Sentient Developments is currently on hiatus as I plug away at a personal project (details TBA). In the meantime, should you miss my ramblings, you can follow me on twitter and add me as a Facebook friend.

 I'll offer my own, typically off-angle, view of the Health Care Bill and its implications for America's ongoing civil war, soon.  Till then, I just want to jot down a quick thought on another matter -- the current European economic crisis, precipitated by near bankruptcy of the nation of Greece.

But first, some announcements...

1) I've continued my series of ten-minute intellectual "YouTube Feasts." First concluding my series about spaceflight withPart V: The  Grand-scale reasons to explore space.  And then with the first part of a series about transparency, privacy and freedom. The Transparent Society: Part 1: the coming era of cameras everywhere. 

 2) The George Marshall Foundation has honoredme by prominently posting my 1999 essay touting George Marshall as the "Man of the 20th Century."

 Enjoy! (And spread the word.)

=== AND NOW... ABOUT THE GREEK/EUROPEAN CRISIS... ===

If you haven't been following this, it's pretty important. The "Club Med" countries of Europe -- Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy -- seem to have gone on a spending binge, since joining the Euro-zone (using the Euro as currency) and now Greece, especially, is asking to be bailed out - big time - by the richest nations, especially Germany.  This seems unlikely.  But the alternative, draconian budget cuts, could stir major social unrest, as well as a national depression.

You know me, I always look for the most obvious thing that is going un-mentioned.  In the case of Greece, I am wondering why nobody mentions the blatant extent to which Greeks are notorious tax scofflaws.  Tax compliance rates in Greece are known to be dismal.  Isn't this an important side of any budget crisis?

I am wondering if Greece might be helped by a dose of radical transparency.  Tax evasion is mediated by corruption, which thrives in shadows.  Were the Greek economy radically opened to light, laws would be enforced, simply because citizens would spot their neighbors' evasions -- (yes I am talking radical transparency! So?) -- and therefore that side of the ledger should dramatically improve.  

This approach has an added advantage.  Radical transparency could be achieved with some simple changes in law, unleashing citizens and media to do the rest.  If combined with an amnesty for those who report and pay-up on past evasions, this approach could offer the poor and middle class something to counterbalance their own sacrifices in setting things right.

 This sort of thing could be a big piece in helping the "Club Med" countries transform their balance books and take up a new position of leadership in an era of change.

=== AND FINALLY... SOME SCIENCE...===

 Citizen news network with credibility ratings. (EARTH predictive hit?)

Mars Express buzzes Phobos, one of the Red Planet's two tiny moons.

Creatures found under 600 ft of Antarctic ice suggest possible life under Jovian moon surfaces.

Your next cool board game?

Researchers Turn Mosquitoes Into Flying Vaccinators.

Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation 

Well, it certainly is reciprocal accountability....

Wow re lunar ice.

A site that answers questions or computations.

Efficient, low-cost water treatment (membrane .02 microns) may be useful in third world countries.

F ive stellar ways to explore space using social media

Women and Posthumanity: The future looks large and sexy. The media is driving females to manipulate their bodies to increasingly unnatural idealized images. We've lost touch with what natural bodies look like; we have no acceptance of natural aging.

Michael Anissimov just posted a link to the site brainpreservation.org.

The site advocates a plastic-based alternative to cryonics - pump the brain full of plasticy resin that prevents the structure from being disrupted, and then wait for brain slicing and scanning technology to arrive.

The interesting part is the old chestnut about "normal people" being too "irrational" to see that this is a worthwhile thing to do, and accepting the Ancestral-Judeo-Christian account of death - roughly speaking, the idea that when you are alive you have something like a "soul" or "essence of aliveness", and that at some definite point, that essence disappears.

In the past, before scientific medicine, that point tended to be pretty easy to identify: you stop breathing, your heart stops, and your body stops moving (apart from rigor mortis). From the point of view of other people, your "agenthood" and "personhood" cease - there is now simply a human-like piece of meat lying on a bed. Nowadays, legal death is harder to define: stopped heart, cessation of breathing, etc are not sufficient conditions, because doctors can make the human-like piece of meat with no pulse or breath turn back into a walking, talking person again.

Cryonicists and transhumanists might endorse an information-theoretic criterion of death: you die if the future can no longer cause a walking, talking breathing, thinking you to come into existence from some record of you. Hence, cryopreservation and plastination are akin to being in a coma.

Information, of course, is not absolute like the Ancestral-Judeo-Christian "Essence Of Life". The fundamental laws of physics - as far as we know - do not destroy information, they merely disperse it to various degrees. Even cremation doesn't destroy the information in your brain, it merely distributes it so thinly over your future light-cone that it is unlikely that any physical entity could piece it back together. There may be edge cases where the information required to piece someone back together is not impossible to gather, but too difficult for anyone to bother attempting.

From the site:

I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.

How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.

Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor — a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate — the metaphor that we are machines.

Michael Comments:

Amen! The above is not so much a proposal for new technology, as it is a proposal for new attitudes. If I want to preserve my brain now, and “commit suicide” according to the Judeo-Christian-influenced standard meme complex, then I should be allowed to do so.

David Brin is a Sentient Developments guest blogger.

I've been recording and posting some brief (for me) monologues on YouTube, starting with

Space Exploration Part 1 - Planning our next steps in beyond Earth ... followed by

Space Exploration Part 2 - Mining the sky: Are there economic incentives out there? ... and then

Space Exploration Part 3: The Big Picture, Where is the excitement? And what about warp drive? Finally, and just posted, there is

Space Exploration Part 4: Ambitious technologies for space: Space tethers, solar sails and space elevators.

More space-related postings will go up soon, plus some fun rants about SETI, andon the (crazy) notion of "cycles" of falling civilizations.

Nature interviews David Brin on scientists writing fiction.

I was also interviewed for the new documentary “The People vs. George Lucas.” I have no idea - yet - whether they used their footage of me appropriately. I attempted to be circumspect and speak well of Lucas -- where he deserved it. For example, I loved the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” and adored “The Empire Strikes Back.” So my disappointment in the films that followed came honestly... leading to my participation as editor and “prosecutor” in the book STAR WARS ON TRIAL. (by far the best and most fun way to explore these issues!)

Those guys at the SETI Institute sure have chutzpah! They plan to tun their first SETIcon August 13-15 at the Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara. “The Search for Life in the Universe in Science Fact and Science Fiction!” Thus perpetuating the myth that they love science fiction.... only don’t mention any possibility that the universe might -- just might -- be different, even slightly, than their standard model. Watch how quickly any alternate scenario is dismissed as “crazy science fiction stuff.” Anybody planning to attend? Oh, don’t get me wrong, it should be fun and interesting in its own right. The topic has fascinated my, all my life and I am glad the are pursuing the worthy search... (as opposed to some of their other, cultlike activities.) But if anyone is interested in some questions to raise....

Denialism includes “denial of progress.” One of the most insidious poisons going around, spread not only by the mad right but also by the lazier and more self-indulgent portions of the left, has been the notion that progress has failed. Even when wagging their fingers at us, in hope that we’ll become better people, Hollywood films like Avatar emphasize guilt and despair as motivators to become better people. Say what? Exactly how is that supposed to work? Instead of ... well, how about pride in what we’ve accomplished and encouragement that we can do more? Directors like James Cameron are sincere. They mean well. They really do want to propel us forward. They genuinely hope their guilt trips will make us better people... while showing in their films a belief that the goal is impossible to achieve! Which makes it all the more tragic that their messages kill the very ambitions they aim to stoke. The ambition to accomplish great things.

In fact, civilization is not vile and useless. Progress happens. It has never been happening faster. See just this one short summary for a partial list of reasons to feel restored faith in our can-do spirit. Of course, the list was compiled by some folks at Cato, who give all the credit to globalization and none to intelligent planning. But the facts still are what they are.

esson number one in human motivation, Jim. Guilt trips aren’t as effective as pep talks that positively reward and praise people for the great stuff they have already done, encouraging them to strive harder to move forward even faster. Go back to school. Re-take psych 1.

Murray Hill might be the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation's capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it's safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical...After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office....

=== SCIENCE ===

I provided two papers in the psychological research volume Pathological Altruism, edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan and David Sloan Wilson (Oxford University Press). This volume takes on a once verboten topic -- can surficially beneficent or altruistic behavior sometimes be motivated by more unsavory drives like aggression, egotism or even rapacious self-interest? Can it even hurt the one who is being helped? My chapters are: "Self-Addiction and Self-Righteousness" and "A Contrarian Perspective on Altruism: The Dangers of First Contact". Those interested will have to wait at least half a year for Oxford to publish the volume. But make note, now. It will be worth the wait. (It also proves I am still doing science... albeit in the form of continuing guerilla raids outside my formal PhD!)

Not that I disagree... but the study was done by a liberal atheist. 😉 In fact, the lurid headline disguises an interestingly more complex article about whether higher general intelligence is associated with “evolutionarily novel” traits -- or much more recent adaptations -- like nocturnal activity (dependent upon artificial light), complex discourse.

The author argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. This jibes closely to my “horizons” model that saitiation trades off against the radius of inclusion, how widely you feel your sense of kinship extends, in space, time, and kind. The satiation tradeoff only works if a person has both certain personality traits (including satiability) and enoigh empathy-imagination.

=== MISC! ===

The worlds first commercial brain-machine interface.

See Mike Treder, of the Institute on Ethics in Technology, write about basics of health care.

Another for the predictions registry... e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. Now see this from EARTH (1989) “That's enough for now. More than enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped some readings into your plaque. Go over them by next time. And don't be late.” Hm? Anybody know an earlier hit on this?

I wish I could find where I also predicted this! That nerves are only the flashiest active elements in the brain. The so-called “support” cells may be just as important, multiplying vastly the number of “active” elements and making the human brain that much harder to emulate!

And finally, some some political items I had lying around...

A TRICK TO DEFEAT THE FILIBUSTER

I've mentioned before that the New York Times ran an especially cogent article -- Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution, by Thomas Geoghegan -- about the absurd filibuster, its unjustified constitutional context, and possible ways around it. It’s one of the most enlightening legal articles I've read. I like especially Gohegan’s recommendation that Vice President Joe Biden simply rule from the bench that his own constitutional powers have been abridged.

On further consideration, in fact, the “Biden Option” could be even simpler than Gohegan suggests. Instead of the vice president using his presiding powers to rule against the cloture process, he can arrange for circumstances that simply bypass cloture, on a constitutional quirk. Here’s how. Simply coordinate enough Democratic Senators in order to arrange for a perfect match of the predictable, lockstep GOP nay vote. Say the result is a 41-41 tie, at which point Biden says:

"The vote for cloture being a tie, the US Constitution takes precedence over any mere Senate procedural rule. I shall now cast the tie-breaking vote. I vote 'Yes' for cloture. The motion carries, and debate on this bill shall close 30 hours hence." BANG!

The great thing about this approach is that it leaves Republicans with no wriggle room at all. Their sole option is to evade the tie, by changing some Republican votes from nay to yea! But the Democrats have far more inherent flexibility. Up to twenty extra Democratic senators may lurk in the cloakroom, ready to descend and vote either way -- to restore the tie or else using those GOP "yeas" to help add up toward a regular 60-vote cloture.

Sure it will be decried as trickery. So?

=== Miscellanea ==

The fundies have made it blatant and open: ”Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!”

See an interesting, if myopic, discussion of why economists failed to see the bubble crisis coming. And sure, none of them mention crackpot theories like my “Betrayal of the Smarter Sons.” I can’t blame them. That one was pretty bizarre, even if it contained some possible validity.

The honest truth is that I suspect other reasons. Oligarchy is an especially pernicious human trend that's rooted in our genes and also in capitalism's very roots. Marx was right that it is the ultimate, recurring threat. He was wrong to say that there aren't solutions that can keep capitalism vibrant, competitive and creative, for generations at a stretch. But those solutions tend to be "captured" by smart proto-oligarchs, much in the way that parasitic viruses and bacteria adapt to attack hosts in new ways.

Right now our immune system cannot adapt to oligarchy-driven distortions because our immune system (politics) has been suppressed by "culture war." Throw in some deliberate sabotage by certain hostile foreign elements and you have a theory that is more than adequate... if far too dramatic for anyone but a science fiction author to concoct or credit.

Too bad, since economic and political thinkers used to ponder a bigger picture. Krugman and Galbraith are peering at individual trees. They do not see the forest.

-- Is the Iraq War over? ---

enough for now....

After a last minute change of plans at SIAI, I was tasked with going to the AGI-10 workshop to speak on AI safety.

Many thanks to all those I interacted with there, it was certainly an interesting experience. The paper I presented is a paper draft that I wrote with Nick Tarleton on, loosely speaking, the state of the art in safe AI motivational systems.

Bootstrapping Safe AGI goal systems is up on my site.

Shane Legg comments:

"During the final workshop session Roko Mijic appeared out of the blue and gave a talk on Yudkowsky style Friendly AI. A show of hands revealed that while half the audience had heard of SIAI, few had heard of CEV. ... In any case, what did become clear is that a sizable part of the AGI community is not familiar with FIA thinking."

- "What you mean is that you want to signal that you're unselfish and virtuous to the point of self-sacrifice, but that if everyone around you was taking an anti-ageing pill, you'd take one too; you wouldn't pass it up and be the only wrinkly one. You also wouldn't kill yourself when you hit 78 in your futuristic young body, rather you'd look back with nostalgia on those mad days of youth when you thought that death was somehow good. By then you would have learned that you are running on corrupted hardware, and that a lot of your far-mode verbalizations are not really your true preferences. No offence meant - I had to go through this painful realization too."

From Robert Wiblin's Facebook.

Tom McCable has some good posts up at his blog "The Rational Futurist".

Thanks to KoanPhilosopher, my FAI talk at the UK transhumanist meetup is out on youtube. My one regret with this talk was not carefully distinguishing between “CEV” and “CEV-like proposals”, as what I actually presented on a slide named “CEV” was not, in fact, CEV.

Over on IEET, James Hughes wrote an odd article critiquing the FAI proposal. It is best summarized by Kaj Sotala:

Well, Milan M. ?irkovi? and Richard B. Cathcart think it's a distinct possibility. In fact, it may even (partly) explain the Great Silence. Check out the abstract to their article, "Geo-engineering Gone Awry: A New Partial Solution of Fermi's Paradox":

Technological civilizations arising on such planets will be, at some point of their histories or another, tempted to embark upon massive geo-engineering projects. If, for some reasons only very recently understood, large-scale geo-engineering is in fact much more dangerous than previously thought, the scenario in which at least some of the extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way self destruct in this manner gains plausibility. In addition, we speculate on possible reasons, both physical and culturological, which could make such a threat even more pertinent on an average Galactic terrestrial planet than on Earth.

Be sure to read the entire article (PDF). Learn more about geoengineering. And be sure to read Jamais Cascio's article, "It's Time to Cool the Planet."

David Brin is a Sentient Developments guest blogger.

Salon Magazine asked to publish as a main article an updated version of my essay about reconstruction in Haiti, wherein I suggest the establishment of clear corridors for every kind of right-of-way, across the capital city—mass transit, sewer, water, electricity, fiber-optics, even WiFi can go in cheap, if all pathway issues are settled at once—so that the skeleton and sinew and bloodstream of a vibrant city can arise... leaving all the subsequent details to Haitians. Drop in and give the essay traffic! Comment if you like.

And hold on till the end for one of my mini-essays about "The Enlightenment and It's Enemies" !

And on the Transparency front... See the les professional kind of police behaving exactly as predicted in The Transparent Society. “Since the police beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991, men in blue have looked warily at the civilian videotaping of arrests and other police activities. Some cops are so opposed to the practice, they've begun arresting the amateur videographers and charging them criminally.” In fact, nearly all such arrests have been dismissed. The important thing now is to make all police aware of that fact, so that continuing to do this becomes knowing and culpable false arrest.

==== A Holocene Grant Proposal ===

Any educators out there... or folks interested in creative new approaches to interface... here’s something interesting you might browse. "HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation are excited to launch the third year of the Digital Media and Learning Competition. Today, young people are learning, socializing, and participating in civic life in dramatic new ways and assessing information in ways never before imagined."

I have a small consortium that has submitted an application for a grant to develop breakthrough “collaboration ware” to help students do team projects (a big part of the modern American curriculum) with vastly more efficiency and fun.

And now my request from some of you. Public commenting on the 2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition is now open! Join the conversation. Log in to provide feedback and comments on applications and see how others are reacting to your application. Register to add your comments at: http://dmlcompetition.net/pligg/register.php by creating a user name and password (please note the user name and password you created to submit an application will not work; all users must create new logins). You will receive an activation e-mail, with a link to confirm your address, and can then log in to the system. Take a look at as many of the brief 50-word project descriptions as you can. If something looks interesting, you can either read more (a 300-word description) or save it and come back later for a closer look.Once you’ve taken a look, we encourage you to discuss (post a comment) or tell a friend.

Favorable comments on our “TeamBuilder” proposal are, of course, most welcome!

=== SCIENCE MISC ====

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body. The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on. (BTW... I showed humans doing this in Heart of the Comet.)

Have you heard of Rav Patel? In his book The Value of Nothing, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. Though, of course, there probably is some vegetarian bias in there!

UPDATE on AUDIO BOOKS from audible.com. See these great Brin titles available in audio version to listen-to during your commute!

=== Defending the Enlightenment = a mini-essay ===

See a fascinating review of The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition by Zeev Sternhell, in which the Israeili philosopher covers a vital topic, resonant with many things I’ve been saying about how the progressive Enlightenment is under frenetic attack, by those scheming to restore older, oppressive ways...

... only with an important difference that prompts me to offer up an observation and a cavil. For, when I speak of the “Enlightenment” I am referring to something much more modern and ongoing that what campus academics refer-to, when they use that word. To me, it stands for the great experiment of Western Civilization, the sole time that any post-agricultural society discovered a viable alternative to the age-old human attractor state, the standard pattern that dominated perhaps 99% of cultures since history began -- rule by inherited oligarchy.

Yes, our current experiment evolved out of the French Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau. But what we have today—and must defend against concerted assault—is only related to that drawing room debating society, as a child is to its grandparent.

Indeed, had the Enlightenment depended only upon its French-Idealist wing, whose love of abstraction sometimes borders on the mystical, the movement would long ago have foundered. It is the Anglo-Scot-American offshoot, with its emphasis on pragmatism, reductionist science, “otherness” inclusionism and material progress in the physical world, that truly changed the world. It is this wing that kept the Enlightenment alive, by powerfully resisting and then quelling the fascist and Stalinist empires. It also was responsible for spreading both practical advancement and modernist ideals to all corners of the globe.

This is an important distinction. For, while the French and American branches of the Enlightenment share many values -- a belief in progress, in human improvability, in divided and accountable power, in free argument and in the value of the individual—the more abstract French wing turns about and partakes in a kind of madness that is rooted in bad old habits that stretch all the way back in Plato—the notion that one can logically derive important conclusions about reality, via words alone. Given that Plato turned out to be just about the most anti-enlightenment philosopher of all time, an implacable enemy of democracy and science, this descent of reason should be troubling.

Indeed, the obsession of scholars, associating the Enlightenment with abstract reasoning, runs smack up against what should be considered the Enlightenment’s greatest insight -- that humans are inherently delusional beings, able to talk ourselves into anything at all. The French Idealist branch acknowledged this problem -- and replied that the answer would be found in better reasoning. A well-meaning, but inherently untrustworthy prescription. One that is, in fact, delusional in its own right.

By contrast, the pragmatic-scientific wing said: “Everybody will be deluded, as a matter of basic human nature, and we are terrible at spotting our own errors. Rationality can be just another method for incantatory justification and rationalization. But there is another answer. If we cannot spot our own mistakes, we can often notice each others! Through well-run competitive systems, like democracy, markets, and science, the give and take of reciprocal accountability can edge us ever forward toward the truth.”

Oh, sure, these competitive systems are very hard to set up and maintain. As one of the earliest leaders of the Anglo-American wing, Adam Smith, described, it is hard to arrange circumstance under which competition delivers all its benefits—creativity, innovation, vigor, accountability and error detection—without soon drawing in its own worst enemy, cheaters. As both Smith and Karl Marx pointed out, Capitalism and Democracy can turn into their own worst enemies. These pragmatic tools require endless fine-tuning, a gritty chore that often makes people tempted to turn back to simplistic dogmatism. (e.g. our present “culture war.”)

Still, the Enlightenment needed path away from the trap of essentialism, in which Rousseau and Hobbes railed at one another over flawed, overly simple descriptions of human nature. It was John Locke, founder of the Anglo-American branch, who said: Wait, you are both right and both wrong. Man is both noble and corrupt. We are complex, and we need systems that can harness that complexity, rewarding the noble traits and binding the corrupt ones. Toward this end, abstractions may inspire, they may lift our hearts... but they do not get the job done.

Hence, my conclusion to a garrulous aside. It is wrong for well-meaning scholars like Sternhell to continue calling the abstract-idealist branch of the Enlightenment its defining center. Not when most of the movement’s greatest continuing achievements were attained by the other, pragmatist/materialist branch. Not only does this ignore the Enlightenment’s greatest strengths, at a time when it is under siege by deadly foes, but this old-fashioned fixation seems obdurate, scholastic, and even rather quaint.

(Thanks Michael Rus, for spurring this thread.)

=== AND MORE SCIENCE! ===

Shades of the Crystal Spheres!

What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy

And more soon......

SETI founder Frank Drake wants to take the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to the next level by implementing a process called gravitational microlensing.

Microlensing is based on the gravitational lens effect: massive objects can bend the light of a bright background object. This can generate multiple distorted, magnified, and brightened images of the background source. More specifically, when a distant star or quasar gets sufficiently aligned with a massive compact foreground object, the bending of light due to its gravitational field leads to two distorted unresolved images resulting in an observable magnification. The time-scale of the transient brightening depends on the mass of the foreground object as well as on the relative proper motion between the background 'source' and the foreground 'lens' object.

In other words, Drake is essentially suggesting that we use our Sun as a 'giant magnifying glass' by positioning an observatory at a distance of around 500AU from it. Theoretically, the resultant microlense would be so powerful that we could see alien planets—and even their continents and oceans.

He contends that advanced extraterrestrial civs may have been doing this for millions of years already and we need to get with the program. Moreover, Drake says this isn't just a one-way system—gravitational lensing could be used to transmit signals to other worlds as well. Considering that our civilization's entire communications schema is about to go digital, he argues that this may be our best bet to communicate with our celestial neighbors.

Okay, now the bad news. The primary problem I have with Drake's suggestion, aside from the fact that it would take over a hundred years to set the crafts into position (which is more an issue of patience than a technical concern), is that the exercise would likely result in failure. Yes, such an observatory would undoubtedly help us discover more exoplanets—even those teeming with life. But it's unlikely that we'd receive any kind of communication by using it.

Among other things, the Fermi Paradox suggests that the timescales in question would not just allow for a civ to set-up and use gravitational microlensing, but to seed every solar system in the Galaxy with Bracewell probes. Sure, extraterrestrials could set microlenses up, but if they're capable of that feat then they're not too far from being able to send out swarms of self-replicating Bracewells.

Again, like I've harped on time and time again, if there are advanced civs out there, and they've wanted to communicate with us, they would have done so by now.

I'm not suggesting that we bail on Drake's project. Quite the contrary. Let's do it. Let's set up this microlense and see what we get. A negative data point can be just as useful as a positive one. And maybe it'll help us discover Dyson Spheres or other megastructures. In addition, the astrological benefits of such an observatory would be incalculable, so it wouldn't be a complete waste by any means.

We just need to temper the expectations of the contact optimists out there, of which Frank Drake is one.

It looks like John Cassidy's latest book, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, is worth checking out. According to Cassidy, it was blind faith in the markets that caused the recent financial meltdown. He argues that we can avert future calamities via 'reality-based economics'—grappling with market failures, disaster myopia, speculative frenzies, and other economic complexities. In this sense Cassidy can be called a Keynesian; it was John Maynard Keynes, after all, who fathered economic-crisis management.

A quote from the Business Week review:

Cassidy agrees with free-market advocates that the market performs wonders, but he believes its reach is limited. In that spirit, he favors greater government regulation of the financial-services industry. Although he doesn't dwell much on practical ideas for reform, he argues that it's necessary to tame Wall Street now that financiers have learned they can privatize profits during good times and socialize losses in bad. He admires the changes that came out of the Great Depression, such as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking from investment banking. Even if current legislators aren't willing to go that far, banks must be required to keep more capital on hand and be given limits on how much debt they can accumulate, he says. He considers the proposed Financial Product Safety Commission a sensible idea. "The proper role of the financial sector is to support innovation and enterprise elsewhere in the economy," he writes. "But during the past 20 years or so, it has grown into Frankenstein's monster, lumbering around and causing chaos."

Essentially, Cassidy is suggesting that a return to hands-off economics would be a disaster. His views mirror my own, namely the suggestion that, left to its own devices, and without oversight, blind market forces will eventually eat itself.

Strike another victory against the advocates of market libertopianism.

With the search and rescue efforts officially called off in Haiti, the time has come for reconstruction. But with nearly 200,000 dead and one in nine Haitians currently homeless, it's easy to get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of the primary lesson learned from the catastrophe.

That poverty kills. And it kills big time.

Stop for a moment and imagine an earthquake of similar magnitude in San Fransisco. It's highly unlikely that we'd see a similar death count -- not with San Fran's first-world infrastructure and emergency response network, not to mention the support from surrounding areas.

But we don't have to imagine these things. Back in 1995 the Great Hanshin Earthquake rocked the Kobe area in Japan killing 6,434 people. This earthquake hit 6.8 on the Richter scale and struck a heavily populated area -- very comparable to Haiti. And in 2008 the Sichuan Earthquake killed nearly 68,000 people in China, a country that sits firmly between the third and first worlds.

There's obviously a direct correlation with the relative affluence of a community and their ability to cope with disaster. There's no question that the the death toll in Haiti was severely accentuated by the poor state of affairs in that country.

It's all fine and well that the world's attention is now focused on Haiti, but the damage has already been done, an outcome caused directly by the earthquake and indirectly by years of global neglect and indifference. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Poverty is the worst form of violence." Indeed, this is exactly the kind of unintended violence we impose upon the impoverished peoples of world when they're largely forgotten.

Moreover, the violence that's unleashed by poverty is hardly limited to the impacts of natural disasters. As Peter Singer recently noted, "Every year, more people die from poverty related causes than entire population of Haiti."

It's clear that poverty has to be eliminated, and Haiti offers a remarkable opportunity to take a de facto post-apocalyptic society and set them on the right track. Success in this matter could provide an unprecedented blue print for similar reconstruction efforts around the world.

Here's what has to happen in Haiti:

• All the money that's pouring in has to be routed to the right areas. While aid agencies are doing an exemplary job dealing with the initial humanitarian crisis, they are far too chaotic, uncoordinated and decentralized to rebuild the country. Rebuilding efforts will have to be conducted by dedicated transnational institutions working in tandem with private industry.
• Haiti's infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from scratch. This will include roads, ports, housing, electricity, sanitation and water. The entire Haitian country has to be redesigned for resilience in anticipation of another earthquake.
• The development of viable economic opportunities is paramount, particularly ones that are sustainable. Agriculture would be a good start; Haiti has some of the sweetest mangos on the planet. Looking further ahead, however, the country's infrastructure needs to be brought to first world standards if it hopes to compete and do business with the rest of the world.

All this is easier said than done, I know. And quite obviously the reconstruction effort will be more complicated than my four bullet points. But we have to start somewhere and something has to be done.

As Bono of U2 once said, "We're not looking for charity, we're looking for justice."

News that the International Olympic Committee is considering mandatory gender testing and therapies to 'treat' intersex athletes is quickly starting to get some attention.

Andrea James has an excellent article in BoingBoing about Caster Semenya and the apartheid of sex—a term attributed to transhumanist Martine Rothblatt. James correctly points out that Semenya is being subjected to the latest "sex science" in order to fit her into our socially imposed gender binary, so that "the apartheid of sex can be upheld within the sporting tradition."

Indeed, fostering discussions of intersexed persons within the context of social tolerance and inclusion is not where the IOC wants to go. They have a problem on their hands because they are completely unwilling and unable to look beyond fixed male and female roles. Introducing new leagues or classifications that cater to these kinds of athletes would be far too uncomfortable and complicated for them to deal with. Insisting that there are only males and females simplifies things, and coercing these athletes into conforming to a gender-specific roles is a seemingly quick and easy fix.

Except for the fact that it may be a human rights violation.

I use the word coerce because intersex athletes like Semenya would likely have to undergo therapies should they want to compete. "Those who agree to be treated will be permitted to participate,” said Dr. Maria New, an IOC hired panel participant and an expert on sexual development disorders. “Those who do not agree to be treated on a case-by-case basis will not be permitted."

Some activists contend that this is a human rights violation, and they may be right. The intersex rights advocacy group Zwischengeschlecht.org certainly thinks so. They are condemning the IOC's attempt to re-introduce mandatory gender tests for female athletes via what they consider a back-handed channel. "We also strongly condemn IOC's notion of apparently blanket exclusion of "ambiguous" athletes, unless they agree to undergo potentially most harmful genital surgery and hormone treatments," they write in a recent press release. Zwischengeschlecht.org is demanding the prohibition of forced genital surgeries on intersexed people.

It also appears to me that the IOC is picking on intersexed athletes. The primary issue with these athletes participating as females arises from their increased testosterone production. Trouble is, however, not all women produce testosterone in the same amounts. In fact, some successful female athletes have a genetic abnormality in which they produce more testosterone than average females. Why is it acceptable for them to compete 'as is', but not for intersexed athletes? Should they be forced to undergo therapies, too? And if so, why should they be considered abnormal simply because they fall outside the averages?

Moreover, testosterone levels can change for women depending on a myriad of factors. Take Mary Decker for example. Decker was the 1983 world champion at 1,500 and 3,000 meters and once held every American women's outdoor record from 800 through 10,000 meters. In 1996 she was one of the athletes routinely tested by the United States Olympic Committee for illegal drugs. The report on her test said she had a testosterone-epitestosterone level higher than international rules allow. Decker contended that the test was invalid for women and that her suit be thrown out. She argued that the test did not take into account the hormonal swings a woman goes through during menstruation while on birth control and nearing menopause.

Should the IOC rule that intersexed athletes have to undergo therapies in order to compete, they will also have to consider cases such as these. To do otherwise would not just be hypocritical, but a blatant sign of discrimination. As it stands, the IOC's contention that intersexed athletes are a special case and that they must be physically modified in order to complete is a human rights violation.

The answer to the problem is not conformism, but accommodation.

Anthony Atala's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs -- from muscles to blood vessels to bladders and more. At TEDMED, Atala shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that "prints" human tissue.

The New York Times is reporting that a panel of medical experts convened by the International Olympic Committee is recommending that the issue of athletes whose gender seems ambiguous be treated as a medical concern and not one of fairness in competition:

Athletes who identify themselves as females but have medical disorders that give them masculine characteristics should have their disorders diagnosed and treated, the group concluded after two days of meetings in Miami Beach. The experts also said that rules should be put in place for determining an athlete’s eligibility to compete on a case-by-case basis — but they did not indicate what those rules should be.

“We did not address fairness,” said Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson of Florida International University. He is an expert on such disorders and participated in the meeting. “The entire concept was that these individuals should be allowed to compete.”

The decision is in reaction to the recent controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, an intersex athlete who won the 800 meters at the world championships in Berlin last August.

While this clearly solves a problem for the IOC, the decision to "treat" athletes with genetic abnormalities will likely have far reaching repercussions for those with other types of genetic endowments. The IOC is in danger of opening a pandora's box in which virtually every athlete with a biological advantage will be questioned.

Immediate examples include swimmer Michael Phelps with his many advantageous traits (including the possibility of Marfan Syndrome) and those athletes with higher levels of hemoglobin which gives them superior oxygen-carrying capability.

But as any athlete knows, it doesn't even need to be this extreme. There's never been a perfectly level playing field in sports, whether it be the quality of the facilities, coaching, funding, and of course, genetic constitutions. Dedication and heart will only get professional athletes so far; so many winners these day are, for all intents-and-purposes, genetic freaks. To suddenly start 'treating' these sorts of athletes and constrain their physicality within a pre-determined sense of normality is overtly problematic.

Who is the IOC to determine what is physically normal in sport? Why should the attainment of fitness peaks (natural or otherwise) be prevented or constrained? And how could they ever come to describe the perfectly 'normal' human athlete?

The IOC is clearly hoping that this issue will be limited to intersex athletes, but what's to prevent others from crying foul when they feel that they're at a genetic disadvantage? The IOC needs to tread very carefully should they chose to move forward with this recommendation.

Dan Buettner gives a TED talk about the practical things we can do today to extend our healthy lifespans. Nothing too radical or out-of-the-box here, but what he says makes sense (but I think I'll pass on joining a faith-based community); these are lifestyle changes we can make in the here-and-now as we wait for more substantive life extending interventions.

Buettner's talk reminds me of an article I wrote a while back, "Eight tips to dramatically improve your chances of living forever."

In his book Reasons and Persons, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to compare two scenarios: A nuclear war that kills 99 percent of the world's existing population, or 2) A nuclear war that kills 100 percent. The first outcome would be a horrible disaster, but the second would be an existential disaster: one that destroys the human race or irreversibly curtails our whole future.

Call the chance of such an event an "existential risk." The future promises a whole host of new ways the human race could be snuffed out: from AI gone wrong (see this previous article) to nanotechnology to synthetic biology and engineered viruses.

What makes existential disasters worse than even widespread personal disasters like cancer, which has killed billions of people? The future potential of the human race is the key difference: If a disaster kills all the people on the planet, then there will be no one to continue the human race. Our species has come a long way since the dawn of history, and if we work to preserve our humanity, our civilization, and our values, we may go a long way yet. There is a whole universe out there and it is huge beyond our wildest dreams—our own galaxy contains more solar systems than there are people on the planet, and our galaxy itself is merely a tiny mote of dust in the great sea of galaxies. If the human race can spread out and colonize a few dozen systems, it seems likely that it will also be able to colonize the entire reachable universe, which contains a whopping 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, and will last for perhaps 100,000,000,000 years.

The number of good human lives that could be lived in this time is simply too large to comfortably contemplate, and all those lives currently hang in the balance between existence and nonexistence, like an innumerable audience of ghostly figures looking down anxiously at the early twenty-first century. If any of the existential disasters actually occur, this future will be wiped out. In effect, the indirect death toll from an existential disaster is so big that all other disasters or humanitarian causes pale into complete insignificance in comparison.

Cosmologists, physicists who study the origin and evolution of the universe, know this better than anyone else. One world-renowned cosmologist after another has spoken out about existential risks. Stephen Hawking sits on the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and has warned that mistakes in constructing artificial intelligence risk human extinction as well. Carl Sagan was active in efforts to avert nuclear war. Martin Rees, in his book Our Final Hour, has warned of risks of bioterrorism and biowarfare.

It is a tall order to preserve not just human civilization, but also our human values, through the disruptive forces of time, technology, and Darwinian selection. The "fragility of human values" thesis claims that many desirable properties that a possible future could have are delicate properties of human brains and culture that could easily be disrupted by technological, economic, and geopolitical forces. We value laughter, friendship, children, sexuality, music, art, family, humor, and nature, amongst many other things. All of these things exist only because the human brain happens to create them, and the human brain is also currently the most intelligent thinking machine in the world. Each day, women give birth to children who also have brains which contain that same magical combination of human value and useful intelligence. But if we create entities that are more competitive and intelligent than humans—entities that did not also value laughter, friendship, children, sexuality, music, art, family, humor, and nature—then there would be a serious risk that humans would lose control of the future, and that these new, inhuman minds would create the world as they saw fit, or as emergent political and economic trends dictated; a grim universe of shuffling electrons and economic transactions with no people and no joy. These dark futures where human civilization gradually shifts away from human values without a “bang” also count as existential risks, and are perhaps the most insidious and horrific to think about.

Existential risks are, from one point of view, the most important and pressing problem in the world, for they threaten humanity as a whole. Unfortunately, they are also grossly under-addressed in terms of research, funding, and effort. Gaverick Matheny writes, in his paper on reducing human extinction risks (pdf), that "A search of EconLit and the Social Sciences Citation Index suggests that virtually nothing has been written about the cost effectiveness of reducing human extinction risks," and Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg noted, in a personal communication, that there are orders of magnitude more papers on coleoptera—the study of beetles—than "human extinction." Anyone can confirm this for themselves with a Google Scholar search: coleoptera gets 245,000 hits, and "human extinction" gets fewer than 1,200.

This means that small groups or even individuals can make a difference to the outcome, by reading and understanding the subject or by supporting research into understanding and avoiding these risks at places like Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute.

The potential of the human race is virtually limitless, but first we have to survive into the next century.

Part nine in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

This is a remarkable video that clearly shows a dog reacting to an earthquake just seconds before it hits.