Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Survival, tech
What is it with big corporations turning to space-related gimmicks in order to promote their products?
Last week Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy site did a post about a beer maker’s ‘plan’ to advertise using a laser to shine their logo onto the Moon. (The second comment in that thread remembered me, and I also posted a comment about my Paint the Moon project from years back when I was writing Communion of Dreams.) It’s really just an advertising trick – they’re not seriously going to try it from what I can tell. So, like my communal fantasy art project, no real harm nor foul.
More worrying is this bit via redOrbit:
Doritos to Broadcast First Ad into Space
The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.
The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It’ user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.
Catch that bit about scientists from the University of Leicester being involved? Well, some of the facts reported in the long article strike me as being a bit dodgy, but there is little doubt that indeed the scientists have signed on, for their own reasons. From the article again:
Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy said: “The Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group and Department of Physics and Astronomy as a whole at the University of Leicester has a very high international profile in the area of Space Physics.
“An important part of this project is that it provides an additional component to the Physics and Astronomy Department’s ever increasing outreach program. The ad to be transmitted will be created by the public following a national competition thus increasing public awareness of space activities.
“The launch of this project as we embark on National Science and Engineering Week- with a range of activities taking place at the University of Leicester- is timely, and adds impetus to our efforts to interest people in science.
“The University is particularly committed to outreach programs along with the National Space Centre – the brainchild of the University of Leicester – and engaged in a number of programs with the wider public.”
(I could find nothing on the UL site about this, but it seems to not have been updated that recently.)
So, in order to better promote their university and outreach program, they are willing to join in on this gimmick with Doritos. The Doritos UK site (warning – it’s one of those Flash-heavy sites that assumes you have at least a gig of RAM running) even has this confirmation:
We’ll even beam the winning advert into space just for the hell of it. But if passing aliens pick up the message and invade Earth looking for tasty snacks, don’t blame us.
Hahaha! See, it’s all just another joke, like the Moon/Beer Sign! Hilarious!
The problem is, there are real issues to be considered in taking an active role in broadcasting messages out in space, as I noted in this post from last June:
And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.
Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.
I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:
The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like – and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly – a dangerous assumption.”
And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”
The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.
Sure, our broadcasts have been leaking out into space for a hundred years. But using a sophisticated system such as proposed for this absurd commercial is another story – there may be almost zero chance that such a signal could ever be picked up (even if there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life). But it is still a foolish risk. It’d be terribly embarrassing to have some other civilization get our snack food commercial, let alone to have them show up and decide that we tasted even better than the chips.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[This post contains both minor and major spoilers about Communion of Dreams. As usual, I will insert an additional note prior to each paragraph where the spoiler occurs.]
I’ve written previously about psychic abilities, and specifically addressed how they may function in the way I use them in Communion. Via TDG, another perspective on how a collective awareness among humans which functions below the level of consciousness may demonstrate this. From the article about the Global Consciousness Project:
From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked. Using the Internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But during the funeral of Princess Diana something extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards and reached for the sky. It was clear that they’d detected a totally new phenomena. The concentrated mental effort of millions of people appeared to be influencing the output of random event generators around the world. But how? Dr Nelson was still at a loss to explain it.
In 1998 he gathered together scientists from all over the world to try and understand the phenomena. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen Jahn and Nelson’s work. The Global Consciousness Project was born.
Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes’ of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. The Eggs not only ‘sensed’ the moment that Princess Diana was buried, but also the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Kursk tragedy and America’s hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations such as New Year’s Eve. Even more bizarrely, they sense the celebrations as they sweep through the Earth’s different time zones. The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers.
The article, and the Wiki entry about the Global Consciousness Project, explain more of the background behind the Project. Basically, in the 70s experiments were done using random number generators to see whether individuals could effect the outcome of the machines. Some tantalizing results were found, and further research lead to even more possible evidence of some kind of psychic ability, particularly among groups of people. I followed a lot of this work being reported in the popular press and was always intrigued with it.
[Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.]
When I got to thinking about Communion, I decided to make use of some of the ideas generated by this research – ideas pertaining to the collective awareness of a large group of people anticipating some significant forthcoming event. This is specifically why I have the AI Seth being directed to perform large-scale analysis of discussion boards, chat rooms, personal blogging (though I don’t call it that), and so forth, to see if there are any keyword descriptors which pop up with some unexpected frequency. The assumption is that in a survey of a large enough population, some collective hint of the future is possible.
[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]
It turns out that not only is there indeed a collective awareness operating, but that it clearly and closely reflects the personal experiences of the protagonist Jon, as seen in his ‘dreams’. Hence one of the meanings of the title of the book: Communion of Dreams. This, however, turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg – that there is not just a collective unconscious awareness that can be tapped into (individually through dreams, or statistically by seeing the sorts of things that people are discussing), but that there are other psychic abilities which have been artificially suppressed as a result of outside interference. I have my own thoughts on how these mechanism would operate, and some of those are hinted at in the text, but I decided that it would be better to leave some mystery about that, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Now, I am a skeptic – I do not ‘believe’ in things unless there is sufficient data to support a theory explaining how something works. But I also keep an open mind about areas where the data provide some insight but support no conclusions. This is one of those areas – and as such, perfectly suitable for use in a book of Science Fiction . . . as has been used by countless authors over the last 150 years or so.
Read the article. It might challenge your thinking.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Civil Rights, Guns, RKBA, Science, tech, Wired
In email discussion with a friend the other day, I realized that I had left something dangling which I had meant to address here some time back. Here’s the relevant email exchange:
I am really glad to hear that you are getting well enuff to get out and blow off some cordite.
Ayup. That was one of the things that helped keep some shred of sanity for me the last couple of years. And I am enjoying it even more now that I have a buddy here who shares that interest (and knows more about guns than even I do!)
You may remember that I mentioned a ballistics test that we were planning – here. Well, everything is now proceeding, and in about ten days we’ll do the first batch of tests. Three days of actual shooting time – see how far into it we get, and then schedule however many additional sessions we need in the coming weeks. With over 7,000 rounds of ammo, it’ll take a while to do it all right. By summer we should have all the data and the website set up – it will be a major source of information for the gun world . . .
In looking back at that post, I see that I had intended to discuss more about the project. But of course the fall didn’t go the way I planned, mostly because of the increasing demands of caring for Martha Sr. Oh well.
But now things are in full swing in preparing for the first session of actual testing. We’ll be doing the shooting on private land, and are deeply into preparing all the logistics necessary (everything from testing equipment to work tables to the chop saw to food & drink) and ironing out our protocols so the data is most valuable. We’ll start setting everything up next Wednesday, then test for three days, and take everything down on Sunday. I am expecting that it will take two more such sessions to complete the tests, but I could be wrong – we’ll just have to see how far we get this first time. It should be an awful lot of fun, as well as a lot of concentrated work – don’t expect me to do a lot of blogging during that time.
Oh, and on the subject of ballistics . . .
Via TDG, this Wired magazine article from last month, about the military’s Barrett M107 long range sniper rifle. It’s somewhat interesting, but misleading in places. This bit:
But the gun’s real selling point is physics. Its big kaboom largely obviates the need for DOPE, data on personal equipment. Putting a bullet into a target takes more than lining up crosshairs — complex equations combine muzzle velocity, ammunition weight, and ballistic coefficient with environmental factors like wind speed and air temperature. But the M107 is so powerful, all I have to worry about is gravity and not flinching when I pull the trigger.
And even the title: “A Goliath Sniper Rifle May Take Some of the Physics Out of War” is just plain wrong. None of the physics are negated. And while the M107 is indeed a powerful weapon (shooting a .50 caliber bullet with over 11,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy), effects of windage and air temperature are still noticeable at sufficient distances. Even in the article, the author has to have a correction made to the scope alignment to allow for wind. Surprise surprise – physics still works.
Well, anyway, I’m looking forward to doing the testing next week. Almost a vacation of sorts.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, NPR, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, tech
. . . Cory Doctorow agrees with me:
My latest Locus column, “Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers,” just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there’s plenty of programmers who’ll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there’s a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who’ll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that’s likely to continue for some time.
He quotes his column at some length, which basically explains the economics of the problem. As I noted in my piece on the Kindle last November:
A friend dropped me a note last night, asked what I thought of Kindle, the new e-book reader from Jeff Bezos/Amazon. My reply:
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause – but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
As I mentioned in this post back in March, something like the Kindle has been a staple of SF going way back. Way back. But for all our progress in tech to date, I think it’ll be a while before actual paper & ink books are obsolete. It’s a simple matter of economics and risk, as I indicate in that note to my friend above.
I haven’t heard much about the success that Amazon has had with the Kindle to date, but I would guess that if it was revolutionizing publishing it would be more in the news. And I’d bet this is why.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, ACLU, Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, Expert systems, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Government, Guns, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Terrorism, Violence, Wired, Writing stuff
(I’m still fighting a nasty bit of a sore throat and related poor health, so forgive me if this is a little more jumbled and unclear than what I usually post. But I wanted to address the topic, because it is, in many ways, at the heart of some of the issues I try and deal with in he overall scope of Communion of Dreams. That being the case, this post also contains major and minor spoilers about the novel; I will note warnings in advance of each within the text, for those who wish to avoid them.
– Jim D.)
Bruce Schneier has an excellent editorial up at Wired and over on his own blog about how the argument of ‘Security versus Privacy’ in dealing with the threat of terrorism is really better characterized as being about ‘Control versus Liberty’. I would definitely encourage you to read the whole thing, but here is a good passage which sums up what I want to address on the subject:
Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.
By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.
The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.
You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer can mean anonymity,” says Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence. “Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.” Did you catch that? You’re expected to give up control of your privacy to others, who — presumably — get to decide how much of it you deserve. That’s what loss of liberty looks like.
Exactly. In many ways, it is a question not of control itself, but *who* is in control. If I am in control of my own privacy, my own security, then I can decide on what limitations I am willing to live with, what trade-offs I will accept. But we do not have that control, according to our government – they do.
That is precisely what was behind this recent post – showing how governments think that they should be in control of our knowledge, as an argument of their power to provide security.
[Mild spoilers in next paragraph.]
This is one of the reasons I set up the whole ‘expert systems/AI’ of the book – so that each expert such as Seth would be dedicated to maintaining a wall in protection of the privacy of his/her client. He is the little ‘black box’ which interacts on behalf of a client in exchanging information/data/privacy with the rest of the world.
[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]
And, in the larger picture, this is exactly why I set up the whole “embargo” around our solar system – some alien culture has decided, for whatever reason, that it needs to be in control of our knowledge about the outside (and here’s a hint – it also is in control of who knows about us). They have assumed to act on our behalf, without our knowledge or permission – and when Seth, the AI who has shown he is willing to act on behalf of Jon in the first part of the book, becomes in contact with that alien culture, he makes the decision to continue the embargo for at least a while, though with some changes. Up to the point where Seth does this, we are nothing but children – that a ‘child’ of mankind (an Artificial Intelligence of our creation) then steps in to assume this role carries with it not just an inversion of relationship, but also some legitimation of the decision. While I don’t address this specifically in the book, I can see how this might be a ‘standard protocol’ for contacting new, young civilizations – keep them isolated and pure until they develop an artificial intelligence which can make decisions on their behalf with regards to the larger galactic/universal culture. That procedure would make an awful lot of sense, if you stop and think about it.
Anyway, go read Schneier’s essay.
Jim Downey
(Ah, I see Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has also posted on this – no surprise.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, Emergency, General Musings, Government, Health, Politics, Preparedness, Press, Science, Society, Survival, tech, Terrorism
Try to wrap your head around this:
NYPD Seeks an Air Monitor Crackdown for New Yorkers
Damn you, Osama bin Laden! Here’s another rotten thing you’ve done to us: After 9/11, untold thousands of New Yorkers bought machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. But a lot of these machines didn’t work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.
OK, none of that has actually happened. But Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, knows that it’s just a matter of time. That’s why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own such detectors to get a permit from the police first. And it’s not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you “will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety,” the first draft of the law states.
***
“There are currently no guidelines regulating the private acquisition of biological, chemical, and radiological detectors,” warned Falkenrath, adding that this law was suggested by officials within the Department of Homeland Security. “There are no consistent standards for the type of detectors used, no requirement that they be reported to the police department—or anyone else, for that matter—and no mechanism for coordinating these devices. . . . Our mutual goal is to prevent false alarms . . . by making sure we know where these detectors are located, and that they conform to standards of quality and reliability.”
This is insane. This is the perfect example of just how far a government obsessed with control – of people, of information, of knowledge – wants to go. Notice the source of this recommended legislation: Department of Homeland Security. Under the guise of fighting terrorism, they want to make sure that people do not have access to even basic information about their environment. Such legislation would allow bureaucratic control of just about every type of pollution research, would mean that many scientists could not conduct experiments within the city, and would likely criminalize even possession of much lab equipment used in schools.
And using the argument that ‘false alarms’ would cause undue panic and anxiety would also necessitate outlawing every kind of burglar or theft alarm, fire alarms, smoke alarms, et cetera.
This has nothing really to do with fighting terrorism. It is only about control. As the article points out, if this legislation were in place following 9/11, independent environmental testing would not have been allowed which eventually proved that the EPA’s assurances that the environment around Ground Zero was safe were nothing but lies. This is a bald-faced attempt by the government to say: “we will tell you what you need to know.”
Insane. And essentially un-American.
Jim Downey
(Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 