Tag Archives: science

Random things and stuff

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First: Got a Christmas card from jul3z…thanks! It was awesome.

Second: Rather than reposting it here, I’ll just point to a snippet from Scientific American about a possible mechanism behind life extension from Scientific American in papertygre‘s journal. (datan0de, if you haven’t seen this yet, you should.)

Third: Spending the evening this evening with S; Shelly’s spending time with S‘s boyfriend this afternoon. Yay!

Fourth: Spending part of the upcoming weekend with phyrra and nihilus…yay again!

Fifth: I had about two hours invested in a 2,000+-word post, with links, that got eaten by LJ…grr. I foolishly typed it in Explorer for PC, so it’s gone. Is it just me, or if an error occurs when trying to make a post, should the LJ page actually print the text of the post along with the error message? That way, you wouldn’t lose it if something happened…

On hope, death, and life

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This weekend, Shelly and I both got some new tattoos. We both got the same tattoo, but not for the reasons you might think.

The tattoo itself is the Kanji for “Hope,” and looks something like this:

We each got the characters on the inside of our right wrists. And no, it has nothig to do with the fact that we’re dating, and everything to do with a set of shared values about the future.

Every day since I was very young, every single day without fail for my entire adult life and most of my childhood, I have been aware of the fact that someday, I’m going to die. This has been a universal constant of the human condition since we first began using language and making tools. There’s no getting around it; the unescapable, inexorable reality of death has fueled the fabrication of entire complex paradigms and mythologies, all designed to reassure their believers that once you get past the grave, if you but only follow some arbitrary and manufactured set of rules, nothing can go wrong.

This has been the reality of the human experience for all of human history…until now. Now, for the first time ever, we can see a mechanism by which aging and death can be circumvented. We aren’t there yet, but we know it is possible. On the horizon, we can see a reality in which old age is no longer a part of the normal human reality, and death is not inevitable. We can see the mechanisms responsible for these things. We can see that these mechanisms can be manipulated. We know that altering these mechanisms does not violate any fundamental law of physics. At this point, it’s simply a question of figuring out how to do it.

Two years before the Wright Brothers flew, Lord Kelvin, the famos physicist who lent his name to the Kelvin scale of temperature and whose work was instrumental in understanding the nature of heat and energy, the man who helped contribute to our basic knowledge of thermodynamics, stated flatly and absolutely, “Heavier than air flight is impossible.” When it was pointed out to him that birds are heavier than air and birds fly, he answered to the effect of “That’s different–birds are alive.”

In fact, he was wrong for one simple and obvious reason: The fact that birds can fly demonstrates clearly and beyond refute that heavier-than-air flight violates no fundamental law of physics. History shows us that that which does not violate the fundamental laws of physics can, eventually, be done; it’s simply a matter of having the will and the time to figure out how to do it.

Nanotechnology promises something no other branch of human exploration has yet promised: the ability to, on an atomic scale, order molecular systems in any way we wish that is not prohibited by the laws of physics. Human beings are molecular systems; the laws by which cellular biology work are becoming very well understood, and when reduced to its simplest components, any biological system is simply a complex system of self-replicating biological machinery, operating in accordance with physical laws to construct large-scale macroscopic systems from small-scale molecular assemblers. Molecular assembly, like heavier than air flight, does not violate the laws of physics; we know this because we see large-scale systems built by molecular assemblers every day. Biological systems which do not age and die do not violate the laws of physics; we know this because we have examples of such systems, in trees that live for four thousand years and microbes that can survive for twenty-five thousand years or longer. Changing the operation of biological systems in arbitrary ways can be done without violating the laws of physics; we’ve known this since the advent of the first drugs, and advances in gene therapy have demonstrated that almost any result we want in almost any biological system is at least theoretically possible.

So, back to the tattoo. I am living in one of the first generations in all of human history where we can honestly say we are beginning to understand the physical mechanisms of aging and death, and we can see ways those mechanisms may be altered. Will it happen soon enough to save me? It’s a long shot. But make no mistake about it: we are fast approaching the first generation of human beings who will be born into a world where old age and death are not inevitable. There is hope–not only for me as an individual, but for us as a species. Erasing old age and the inevitability of enfeeblement and death will transform the human condition in ways that we can not hope to predict, and are at least as profound and as deep as the development of language.

I will do everything in my power to be there to watch it happen.

There’s a good chance, of course, that the technology will not develop before I die. In that eventuality, there’s a backup plan: Alcor. It too is a long shot, but now that I have a better understanding of what they hope to accomplish, and the mechanism by which they hope to accomplish it, it’s not as much of a long shot as it seems.

So. Now I have hope, and hope is a powerful thing.

The official numbers aren’t in yet, but from the preliminary it looks like…

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…SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize!!!!!!

As I type this, it’s on its way back from a maximum altitude of 368,000 feet on its second flight to claim the Ansari X Prize. The era of civilian commercial space flight has officially begun.

It’s almost impossible to express how exciting this is. Manned private space flight is one of those things, like nanotechnology and molecular materials science, that changes everything. Now everything is possible. Private space stations. Space tourism. But none of that is nearly as exciting, or as important, as the idea that we are, haltingly, leaving our ancestral home.

This is vital, to our future as a species and to our survival as a species. We cannot stay here. If we do, we’re doomed. The next species-ending catastrophe may not happen tomorrow, or two years from now, or two hundred years from now, but it will. It’s just a question of time.

And we should not stay here. We alone among all the animals have the ability to understand ourselves and the universe. Sapience is how the universe knows itself. If we are to become what we are capable of becoming, we must leave the cradle. That won’t happen until spaceflight is accessible and cheap.

What has been done today is more significant than the invention of the first crude dugout canoe. This is the next step in the same imperative that made us migrate out of Africa millennia ago. We now live in a time where we can see our way away from our homeworld. Very exciting times, these, and I am delighted to be living in them.

From the live Webcast:




And the person who made the X Prize possible:

Civilian Space Exploration meme

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Ganked from happypete:

In honor of the launch of SpaceShipOne for all the marbles on Monday, I’ve got a meme.

Add “civilian space program” to your Interests, and post about it. Let’s see how far it goes. See if we can generate some interest in Boldly Going….

To add “civilian space program” to your interests automagically, click here.

Quote for the Day, courtesy Deke Slayton, the late NASA astronaut, from the book Moon Shot; he’s quoting Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first human to envision rockets for space travel:

“Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

Amen.

Link o’ the day

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A microbe that grows in the Dead Sea is teaching scientists about the art of DNA repair.

Halobacterium appears to be a master of the complex art of DNA repair. This mastery is what scientists want to learn from: In recent years, a series of experiments by NASA-funded researchers at the University of Maryland has probed the limits of Halobacterium’s powers of self-repair, using cutting-edge genetic techniques to see exactly what molecular tricks the “master” uses to keep its DNA intact.

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“We have completely fragmented their DNA. I mean we have completely destroyed it by bombarding it with [radiation]. And they can reassemble their entire chromosome and put it back into working order within several hours,” says Adrienne Kish, member of the research group studying Halobacterium at the University of Maryland.

Slowly but surely, we’re getting there…

Some thoughts on communication

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One of the strangest principles of quantum physics is the notion that an observer, on a quantum level, always interacts with the thing being observed. This principle has fueled all kinds of philosophical theories, and people have used it to construct ideas about how it’s impossible for a person to observe any part of the world without changing it.

The world of particle physics is a bizarre place, and things don’t behave according to the rules of the macroscopic world we live in. For example, a photon that’s directed at a beam splitter can go off in one of two directions. In reality, the photon acts like it goes off in both directions, and continues in both directions simultaneously. This condition is called a superposition of states. The photon continues going down both paths until it interacts with an observer somewhere, at which point the superposition collapses and the “phantom” photon that went the other way disappears as though it had never existed.

This effect is quite real; it can be measured and demonstrated in a lab. It’s led philosophers to posit that the entire universe is a construction of understanding–that we create the universe we live in just by observing it.

Problem is, the philosophy is bunk. You see, in terms of quantum mechanics, the word “observer” has a very specific meaning. An “observer” is nothing more than “a thing whose state depends on the state of the thing being observed.” If a photon in a superposition of states encounters an electron, and changes the electron’s energy state, then the electron is an “observer.”

Schrodinger’s cat would never work the way it does in the thought experiment. You can’t put a cat into a half-alive and half-dead superposition of states…because the Geiger counter is the observer in this system! It’s a thing whose state depends on the state of the thing being observed. The term “observer” does not mean “person looking at something;” a quantum “observer” need not be human, or sapient, or even alive at all!

But I didn’t come here to talk about quantum physics. I came here to talk about communication.

Philosophers have been led astray by quantum physics because of a fundamental communication error. They see a word, they believe they understand that word, and they go on as if that word means what they think it means. But in the domain of quantum physics, the word “observer” has a very narrow meaning that’s not the same as its ordinary, vernacular meaning. When we think “observer,” we think “some guy standing there watching something”–but that’s not what the physicist means at all.

Communication is a very tricky beast. On the one hand, human language and human communication is remarkably resiliant. If I type a sentence containing non-standard English futzpahs, even if you have never seen or heard those futzpahs before, you can still glork their meaning from context. On the other hand, it can go horribly wrong in so many different ways, sometimes it’s a bloody miracle anyone ever communicates with anyone else in the first place!

The simplest way for communication to go wrong is when one person uses a word in a way that the other person doesn’t understand, or uses a familiar word in an unfamiliar way. Unchecked, this can lead to all sorts of difficulties:

ALICE: Can you do me a favor and pass the sweeper?
BOB: Sweeper? What the hell is a sweeper?
ALICE: The thing that vacuums the rug. You know, the vacuum cleaner.
BOB: Oh! Right. okay, here you go.
ALICE (angry): You never help me out around the house! You expect me to do everything! I ask you to do one thing and you won’t do it!
BOB (confused): Huh? You asked me to pass the sweeper, and I gave you the vacuum cleaner! It’s what you wanted, right?
ALICE: No, I asked you to vacuum for me. ‘Pass the sweeper’ means ‘vacuum the rug.’
BOB: You asked me to pass the vacuum cleaner. When you say ‘pass the salt,’ I hand you the salt. When you say ‘pass the plate,’ I hand you the plate. So when you said ‘pass the vacuum cleaner,’ I assumed you wanted me to hand you the vacuum cleaner.

It pays to be very careful about the way you use language, and to make sure, before you get angry or emotionally invested in something, to make sure that you did, in fact, communicate the idea you thought you communicated.

The problem gets worse if one of the people involved already has an idea about what the other person has said, or is going to say, and has some kind of emotional or philosophical investment in that idea. For example, if Alice believes that Bob finds her ugly, Alice may see evidence of that belief in everything Bob says, even if Bob doesn’t hold that belief at all:

ALICE: You said I was ugly before we went to the restaurant!
BOB: No, I didn’t. I said I think the blue dress looks better on you than the red dress.
ALICE: But the blue dress covers more of my body than the red one! See, you think I’m ugly!

Compounding this problem is the fact that people can rarely remember word-for-word what was said to them five minutes ago; they remember only the gist of it, the meaning they got from the words. If the words were not understood, the erroneous meaning stays.

And just to add even more problems on top of the pile, an inference can be made on the basis of faulty logic. Relatively few people are good at logic; reason can be just as flawed as emotion, and logical errors can cause someone to get the wrong meaning even if the communication itself is fine.

ALICE: Bob thinks that I’m not good at relationships!
CINDY: Really? What did he say?
ALICE: He said that one indication of good relationship skills is a history of long-lasting relationships. But I haven’t had any long-lasting relationships. So he must think I don’t have good relationship skills!

(This particular fallacy is called “denying the antecedent,” and it takes the form “In order for there to be fire, there must be oxygen; there is no fire in this room; therefore, there is no oxygen in this room.” Its correlary, “affirming the consequent,” is the same error from the opposite direction: “In order for there to be fire, there must be oxygen; there is oxygen in this room; therefore, there is fire in this room.”)

A side effect of being emotionally invested in an idea can be that the person holding the idea doesn’t do even basic fact-checking on information that confirms that idea; for example, if Alice believes that Bob is a bad person, and is extremely dedicated to the belief that Bob is a bad person, then when Cindy tells Alice “Did you hear? Bob got arrested for molesting his six-year-old daughter!” then Alice may forever form a lingering association between Bob and pedophilia even if Alice knows that Bob has no children. People who want to believe something about a person may tend to accept without question rumors or gossip about that person, even if they know intellectually that the rumors or gossip cannot possibly be true.

And it just keeps getting worse. All these problems assume that the people involved are communicating ideas or concepts which they already have in common. When two diffeent people have totally dissimilar worldviews, the situation gets much worse. We fit our understanding of the world around us into a conceptual framework, and tend to take that conceptual framework for granted, without even ever questioning whether the framework is valid, universally applicable, or shared by the people around us.

ALICE: It’s obvious that people with multiple romantic relationships can’t possibly be committed, because ‘commitment’ means that you’re dedicated to oly one person. Someone who is not committed can’t be trusted, because they have no commitment to you.
BOB: But what if someone is committed to more than one person?
ALICE: Impossible. That’s a logical contradiction. ‘Commitment’ means ‘dedicated to only one person.’ You can’t be dedicated to two people any more than you can divide a circle into three halves.

This same sort of reasoning can cause problems in communication when one person’s words or ideas superficially resemble, but aren’t the same as, a different set of words or ideas that the listener has already formed an opinion about; what’ll happen is that the listener will assume that the words he’s hearing carry the same meaning as the words he’s already heard, and react as if they had the same meaning, when in fact they don’t.

ALICE: Jealousy is an internal emotional state. A person why says ‘I am jealous’ is making a statement about an internal feeling; you can not necessarily draw any conclusions about that person’s circumstance just from that statement.
BOB: That’s bullshit! Jealousy is not always caused by internal feelings; sometimes, a person might feel jealous because of something their partner has done. You’re just trying to dodge responsibility for your actions, that’s all.
ALICE: I didn’t say anything about the causes of jealousy.
BOB: Yes you did! You’re just repeating that tired old line that jealousy is all in someone’s head and that person needs to just get over it already.

Often, you’ll see several different forces at work screwing up communication at the same time. Witness, for example, the people who believe that Americans don’t have to pay tax. They point to the fact that the United States has a “voluntary” tax system, erroneously thinking that “voluntary” means “something you don’t have to do;” in the specific legal sense, “voluntary” means “you volunteer information to the government about the amount of tax you owe” (meaning that you make the calculations, then send the IRS the result of those calculations; in a non-voluntary system, the government calculates how much tax you owe, and sends you a bill). Furthermore, they’re heavily emotionally–and financially–invested in the flawed understanding.

On the whole, I’m not entirely convinced communication ever really works at all, and I’m beginning to have my doubts about language.