemy planes, ships, and drones at close range. It might be an effective defense against swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17796/bae-systems-wants-its-new-microwave-close-in-weapon-system-concept-on-us-navy-ships

India’s aircraft carriers are vanity projects that will have little use in any all-out war with the most likely enemy, Pakistan.
http://warisboring.com/indias-third-aircraft-carrier-is-most-likely-a-waste-of-money/

Nuclear depth charges were a thing: a 30 kiloton underwater detonation (this is a below-average yield tactical nuke) sank dummy subs out to a radius of 1 mile.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-nuke-a-submarine-2f0bd50f39e

“The rule of thumb is that vertical takeoff and landing means a 50% reduction in payload.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/us-navy-baby-carrier-deploys-to-pacific-intl/index.html

In spite of the recent saber-rattling and improvements to North Korea’s nuclear missiles, a second Korean War is highly unlikely.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/11/should-you-worry-about-a-u-s-war-with-north-korea-not-really/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/03/why-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-is-less-likely-than-you-think/

Bill Gates and Steven Pinker agree that the state of humankind is continuing to improve, but only seems to be getting worse thanks to information technology and to an increasing williness of long-marginalized people to speak out, making us hyper-aware of what problems remain.
https://Fmobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/mind-meld-bill-gates-steven-pinker.html

Another step towards fleets of cheap, autonomous ships for oceanic and climate monitoring. In time, they would have even more uses.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/141674.html

Someone has been photoshopping faces of female celebrities onto nude performers in porn videos. This is only the beginning: It’s only a matter of time before computers can easily make highly accurate, 3-D models of people just by looking at photos and video footage of them. As an intermediate step, the data could be used to find porn stars whose body types best matched each celebrity’s and to digitally graft the celebrity’s face onto each nude doppelganger, but ultimately, it will be possible to make fully lifelike, CGI porn movies starring any person.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley

“Average” is beautiful: “Facial averageness” is considered beautiful.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/face-perception/the-beauty-of-averageness/

Chinese geneticists have cloned monkeys, but the failure rate was extremely high: Out of 79 clone embryos they created and implanted into female monkeys, only two were born healthy. All the rest either spontaneously aborted or died shortly after being born. The technique or a slight modification of it could probably be used to clone humans.
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30057-6

In the early 1800s, Iceland got its first non-white immigrant: a half black, half white man named “Hans Jonathan.” He had two kids with a white woman, and today, his DNA is found in 788 Icelanders. By sequencing the genomes of 182 of these descendants and cross-referencing them, geneticists were able to reconstruct 19% of Hans’ genome. The task was made easy by the fact that African DNA easily stood out, and by Iceland’s highly detailed genealogical records, but in principle, the same method could be used to reconstruct any ancestor’s DNA. With advanced enough technology, we could make “clones” of long-dead people.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6

Genealogy is kind of meaningless since ultimately, we all share the same ancestors and are from the same place. Stopping your research at one point in the past is an arbitrary choice, and having an ancestor that was famous or royal doesn’t make you special.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-genealogy-is-bunk.html

Identical twins also share the same epigenetics.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/not-just-genes-identical-twins-exhibit-supersimilarity

Using frozen human embryos for IVF is just as likely to succeed as using fresh embryos.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1705334

Baseline, subjective happiness level is also highly heritable, which raises the prospect of genetically engineering humans to be happier.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/classic-study-on-happiness-and-the-lottery.html

More on that: Brain damage and surgical removals of parts of the brain can improve people’s personalities. I wonder if it will be common for people in the future to get brain surgeries that make them happier or nicer.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180108-when-personality-changes-from-bad-to-good

Scientists have developed tiny needles that can inject drugs into the brain. Targeted injection sites can be as small as 1 sq mm.
http://news.mit.edu/2018/ultrathin-needle-can-deliver-drugs-directly-brain-0124

The amino acids and three-unit codons that form the basis of all genetics might be optimally evolved in form and function. Whenever we find organic alien life, its DNA will look and work almost identically to our own. There is, however, a small chance that a clean-sheet genome consisting of more types of amino acids and longer codons might be superior, but there’s no plausible way natural selection could bring it about (we have settled into a local optimum when the global optimum still lurks far off). Ultimately, optimizing biological life forms from the molecular level up is probably a task that only intelligent machines will be able to do in the distant future. All multicellular life forms are so finely-tuned to use the existing genetic alphabet that testing the hypothesis by changing things at the margins probably impossible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/expanding-the-genetic-alphabet/549620/

Is human wealth inequality just a manifestation of broad resource- and genetic-dominance inequality observed in any group of organisms?
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/50/13154.full.pdf

Reality check on a “revolutionary new cancer test” that the media massively overhyped. More health information isn’t always better thanks to the risk of false positives.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/22/a-hard-look-at-liquid-biopsies

Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime provide extraordinarily cheap entertainment. Never in human history has it been easier for people to occupy themselves.
http://efficiencyiseverything.com/entertainment-per-dollar/

More on that:
http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Costs-For-Americans.png

Fallout 3 is a very highly rated game, takes 23-130 hours to complete, and can be bought for only $5. That averages out to…basically free.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=3340
http://www.gamelengths.com/games/playtimes/Fallout+3/

Stephen Spielberg thinks “Ready Player One” is an accurate representation of the future…everyone is unemployed and spends their lives playing virtual reality games.
https://youtu.be/aWz6d1Z6bnU

Rollable TV screens will become mainstream once rigid screens get too big to fit through standard-sized entry doors. I think rollable, 8K resolution TVs that cover entire walls should become common in the 2030s.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/08/technology/lg-rollable-display-ces-2018/index.html

Google Glass may have failed, but I’ve always thought augmented reality (AR) glasses were a worthy tech concept that would return in an improved form. The “Vuzix Blade,” which reviewers have described as being an improved version of Google Glass that also makes use of the Alexa voice-activated AI assistant, could herald that return.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869174/vuzix-blade-ar-glasses-augmented-reality-amazon-alexa-ai-ces-2018

I really like the prediction about the future “on-demand economy.” Someone puts out a gig announcement, and AIs instantly figure out which human can do the gig the best, and they notify the person. If robots are constantly telling you to do one gig after another, it will kind of add up to something like a job.
https://msblob.blob.core.windows.net/ncmedia/2018/01/The-Future-Computed.pdf

Related: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/filling-americas-6-million-job-vacancies/549752/

It’s been one month since the NYT front page article exposing the existence of a secret U.S. government program to study UFOs appeared, and the government has still made NO ATTEMPT to deny its claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Guillermo del Toro saw a UFO: ‘The UFO, says del Toro, “Went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life.’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toro-seeing-a-ufo-hearing-ghosts-shaping-water-1068754

A critic breaks down all of the reasons why the Star Wars First Order’s space ships make no design sense. I agree that advanced space ships won’t really have “top” and “bottom” parts, but they could still be asymmetrical.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a28088/star-wars-the-last-jedi-dreadnought-star-destroyer/

The $30 million XPrize award for the first company that landed a private rover on the Moon will go unclaimed.
https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize

It’s possible the recent SpaceX rocket launch was actually successful, but the military satellite they put in orbit is so secret that they had to claim it crashed and the mission failed.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17612/the-secret-zuma-spacecraft-could-be-alive-and-well-doing-exactly-what-it-was-intended-to

Diesel car engines have been unfairly villified by the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42666596

 

If New York’s government can sue oil companies for making global warming worse, than can someone else sue New York’s government for shutting down its nuclear power plants, which also made global warming worse?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/new-york-suing-oil-companies-but-how-about-suing-new-york-for-shutting-nuclear-reactors.html

An argument against “geoengineering” turned on its head: Whale feces contains high levels of iron, iron dumped in seawater causes plankton blooms, and plankton blooms sequester CO2. Whale populations are about 70% lower now thanks to human predation than they were in pre-Industrial times. If we dumped iron powder in the oceans, we’d be restoring the natural carbon sequestration mechanism of the ocean rather than doing something unnatural.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html

 

 

Transhumanists are overwhelmingly likely to be the oldest children in their families.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, December 2017 edition

The U.S. working-age population would be shrinking right now if not for immigrants and the children of immigrants. This will continue until at least 2035.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/

East Asia will have to import 275m people between the ages of 15 and 64 by 2030 to keep its working age population stable.
http://econ.st/2jT5FYx

But will demand for immigrant workers slacken once we have robot workers? Ben Goertzel thinks “toddler-level AGI” will be invented by 2030, followed by the Singularity.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Skip the first 15 minutes. Greg Brockman believes deep learning isn’t close to hitting the limits of what it can do, and its capabilities will continue radically improving thanks to better, faster hardware. By the end of 2018, he thinks machines will be able to generate artificial audio and video (like imitations of human voices and totally fake video footage) that humans won’t be able to distinguish from reality. Within five years, he thinks a breakthrough will happen in robotics, making them much more capable and practical for use.
https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-74-towards-artificial-general-intelligence-greg-brockman/

Google claims it can already convincingly fake human voices.
https://qz.com/1165775/googles-voice-generating-ai-is-now-indistinguishable-from-humans/

A timely counterpoint to bellicose declarations that “machines will never replace humans” and “human judgement will always be needed,” etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/washington-wreck-positive-train-control/548744/

Self-driving cars might offer people free taxi rides in the future, so long as passengers are willing to endure sales pitches from various corporate sponsors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/self-driving-cars-free-future/548945/

The typical American thinks his personal odds of losing work to machines are 30%, while everyone else’s odds average out to 49%.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/automation-in-everyday-life/#many-americans-expect-a-number-of-professions-to-be-dominated-by-machines-within-their-lifetimes-but-relatively-few-expect-their-own-jobs-or-professions-to-be-impacted

When asked individually, Americans say that they would not feel threatened by the discovery of non-intelligent aliens and it would not shake their religious beliefs, but they assume that would not be true for everyone else. ‘That may be because “most Americans tend to think, on any desirable trait or ability, that they’re better than the average person.”‘
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/04/how-will-humanity-react-to-alien-life-psychologists-have-some-predictions/

An article appeared on the front page of the NYT exposing a secret Pentagon program devoted to studying UFOs. It has evidence of UFOs doing impossible aerial maneuvers and anomalous physical materials recovered at UFO land/crash sites. As of the date of me writing this blog post, the Pentagon has not denied anything in the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Videos leaked from that UFO program’s trove, showing a 2004 encounter between U.S. fighter planes and a strange object off the coast of California. The pilots could see it with their eyes and it also showed up on their visioning sensors.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-delonge-takes-alien-research-215651746.html\

Humans are genetically programmed to believe bad news over good news, and are likelier to remember bad things. In opinion polls, this expresses itself as overestimation of metrics like the crime rate,  incidence of terrorism, and incidence of poor health.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42329014

Of course, sometimes the conventional wisdom that the world is getting worse is true: People with lower IQs and people who are overweight are breeding faster than everyone else.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21732803-it-does-however-no-longer-seem-favour-braininess-data-half-million

‘This may be the most powerful gene-manipulation toolkit that has yet been described, and you can expect to see a lot of work on it in the coming months as other groups give it a shakedown. ‘
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/08/crispr-the-latest-edition

The first two “gay genes” have been identified. By themselves, they don’t automatically make men gay, but they’re more common in gays.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2155810-what-do-the-new-gay-genes-tell-us-about-sexual-orientation/

The FDA will make it easier for companies to sell DNA testing kits directly to Americans.
https://gizmodo.com/the-fda-just-made-it-a-lot-easier-for-dna-health-tests-1820216695

The FDA has approved a new wearable medical device: The Kardiaband EKG, which can be attached to an Apple Watch to detect abnormal heart activity with high accuracy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5138101/FDA-approves-Apple-Watchs-medical-device-accessory.html

‘..So perhaps we’re finally heading for that era of personalized medicine that everyone keeps talking about…as sequencing gets relentlessly cheaper and more widespread.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/18/genetic-variation-gets-more-real-all-the-time

Woman, 26, gives birth to baby who spent 24 years as frozen embryo

Should society pay for uterus transplants so that infertile women can have “the experience of pregnancy”? The experience of raising a child seems to be what really counts, and it can be had much more cheaply and at lower risk through hiring a surrogate mother.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/05/568453168/first-baby-born-to-u-s-uterus-transplant-patient-raises-ethics-questions

‘Public Health England says there is a large amount of evidence that shows e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking – at least 95%.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42328236

Metformin is one of the best candidates for a human anti-aging pill.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42273362

Within your lifetime, the means to make yourself digitally immortal will probably be invented. Here is its nascent form.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572068474/illinois-holocaust-museum-preserves-survivors-stories-as-holograms

What bad futurism looks like:
Article title: ‘2018 is when something finally gives on North Korea’
At the end of article: ‘It’s possible that a year from now not much will have changed: no war, no talks, no significant results from sanctions.’
https://qz.com/1157919/2018-is-when-something-finally-gives-on-north-korea/

‘“It is beyond me why we think an enemy [like North Korea] would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city…EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon — for any reason — it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response.”’
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/expert-emp-weapons-are-loony-idea-23695

The first atomic bomb–“Little Boy”–was surprisingly simple, and one man was able to build detailed blueprints for it using open source data. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/26/570806064/north-korea-designed-a-nuke-so-did-this-truck-driver

The first stealth aircraft, the F-117, is 40 years old. The U.S. built it thanks to insights gleaned from a Soviet paper on radar reflectivity, which was published 51 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/stealth-turns-40-looking-back-at-the-first-flight-of-have-blue/

Almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, most of NATO’s Eastern European members are still using Cold War-era weapons whose technology is not compatible with the West’s. A partial, affordable solution might be program to modify the Eastern European weapons.
http://www.janes.com/article/76473/kharkov-morozov-design-bureau-unveils-new-t-72-upgrade

Bulgaria has to send its fighter planes to Russia for maintenance, even though the country is in NATO and would have to use those same aircraft to fight Russia someday. The underfunding and failure to get rid of Soviet-era hardware could be a disaster in a war.
http://www.janes.com/article/76391/bulgaria-turns-to-russia-for-mig-29-logistics

In the U.S., we see problems from the opposite extreme, where the military is overfunded and has the luxury of falling for the siren song of advanced, unproven weapons tech that never get off the ground.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16695/the-navy-is-changing-its-plans-for-its-dumbed-down-zumwalts-and-their-ammoless-guns

Upgrading old clunkers like UH-1 helicopters with autonomous capabilities could keep them in service for decades to come.
http://www.janes.com/article/76439/usmc-onr-conduct-final-autonomously-operated-uh-1-demonstration

Flying drones that are indistinguishable from birds would have great reconnaissance value to militaries. ‘Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds.’
https://youtu.be/-gc8kBmzOOI

Fleets of cheap, autonomous mini-subs could map the seafloor. Someday, every shipwreck will be known and every chest-o-pirate-gold recovered.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42335230

Google Maps has so comprehensively mapped the Earth’s surface that it’s moving on to cataloging the exact locations of exterior building doors and mailboxes.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

By the end of 2018, the U.S. might be a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia or Russia. (U.S.-Canada fossil fuels production won’t peak until around 2030.)
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/us-crude-oil-production-could-be-more-than-saudi-arabia-in-january.html

The DoD’s experimental “safe” alternative to cluster bombs was basically a giant nail bomb. (It failed, and we’re just bringing back cluster bombs.)
http://www.janes.com/article/76101/pentagon-reverses-cluster-munition-ban

‘If you asked experts a few years ago when they expected this to happen, they’d have been likely to say in one or two decades. Earlier this year, some experts I polled had revised their forecast to within two to five years. But Martinis’s team at Google recently announced that they hope to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of this year.’
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2017/12/how-quantum-computing-will-change-world

Throwing cold water on AlphaGo Zero’s recent gaming milestones:
https://medium.com/@josecamachocollados/is-alphazero-really-a-scientific-breakthrough-in-ai-bf66ae1c84f2

Two years ago, Elon Musk said we’d have autonomous cars in two years.
https://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/

This year, Elon Musk said he’d build a massive battery farm in Australia within 100 days. He did it in 60.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42190358

“Space blindness”: The latest monkey wrench thrown into our big plans to go to Mars. “ The Mission has been “Only 20 or 30 years away” since I was a little kid.
At least our killer robots will get there someday.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/dec/02/space-blindness-must-be-solved-before-mission-to-m/

 

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Review: “Starship Troopers”

In the distant future, Earth prospers under a global, quasi-fascist oligarchy where only military veterans are allowed to vote or have political power. Earth’s military is enormous and is based around a fleet of large space warships that carry expeditionary soldiers called the “Mobile Infantry.” This force defends the expanding sphere of human civilization against a race of large, insect aliens nicknamed “the Arachnids.” After human colonists try to settle on an Arachnid planet, they retaliate by destroying the settlement and flinging an asteroid at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires and leading to all-out war between the two species.

The film focuses on the wartime experiences of Rico and his three friends, who all enroll in the military right after high school and quickly lose their innocence in the ensuing war. It is a classic bildungsroman tale, and though panned by most critics, is held in esteem for its entertainment value and satirical take on the fascist elements of American culture.

A date for the film’s events is not given, though we do have one clue. During the high school graduation dance party, a band performs a variation of David Bowie’s song “I’ve not been to Oxford Town.” The original song was released in 1995 and contained this stanza:

“But I have not been to Oxford Town

(All’s well)
But I have not been to Oxford Town
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
20th century dies”

The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.
The band performing at the high school graduation
The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:
“But I have not been to Paradise

(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”

Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.

There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.

While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.

Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.

There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.

There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.

The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.

This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.

The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.

When your guns don’t even have BB gun iron sights, all you can do is spray and pray.

The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.

In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.

It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.

Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.

Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.

Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.

So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”

Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.

This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.

Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.

ARMed and dangerous!

Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.

There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.

Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.

On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.

But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.

I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.

In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.

We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.

In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.

Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.

The Davy Crockett nuclear launcher

If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.

Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.

Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.

Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.

We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”

I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.

Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.

Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.

Government commercial encouraging psychics to come forward

Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.

Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.

Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.

Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.

As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.

Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.

One of the smaller drop ships

I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.

A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.

A CH-47 can hold up to 33 troops, which looked to be the same capacity as the larger Starship Troopers drop ships

The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, November 2017 edition

  1. Another reason why you should always be skeptical of Russian predictions about how strong their military will be within X years.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16175/russia-rolls-out-new-tu-160m2-but-are-moscows-bomber-ambitions-realistic
  2. Russia won’t start mass producing stealth fighters until 2027 at the earliest. (U.S. F-22s started rolling off the assembly line in 2005.)
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-su-57-stealth-fighter-s-500-air-defense-system-23383
  3. Contrary to what is widely believed (thanks to fiction like The Hunt for Red October), the USSR/Russia has always been far behind the U.S. in submarine technology, and the gap is widening.
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/why-russias-new-stealth-submarines-have-big-problem-22941
  4. The Russians used a spy ship with submersible instruments and winches to raise or destroy their two fighter planes that crashed into the Mediterranean during Syrian support operations. They did this within five days of each crash to prevent American subs from snatching them from the seafloor and examining the technology.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16379/russia-scooped-up-wrecks-of-crashed-naval-fighters-off-sea-floor-near-syria
  5. A tale of two military readiness levels (this has just a little bit to do with differences in how well-funded the two forces are).
    First: http://www.janes.com/article/75790/over-half-of-bundeswehr-s-leopard-2-mbts-are-not-operationally-ready
    Second: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16366/portlands-142nd-fighter-wing-launches-13-f-15c-ds-eagles-in-rare-snap-readiness-drill
  6. The Air Force is reusing WWII-era shells and 1950s-made barrels for some of their AC-130 gunship cannons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16523/the-usaf-is-rebuilding-world-war-ii-era-40mm-shells-for-its-ac-130u-gunships
  7. What happens when you try fixing something that ain’t broke:
    http://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-still-hasnt-figured-out-how-to-make-a-decent-uniform/
  8. “Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html
  9. “The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.”
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/
  10. We were supposed to have power armor in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-to-make-tech-exoskeleton-for-army/
  11. “As it was, Task Force Rogue One met only five out of the ten performance measures that the U.S. Army uses to evaluate a successful raid.”
    https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/27/no-more-task-force-rogue-ones-a-tactical-analysis-of-the-raid-on-scarif/
  12. There’s no evidence that mandatory health checkups reduce the incidence or severity of diabetes, even when the checkups result in early warnings that patients are developing the disease.
    https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/preventive-care-worth-cost-evidence-mandatory-checkups
  13. A handful of people are still in iron lungs.
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-apos-last-iron-lung-222200990.html
  14. Big pharma is less profitable than you probably think, and its profit trajectory is grim.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-grim-future-here-are-the-numbers
  15. A brain exercise has finally been scientifically proven to reduce the odds of getting dementia.
    http://news.medicine.iu.edu/releases/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.shtml
  16. Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means.
    https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/
  17. The genetic mutation inhibits the PAI-1 enzyme, extends lifespan by 10 years and sharply reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t seem to carry any downsides.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/well/live/amish-mutation-protects-against-diabetes-and-may-extend-life.html
  18. The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
    FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629
  19. “The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning.”
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law/
  20. Related:
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/24/the-genomic-revolution-shows-up-late-but-shows-up
  21. An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions.
    https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo
  22. Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/
  23. ‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’
    https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities
  24. Is a stressed-out human phone operator who is trained to suppress and fake their own emotions and to read from a script more “personable” than a machine? Will human advantages in jobs requiring emotional interaction and nurturing endure?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/are-humans-actually-more-human-than-robots/545714/
  25. If you had a human friend who had elementary knowledge of 40 languages and could do basic translations between any two of them, would you be laughing in their face at their mistakes, or would you be in awe of their intelligence?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-42066517/google-pixel-buds-language-translation-tested
  26. Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths.
    https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods
  27. Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html
  28. An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
  29. Plants are green because they don’t absorb the green-colored portion of the visible light spectrum. The pink-colored windows absorb the green light and turn it into electricity.
    https://phys.org/news/2017-11-solar-greenhouses-electricity-crops.html
  30. An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/
  31. The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
    “The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.”
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers
  32. Why having industry standards and two or three established big guys dominating a market is important:
    https://qz.com/1132657/an-internet-of-things-flop-means-some-connected-lights-wont-work-anymore/
  33. It’s just as likely this discovery will end up as another flash in the (bed)pan that goes nowhere, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
    http://www.janes.com/article/75947/arl-utilises-bodily-fluids-for-power-generation
  34. Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/
  35. Why speculate about creepy future surveillance when Facebook is doing it now?
    https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691
  36. From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.”
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
  37. He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight.
    https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/
  38.  Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.”
    http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence
  39. Telescope capabilities are about to vastly improve. The 2020s will be full of important new astronomy findings.
    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/by-2020-upgrades-to-gravity-wave-detectors-will-detect-one-to-two-neutron-star-collisions-per-month.html
  40. A metaphor for China as a whole.
    https://qz.com/1137026/chinas-first-all-electric-cargo-ship-is-going-to-be-used-to-transport-coal/
  41. 2018 could be the year Venezuela finally implodes. If they run out of foreign currency reserves and default on their loan payments, then that’s it.
    https://qz.com/1128894/venezuela-has-finally-defaulted-on-its-debt-according-to-sp/
  42. I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.”
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity
  43. Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.”
    https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA
  44. Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
    The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
    The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM