Minor bit of trivia: the early information on the JWST which was available helped me to come up with the design idea for the ‘Advanced Survey Array’ in Communion of Dreams. I never really get into a description of the ASA, but I had to think through for myself how the thing worked to use it consistently in the book.
Several things of interest, some personal, some news, some related to the book . . .
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I am struck with how powerful just random chance is in determining the course of events. Whether you agree with the Administration’s handling of it or not, just consider how the BP oil leak in the Gulf has come to dominate the attention and course of politics. Who could have predicted that of all the things happening in the world, this would happen? It’s like getting in a car crash – it sort of shuts out every other factor in your life.
I’ve written about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity previously. Simply put, I find the idea interesting but unconvincing. Kurzweil and the others involved in this ‘Singularity University’ are smart people, and I like that they are pushing for research and the development of technology which will benefit all, but it strikes me as mostly as the technological equivalent of the ‘afterlife’ of most religions – more hope than reality. This quote from the article sums up my thoughts pretty well:
William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.
“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.
“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.
Which isn’t to say that there cannot be revolutionary breakthroughs which could radically change our lives. I’ve also written about how hydrogen sulfide (H2S) seems to be connected to hibernation, and now comes a fairly breathtaking bit of news that is related:
Yeast and worms can survive hypothermia if they are first subjected to extreme oxygen deprivation, a new study finds.
The results could explain a long-held mystery as to how humans can be brought back to life after “freezing to death,” the scientists say.
The study uncovered a previously unknown ability of organisms to survive lethal cold by temporarily slowing the biological processes that maintain life.
But the really interesting bit was this:
Documented cases of humans successfully revived after spending hours or days without a pulse in extremely cold conditions first inspired Roth to study the relationship between human hypothermia and his own research in forced hibernation.
In the winter of 2001, the body temperature of Canadian toddler Erica Norby plunged to 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) as she lay for hours in below-freezing weather after wandering outside wearing only a diaper. Apparently dead, she recovered completely after being re-warmed and resuscitated.
The same curious fate befell Japanese mountain climber Mitsutaka Uchikoshi in 2006, who was discovered with a core body temperature of 71 degrees F (22 degrees C) after 23 days after falling asleep on a snowy mountain.
23 DAYS? Holy shit, I hadn’t been aware of that.
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And lastly, you probably heard about this:
KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. geologists have discovered vast mineral wealth in Afghanistan, possibly amounting to $1 trillion, President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman said Monday.
Waheed Omar told reporters the findings were made by the U.S. Geological Survey under contract to the Afghan government.
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Americans discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, according to the report. The Times quoted a Pentagon memo as saying Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cell phones.
Sounds like a brilliant bit of good news? Think about it again. As someone on MetaFilter commented:
Oh man, I wish I could feel optimistic about this… but a homeless guy with no hope and no prospects, who finds a gold watch, still has no hope and no prospects, but now he’s in for a beating too.
Did you ever read The Prize? Same thing. The ore sources for some of these minerals are very rare, they are critical for many high-tech products, and there is going to be a scramble to make sure who winds up in control of them.
Almost 30 years ago I took psilocybin for the first time. I repeated the experience several times over the next couple of years, and have largely spent the time since making sense of the whole thing. Some of this is reflected in Communion of Dreams: descriptions of synesthesia in the book were based largely on my own experiences while under the influence of ‘shrooms, and the use of ‘auggies’ (drugs designed to increase neural processing) were also inspired by those experiences.
But the use of psychedelics was largely from another time. Not the first instance of my having been out-of-phase with the rest of society.
So it’s somewhat surprising to see new research being conducted using these drugs. Research which really should have been conducted decades ago, were it not for the paranoia of the “Just Say No!” years. This weekend’s edition of To The Best Of Our Knowledge provides a nice insight into this:
It’s taken decades for study of mind-altering drugs to be taken seriously. Now a handful of scientists are at the forefront of new research. One of them is Roland Griffiths is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. He’s just turned his attention to psilocybin, a classic hallucinogen commonly known as magic mushrooms. He tells Steve Paulson about his findings.
And:
We hear a clip from Annie Levy who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the late stages she took part in an experimental study designed to see if taking psilocybin could help with the fear and panic about dying. In her case, taking a single dose was a life-changing experience in her final months.
It’s a shame, really, that the therapeutic use of hallucinogens has been stymied for so long. There is such a long tradition of using these drugs to access deeper insight and spirituality in many cultures that one is almost tempted to say that humankind’s evolution has been influenced by psychedelics as much as learning to use fire. That we have cut ourselves off from these natural psychotropics is a shame – and again is reflected in Communion of Dreams in how we have artificially lost part of our natural birthright.
Last week I mentioned the genetic breakthrough accomplished by J Craig Venter and his team: the creation of functional man-made DNA. Since then, lots of very smart people have been trying to sort through the implications of this development. One of the better collections of such discussion I have seen can be found at Edge.
Here’s a bit from PZ Myers (also on his blog) that I find particularly insightful:
Nature’s constant attempts to kill us are often neglected in these kinds of discussions as a kind of omnipresent background noise. Technology sometimes seems more dangerous because it moves fast and creates novelty at an amazing pace, but again, Venter’s technology isn’t the big worry. It’s much easier and much cheaper to take an existing, ecologically successful bug and splice in a few new genes than to create a whole new creature from scratch…and unlike the de novo synthesis of life, that’s a technology that’s almost within the reach of garage-bound bio-hackers, and is definitely within the capacity of many foreign and domestic institutions. Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
Let me repeat that last sentence: Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
As you likely know, the Space Shuttle program is coming to an end, and each of the shuttles are on their final launch schedules. Take a few minutes and watch this amazing time-lapse vid:
The action starts in the hangar-like Orbiter Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Discovery has been outfitted for its STS-131 mission. The vehicle is then towed to the 525-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building, hoisted into a vertical position and lowered onto its external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters. Then it’s off to the pad on the giant Mobile Launcher Platform, where the shuttle is encased in its protective Rotating Service Structure until just before launch on April 5, 2010.
Sometimes the things we do impress the hell out of me.
Now, this scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell. In a publication in Science magazine, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.
I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.
I was checking the web stats, saw that BBTI is closing in on 2.5 million hits (probably hit that mid-afternoon tomorrow). A link from a site listed in the referrals had this comment about the project that I thought I would share:
“As I recollect, it was actually someones Master’s research project at the University of Iowa. Can you imagine doing graduate level work in external ballistics? Kinda cool.”
At first I just thought it was amusing, since we explain right on the homepage what prompted us to do the testing. But then thinking about it a little further, I realized that it was actually a nice compliment and somewhat insightful: what we did could be seen as being comparable to graduate-level study and research. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
. . . about Stephen Hawking’s caution regarding contacting alien civilizations.
LONDON (AFP) – Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, British scientist Stephen Hawking has warned.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” said the astrophysicist in a new television series, according to British media reports.
And:
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.
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Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.
Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
Man, it really makes me wish that Communion of Dreams was currently in print. Because this is all stuff that I discuss, at length, there. The topic of alien contact is as old as science fiction, but it comes and goes in popularity – and right now it’d be great to have my book on the shelves of bookstores.
Communion Of Dreams 