Biology Is Too Slow!

Humans are pumping a lot of energy around. When it comes to energy we don't mess around. We like our energy highly concentrated. We dig it up, refine it, convert it, and pump it through wires or pipes or the air like there is no tomorrow.

Nature is adaptive. Right? Nature finds a way. Right? So where are the animals and plants that suckle upon high power lines, that find their adaptive way into fuel tanks and batteries? Surely they could. Surely the same nature that goes gaga around mid ocean heat vents and can learn to metabolize the worst toxins we can throw into ponds... that good old adaptive nature should find a way to co-evolve with 50 thousand volt transmission lines.

And there are other (new) tits for nature to suckle. I fully expect our air to become less and less transparent to radio transmissions. If we can build devices that can grab radio energy right out of the air.… surely airborne molds and other microorganisms can do so. Are they? Doesn't look like it. What weird life forms would be best suited to radio-metabolism? Plants grab photons in the visible (radiation) band. Photosynthesis (in plants) is a respiratory affair - requiring oxygen and nitrogen for the primary reactions, but they also rely on heavy and rigid structural support to get up into the air where they can maximize their surface interface and solar exposure. Actually, when you think about it, a plant would be more efficient if it spent no energy fighting gravity, and instead laid flat on the surface of the land. Plants must only grow into the air to compete away from shade the shade of other plants and to increase respiration surface area.

Anyway, and this is a bit of an aside, but would there be a way for lighter than air super-colonies of single celled animals to maximize access to radio energy without the need for the heavy structure and vascular transport terrestrial plants employ? Maybe the radio scenario is ludicrous. Surely there is lots of background microwave energy constantly streaming by. Surely radio waves have been around as long as biology has been around. If radio was a good source of energy, nature would have already found a way. Maybe big bang radiation doesn't pack much of a wallop. Is it possible that communication intended radio is more energetic? More localized. Easier to exploit. I can imagine some type of group-dynamic in which individual floating animals or proto-animals learn to orient themselves such that they become a reflective parabola or fresnel lens concentrating radio energy to a focal point where other animals absorb the energy in some sort of symbiotic bio-community. Many other scenarios are conceivable.

Are plants learning to seed near highways to take advantage of air movement and carbon dioxide? There are a million ways in which human activity effects environments in ways that provide energy and stability clines. Surely life is reacting in step.

The pace of culture is so much faster than most organisms can genetically respond. The smallest organisms with the shortest life spans that have the greatest populations spread over the largest geographies are the organisms most likely to take advantage of our frenetic environmental messings.

Are they? Is anyone paying attention?

What is computing?

This is the most important question of our time… yet so rarely asked. Computing technology increasingly shapes every aspect of human behavior, culture, resource use, health, commerce, and governance. A passive stance on the question that effects all other questions is increasingly dangerous to the future of all humans, of life, of evolution itself.

In the 60's we created NASA, an elaborately funded research program to uncover the knowledge and develop the technology to "go to the moon". Yet one would be hard pressed to justify the cost to society of contraptions that do nothing more than take a few people to a near-by rock… almost nothing of the NASA program can be used outside of the narrow focus of getting a few tens of miles off the surface of Earth (at tens of millions of dollars per pound).

Ironically, and inadvertently, the practical mathematics, programming, and computational techniques developed and honed by NASA in the pursuit of its expensive and arguably impractical goals may be the only pertinent contribution to show for the tens of trillions of dollars spend on this ill-concieved and irrational "research" program.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse… akin to building a global library system and book binding before developing a written language.

We are surrounded by lifeless rocks. We didn't need to send a few Air-force test pilots to the moon to figure that out. The practical scope of our chemically propelled rockets hardly avails us to the nearest little frozen or boiling neighbor planets in this corner of this one little Solar System. Ever attempt a phone conversation with 40 min. gaps between utterances?

The interesting stuff in this Universe (at least the small corner we have access to) is right here on our little Earth. It is us… and more than that, it is not so much what we have done, but what we will do and how what we will do effects what other future things will do because we set them into motion. That is our job. In a very real way, we are the first things that understand the job description despite the fact that it has always been there and has always been the same. This understanding should give us a leg up on the process. Should.

There are two kinds of knowledge: the first, historical, the second, developmental. When we go somewhere, we do nothing more than uncover that which already is. Compare this to development, where we create things that never were. In this universe, if there was a force that was prescient in creating one star or planet, that same force must have been prescient in the creation of Earth. We don't have to go to Mars to find the forces that created Earth. And we certainly don't need to send humans over there even if we do want intimate knowledge of a place like Mars.

At any rate, computing is a universal process. Computing is agnostic to domain. You can compute about particle physics and you can compute about knitting. Computing is an abstraction processing medium. Computing is what brains do. Computing is not restricted to the category that is biological minds. Learning how to compute is learning how to discover. The goal becomes the unknown… becomes un-prejudiced developmental discovery. The machinery of pattern matching… of salience… of the perception of essence across domains.

I am obsessed with this biggest "why" of computing. I don't think the computational "why" can be separated from the biggest "why" of existence in general... of evolution… of the march of complexity.

The convergence of thermodynamics (the way action effects energy dissipation) and information science (the relative probabilities of structure and the cost of access, processing and transference) guide my approach to these questions. Least energy laws dictate the evolution of all systems. Computing is evolution. Abstraction systems allow prediction. Prediction grants advantage. Advantage influences the topology of the future. The better a system gets at accurately abstracting it's environment, the more it will influence the future of abstraction systems. Computing is the mechanics of evolution... always has been. Are we designing computing to this understanding of the methodology of complexity handling?

Lets suppose we gave the scientists at NASA a choice. We ask them, "What technology represents a greater potential towards the eventual understanding and even physical exploration of the Universe, rocket engines or computers?", What would be the rational and obvious answer? If we ever hope to get any real distance in this universe it won't be by burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. Most things in this universe are millions of years away even at the speed of light. Rocket engines hardly move at all when compared with even the too-slow speed of light. Getting anywhere in this universe will demand tunneling beneath the restrictions that are space and time… no rocket engine will ever do that for us. I am not an advocate for space exploration, but if I was, I would be pushing computation over rocket propulsion.

It is time to advocate a culture wide push towards the advancement of an ever-expanding understanding of computing. To the extent we succeed, all of the future will be defined by and fueled by our discoveries. If we choose instead to spend our limited and most expensive money towards rockets we had better hope the universe can be understood through the understanding of explosions and destruction and spending long periods of time floating in space. Come on people! Think!

[ more to come… ]

Solar energy conversion… can it hurt the Earth?

Note: before anyone accuses me of being anti-green, let me explain my general motivation and then the specific intent of this post. I don't think there is a more potent problem facing humanity (and all life) than the current man-caused spike in global temperature. If we do not act appropriately and quickly and at unprecedented scale, biology faces near-total destruction. The scale of this problem demands that our solutions be equally large. Large solutions of any kind will have both intended and unintended consequences. We must strip emotion and sentimentality from our assessment and design process. We must dump our pre-conceptions and deal with the physical dynamics as they are (not as we would like them to be).

Global heat delta as solar/wind is converted?

Almost every time solar energy is harnessed by human-built converters (to electricity or work), this energy is transmuted down the thermodynamic ladder faster and more localized than would "naturally" occur.

And its digression towards heat is localized (thermodynamic oxymoron I am aware). At the very least, the global atmospheric energy distribution budget is disturbed. Energy that used to go towards other dynamic dissipative systems (ocean and air currents, the fresh water cycle, etc.) is now siphoned off and downgraded to heat at a faster rate. This is especially true of systems like solar to electricity cells which convert some sunlight that would otherwise have bounced out into space.

Even wind and water current converters (turbines) pull kinetic energy from a large system, and localize (time and location) the thermodynamic degradation in non-natural ways.

In both cases, heat that would have dissipated down stream over a long period of time is removed instantly (much of which is immediately lost to heat in the conversion process) and sent to highly localized dissipative devices (lights, heaters, stoves, computers, washing machines, TVs, and industrial equipment). The placement of these end of the line dissipative devices is determined by human desire and not the simple thermodynamic least-energy topology represented in natural systems.

As we get better and better at exploiting solar energy to our own energy needs, more and more of the solar energy that drives large scale atmospheric phenomena will be removed from the standard atmospheric causality chain. What impact will this have on weather patterns? On ocean currents? On global temperature and temperature distribution? On annual seasons? On precipitation patterns?

Our planet's heat budget is to some extent regulated by the off-planet radiation of heat through infrared (and other) radiated wavelengths. How do our current human uses of electricity effect this radiated/mechanical heat fraction?

As compared to hydro-carbon oxidation?

To be sure, the oxidation of hydro-carbons (burning oil and gas) has a more radical effect on heat balance. But this has more to do with the fact that undisturbed oil and gas are only "potential" energy until we bring them to the surface and burn them. Solar energy conversion is not typically considered in light of thermodynamic process because it is assumed that this is energy that is used naturally anyway. But natural uses of solar energy drive planet wide dissipative engines upon which all life is distributed and timed.

To what extent will drastic increases in solar energy conversion effect these essential processes? Especially as humans continue to use more and more energy?

Is this a tipping point effected system?

I know that current solar conversion is probably such a small slice of the total earth-solar energy budget that these questions must seem daft. However, as we have seen in many natural systems, small changes can catalyze huge and unexpected out-fall effects. Disregarding "tipping point" sensitivity, how will ever increasing capture of solar energy for human use effect Earth-scale dissipative systems that support biology as it is currently represented?

Engineering done well

Here is what I suspect. We put solar conversion panels up where solar real-estate is cheap... on roofs or in deserts where other (agricultural) uses of that energy is not reasonable. These locations are locations where there is reason to have highly reflective surfaces. A well designed solar converter reflects as little energy as possible. Either way, I suspect that solar panels have different reflective behavior than other surfaces. Plants appear green because they absorb red (longer wavelength) light. Plants differentially reflect green and blue light. Solar panels are usually placed where plants aren't. But even if they replaced plants, their reflection/absorption properties would be different than plants. A plant converts solar to chemical energy in a respiratory process that absorbs carbon from carbon dioxide in the air and strips the carbon releasing pure oxygen.

Photovoltaic panels are not respiratory systems. This fact alone changes the environmental atmospheric equation.

But let us instead concentrate on panels that replace only other non-biological surfaces of various reflective and heat storage indices. The whole point of a well designed solar panel is to convert solar photonic energy to heat or electricity (or hydrogen) which can be transported or transmitted to other locations for immediate use (conversion back to heat through a chemical or mechanical process that results in work). This process differs from natural processes in important ways. It is usually faster degradation to heat. It is often localized differently than natural dissipative processes. And (if well designed and engineered) it is more absorptive than natural surfaces. 

Randall

Motivation [anti-] matters...

Recently, I stumbled across a post to a public online science discussion group. But, it wasn't the subject of the post that interested me. The subject was speculation about the existence of anti-matter galaxies "at the fringes of the universe". What makes this person's post worth commenting upon is the almost immeasurable difference between scientific thinking and non-scientific thinking. So… it's worth an short examination.

First what we think we know about anti-matter:

Every empirically derived model of the universe (standard model included) shows almost no remaining antimatter after just a short percentage of its current age. The same models show an almost 50/50 split at the first moment… and then a quick period of mater-antimatter annihilation resulting in the current matter domination (with a whole mess of residual dark matter and dark energy). Remember, antimatter isn't nether-worldly, it's just matter that is in some fundamental way, symmetrically inverted. An antimatter electron would, for instance, have a positive charge. Thats all. No magic, no otherworldliness, anti-matter is still matter… is every bit "material".

Now the question of rhetoric:

What fascinates me when discussions like this erupt is the "why" that drives the original post. Contrarianism is a cornerstone of Scientific thought. But when the motives driving contrarian ideas are not scientific, you can expect scientists to assign the standard "crackpot" label. Every time I investigate such a claim, every time I ask and get an answer to the question "What drives your interest in making this contrarian claim?", I get an anti-scientific answer. I get an answer that reveals a spiritual world view that necessitates some fundamental strangeness at the base of a "theoretical" framework or "cosmology". The strangeness is necessary to support a "physical" explanation for the meta-physical emotional experiences and needs the contrarian finds personally satisfying. It is endlessly fascinating to me that anti-scientific thinkers seek constantly to justify their emotional-experiential world view atop some sort of awkward and illogical re-imagining of science derived knowledge. In contrast, you will never see a scientist go to spirituality in support of his theory or experimentally derived data set. No scientist has ever or will ever work a verse from the Bible, or a witticism attributed to Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, Confucius, or L. Ron Hubbard into a proof or theory. The anti-symmetry of these two behaviors is worth a well intentioned pause for thought.

The inward apologetic focus of spirituality is the opposite the outward focus and motivations of science. Science (scientists) are motivated by a desire to understand the universe… as it is… for what it is. A scientist tries all day long to disregard what it feels like to think or want or need, expects that their own personal emotional gestalt is forever slanted by evolutionary selection towards culture, gender, species, and bio-centric mechanisms that are physically embedded and unavoidable. A scientist is motivated to see beyond personal experience to the fabric from which it is derived and of which, perspective is just a tailing, a side effect. It is important here to specify the scientific classification of the self and self-experience. Science is frequently accused of being anti-self. This is the farthest from the truth. To science, the self and subjective experience is every bit as existent as any thing else in this universe. But in the same way that Copernicus re-figured the ontology of the Solar system, placing the Sun in the center and demoting Earth to the less central and less exclusive role of Planet, science views the self and experience as non-special, as one of, as a physical manifestation of order and causality specific to place and time and circumstance. The self, to a scientist is effect. It is weather, not atmosphere. It is concerto not violin. It is road trip, not station wagon.

A scientist says "My mind is flawed. My mind tells me things that it wants to hear. How can I construct methods and means to see the difference between what is and what I experience?" A scientist doesn't seek physical justification for flawed thinking. A scientist just plain expects it, deals with it, looks beyond it. A scientist posits causality at base. Builds an inverted pyramid of causality. At the lowest point in this pyramid, this hierarchy of influence, are the most basic of physical processes. We humans and our thoughts appear high up at the top of this ever expanding pyramid of influence and causality… meaning, what we do and think is much more effect than cause. Scientists expect and accept this. We don't seek means of rearranging the structure that built us to fit our emotional experiential needs. We just look for what is.

So, I have asked the author of the originating post; "What motivates your interest in the existence of anti-matter galaxies?"

Note: A whole slew of fringe (mathematically consistent?) theoretical models have been introduced by legitimate scientists that allow for the existence of contemporary pockets of anti-matter in a matter dominated universe such as ours.  These alternative models (and far crazier ones as well) are introduced to test the validity of more dominant models, as a means of falsifying. But this process of constantly looking for error is motivated by an interest in discovery of the truth about what is. Again, this search for "What Is" is fundamentally different than a search for an explanation or justification for "What I Feel".

Randall

Some background information:

The early universe was opaque to light (for about 300 thousand years). The energies released (that still exist) were generally of a much higher frequency then visible light… gamma radiation. Plus, the universe was too hot and dense (millions of times hotter and denser than the first moment of an atomic bomb detonation) for atoms to form, so photons wouldn't stream past atoms as they do today, and instead interacted with the dense soup of nuclei and electrons. When the universe had expanded and cooled to the point necessary for atoms to form, photons (of all energies) were free to fly unimpeded as they do today… the universe was finally transparent. Then it was another 500 million years before stars were formed and ignited before the first location-specific photons began to flood out into the universe (the stuff we can see with our eyes, telescopes, and directional sensors).

Because of the expansion of the Universe the big bang (matter anti-matter) created gamma rays are now huge radio waves (many meters in wavelength). This is the cosmic background radiation… the hiss on your analog radio and TV.

Now, what an event horizon is, and what one can see, are two very different things. 

It is important to remind our selves that seeing isn't an active process. Seeing is a passive act. Sure, the photons that hit our retina are active, but the only thing active about our eyes is that they react to photons that hit them. We don't "look" out into the cosmos. We passively receive stray photons that were created or reflected off of stuff at some distance (which always translates to some time in the past)… and only photons, which happen to be streaming along exactly in a path that intersects one of our eyes. Our eyes don't suck information in, they just sit and wait for what ever comes their way. The best we can do is point them in a particular direction.

The event horizon is the theoretical spherical limit to how far anything can go within a given period of time from when it was released. Typically when we are talking about an event horizon we are talking about a boundary dictated by the fastest anything can travel in space-time, which is the speed that light travels in a vacuum. Given the fact that this universe began as a singularity (as one point of zero spacial diameter), we are (as is everything) always at the center of that first primordial point. That is the really great, if somewhat confusing, thing about an expanding universe… where ever you are, if you are within this universe, you are at the the exact epicenter of the big bang that started it all.

This rule is true no matter how fast you are going or when you started going that fast. Distance itself is an attribute of space-time and space-time was created by the big bang. There is nothing remotely detectible, like distance (or time for that matter), that is or ever will be, outside of space-time.

Even stranger, if Einstein was correct (and everything we have ever measured seems to say that he was), energy and matter are directly tied to and dependent upon space and time. Add or subtract from any of these four and you directly effect the quantity of at least one of the other three.

The photons that bring us information about things far away (long ago) left a universe that was less and less like the one we live in today the longer ago they were made. The limits to what we will ever be able to "see" no matter how good our telescopes get, are dictated by when the universe became transparent to light. This is when light became directional. There is radiation all around us that isn't directional… or rather it was created before the universe allowed radiation to stream unimpeded in a strait line. This radiation is considered "noise" as it is incoherent (each photon is unrelated to each other photon). In this sense, it is like temperature, you can know things about the average of all of the photons (average wave length and amplitude) but anything you can measure about any one photon is missing any information that would tell us anything about source location.

That is the bugaboo about knowing anything about the very earliest universe. There was a very long period of time right after creation (scientific semantics) that we can never know much about. We can derive quantities as averages, but we can not know anything about specific spacial events or trends. The moment the universe went transparent is a boundary, before which we can only guess at location-specific layout of the universe. For all practical purposes, in this universe, the moment of transparency (the moment the universe got cool enough to allow the formation of atoms) is the only "event horizon" of any interest. This photon transparency horizon (300 thousand years after the big bang) has nothing at all to do with the theorized matter anti-matter annihilation epoch which occurred between about 10^-32 and 10^-12 seconds after the big bang.

Note: It is calculated that the observable matter dominated universe (photons, neutrons, protons and electrons) is the result of a 1 part in 1 billion majority of matter to anti-matter. The statement made earlier to the effect that "electrons are supposed to be positively charged" is complete hooey. Anti-matter is created everywhere in the universe that energies are high enough for fusion (in stars, supernova, and at black hole horizons). Such newly created anti-matter is annihilated the moment it contacts matter and this produces photons in the x-ray spectrum.

Future Salon speakers Jaron Lanier and Eliezer Yudkowsky square off

Hey all (?),

Have any of you ever experienced the awkwardness of nervous "nerd" laughter... well the link below will provide a good example of what this is like. The link is to the Future Salon and in particular a video stream about half the way down the page entitled:

"Future Salon speakers Jaron Lanier and Eliezer Yudkowsky square off"





It is video conference phone call split screen debate between this Yudkowsky guy who is the head scientist at the Singularity Institute, and Lanier who has been the genius hippy in red dread locks since his early pioneering work with Virtual Reality and artificial vision systems.

Before you click the link, let me frame the debate.

These two guys represent the two extremes of a subtle range of viewpoints on evolution, AI, and human consciousness.

On one end you find the "Hard AI" camp (here represented by Yudkosky) which believes that intelligence is simply an emergent property of the physics of this universe and the evolutionary process, and so, should yield its secrets to scientific investigation and by extension, should be evolve-able and build-able or extend-able through directed pragmatic human effort.

On the other end of this polemic you find the "humanists". The humanists have trouble with the idea that consciousness is reducible to units that could be mechanized in a substrate other than biology or that intelligence could result from the computational gestalt in use today. Though his professional life consists of working on the kinds of computing problems many would label "AI", Jaron is one of these "humanists".

Jaron's main criticism of the hard AI camp in this debate is that their strong attachment to finding a way past death and their a-priori belief in the possibility of reasonably building self evolving intelligence together become so rhetorically invasive that they can no longer do objective investigation or engineering... that their beliefs and desires make them "religious".

Yudkoski could make an even stronger case against the same tendency towards the religiousness of the humanist position as it is based upon the extreme human-centrism that is the notion that consciousness is unique and magic in that it stands alone as something special to humans or biology... but he doesn't. I can't tell if he just doesn't realize that Jaron is by far the more religious of the two... or that he is just two nice to do so.

To me, this is not the logical scientific debate both seem insistent upon presenting, but between a Southern Baptist Minister and a Catholic Priest who are both under the self-delusion that they are more atheistic and objective than the other.

If you can stand the awkward nerd-fest mannerisms (Saturday Night Live could have a field day with these two characters), this little debate goes a long way in illustrating some of the deep philosophical polemics that seem to pop up anew with each new technology or cultural innovation and each new generation.

I can't win. Even in AI... in the field that best matches my own interests, I am a loner. I represent interests and motivations not expressed by anyone else.

I respect both of these researchers. Each is passionate and extremely well prepared for this debate and bring to it a lifetime of concerted thinking, experimentation, and theory. The debate is a spectacle: like a 1960s Japanese monster movie. And just as herky-jerky awkward. Very illuminating on so many many levels. This video could be the basis of a graduate thesis on science in the shadow of post-modern thought (confusion?).

From my perspective, Jaron is a nothing more than a (very bright) priest who can't stop doing science in the basement, and Yudkoswsky is nothing less than a scientist that can't help wanting to build a God.

Randall Reetz