When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring. Permanence has always been part of the experience. [ ... ] Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Whoa, back it up, back it in, where the hell do we even begin? If there’s a more of a you-damn-kids-get-off-my- lawn moment than that, I haven’t seen it yet. Widely read Luddites like McKibben and Carr are also threatened by modern technological advancements, but while McKibben frets about comic book science and Carr was merely threatening us with web-induced ADHD, Franzen foresees the end of democracy itself because we’re reading e-books. Aren’t you just ashamed of yourself? Shouldn’t you run out and buy those permanent books that won’t suddenly change on you when you open them again? Besides, what books need to change? Once you write a book, there’s no need to update it ever again. Unless it’s a textbook and new scientific findings will require an adjustment in important facts and figures, necessitating new editions. Or it’s a current events book published days before a world changing event alters a narrative it’s trying to convey, and risks making it pretty much irrelevant from the moment it hits the shelves. Certainly fiction would be fine without having to be edited again and again, but non-fiction doesn’t have such luxury, and being able to update important facts on the fly if needed would be a huge plus for writers and publishers. But don’t tell that to Franzen. Change scares him.

And just out of curiosity, if permanence is what’s needed to make government and law to work, why have bills and lawmakers in the first place? Had governments across the world worked according to Franzen’s logic, I’d argue that we’d still be living under hereditary monarchies because the first written traditions and sets of laws for each country would’ve been drafted, approved, set in stone, and only enforced. Since that’s not the case in any nation and laws are adopted, struck down, and updated constantly, the sanctity of permanence espoused in his opinion on the matter doesn’t actually exist. Basically, e-books are new, unusual, and different from any previous format to which Franzen is accustomed but he feels compelled to justify his dislike with something a little more than "it’s new" not to seem like a member of the old fogey squad, so he reached for new heights in hyperbole. The result? He actually comes across not just like an old fogey, but a paranoid old fogey at that. To tie a digital book format to the end of democratic rule and government as we know it and claim that being able to change a book’s content leads to anarchy is to hop into the Hyperbole Mobile, then race it off a cliff, pushing the pedal to the metal the whole way down. In this case, honesty would’ve been the best policy.

As has been noted before, fundamentalism is antithetical to the modern world for a whole host of reasons, and a society trapped in the past as required by extreme religious dogma, can’t adapt to the changing world it inhabits. Israel’s economic game plan relies heavily on research and technology, primarily computing and all applications of it, ranging from social media to weapons design and security. Huge investments in medicine, basic research, and computer science require a workforce that completed the prototypical modern education heavy in science and mathematics. And guess what the rapidly growing Haredi populations usually consider heretical distractions from studying the Torah and Talmud? Exactly that. While the government wants to keep plowing cash to create the most modern economy we can imagine, it’s facing the fact that many of those who are just the right age to either take full advantage of these investments, or can start their education to reap the future benefits of this modernizing boost, have either voluntarily ruled themselves out from consideration with their religious devotion, or have been prevented by their fundamentalist parents from becoming scientists, or researchers, or engineers. It’s a textbook example of the kind of thing that gets Dawkins and Harris fired up, a denial of education and knowledge through imposed dogmatic ignorance and arrogance.

And this is not to mention the political and social fallout from a fundamentalist swarm either. Secular Israelis will fume about stories of Haredi blocking ambulances from crossing their districts on Sabbath, demanding a strict obedience to the Torah’s prohibition of work on that day even if this results in someone’s death because it must have been G-d’s will to take this person’s soul on Sabbath. If you believe the claims, people have died because ambulances either didn’t get to them in time, or because the patients didn’t get to a hospital quickly enough to start treatment. Trying to negotiate with Jewish fundamentalists seems futile. After all, how can you have a productive discussion with those who believe that their opinions are actually divine edicts and you’re a sinner who is disobeying the world of G-d rather than a person with opinions and ideas that need to be heard and discussed in more depth? If you visit Israel, you’ll see a country divided into a population trying to keep up with the modern world and embrace its challenges, and a population which confines itself to the 18th century and regards their fellow citizens who are scientifically educated and modernized with thinly veiled contempt, if not outright pity and disgust. What could be a successful case study in how to use government investments in science and technology to boost the economy and education is being hampered by arrogant dogmatism.

Of course this is not a perfect look into the future of the United States in which Christian fundamentalists gain inordinate political power since they do believe in science and technology as long as they don’t run contrary to their beliefs with their application, and wouldn’t spend all their time only studying the Bible. They would be more than willing to serve in the military since they see themselves as holy warriors, and serve already. In the grand scheme of things however, outsized fundamentalist influence on American politics would defund a lot of scientific and research programs, casting them as a waste of public cash, keep hobbling science classes by either injecting religious connotations into them or forcing them to stay mum about crucial concepts in both biology and physics, and trigger many highly unpleasant social changes which would force religious dogmas into law. All of it is being done now and while so far, promoting social archconservative views in public is just an easy way to win votes for right wing candidates while implementations of these views generally stall in the legislative branch or get watered down into irrelevance on riders to funding bills, extremely powerful and really devoted fundamentalist lobbies could start imposing their will through politics. And in a day and age when we should be investing into economic modernization, we literally can’t afford to step back in time and simply bow before the whims of those convinced that they have divine edicts to make their own rules.

My guess is that the different factors like eye scans and commonly used words will be used as neurons in an artificial neural network. Then, when a person whose habits were monitored interacts with the system, all the interactions will be used as inputs and ran through the network to determine whether they fit into the patterns on an ongoing basis. What happens if you’re just having an off day? Trouble at home? Maybe you got a ticket on your way to work? Maybe the traffic was particularly horrendous that day and you’re still seething over some random twit who decided to cut through two lanes of freeway traffic doing 25 under the speed limit right under your nose, almost making you read end him? Well, the neural network probably won’t like that and interfere as you try to work, threatening to turn your simmering anger into full blown fury and triggering another system that observes your outward behavior to target you as a security risk. Just watching what you tend to type often, how much you type, where your eyes are directed, and so on and so forth, aren’t very good indicators of how you’re going to behave in the future and they don’t capture anything all that highly individual, especially if you’re doing fairly repetitive tasks on a computer as part of your daily routine. It’s just data for a massive data dump.

And this is not to mention that judging your every interaction with a computer on even an hour by hour basis is going to take an immense amount of computing power since your actions have to be recorded and sent to an equivalent of a small server far to be constantly ran through the neural network. Since we’re talking about the mad science arm of the military, this system’s target use would be the Defense Department which will have millions of uniformed service members, employees, and contractors, to keep track of. The system would have to analyze billions of actions every day nonstop. It’s not impossible, but it would be very expensive to maintain and as we’ve just discussed, the results it would provide are rather dubious at best. It may be tempting to see the patterns of data it will generate as being extremely informative and revealing, but they’re not. Since it has to deal with humans, anything other than a major anomaly within the entire system will get lost in the noise, and seemingly personally identifiable computer usage habits will be homogenized into something so generic, it’s going to apply to an entire subset of computer users rather than just one. Any other approach and the network could be constantly going off with false alarms and thousands of people will be locked out on a regular basis after an occasional sneeze sets off the system’s hair trigger, which DARPA would find unacceptable.

We need to remember that with today’s computers we can easily record enormous amounts of data and then crunch through it faster than an entire army of humans. But that doesn’t mean that the data we can collect has to yield some profound insight we can tease out for predictive purposes. We have to focus not on what we can measure but why we’re measuring it and what factors are involved. We can mine oceans of data for some big and surprising factoids like say, 88% of users don’t use a feature the site owners thought would be huge. And that’s really it. From this data, we can’t predict that tweaking the feature in certain ways will ensure that it could attract three times the users utilizing it at the time the data was reviewed because personal preference varies greatly and something new and completely out of range for your data collection capability really captures your users’ time and attention. And sure, we can use certain data to help solve very straightforward prognostication problems, but only when they involve few factors, are very narrowly defined, and based on solid data points we can express as hard facts such as numbers, text, or true/false values. Beyond that, we’re engaging in what is really more or less just informed speculation that could be spot on, or a textbook example of GIGO.

[ illustration via Popular Science ]

Considering the number of posts already written about the contents of the paper, it would be redundant to use the next paragraph or two for a summary of the nonsense it contains. Check out PZ’s post, or Ars Technica’s disappointed take on the publishing process to get the main theme. Simply put, this is a paper so bad, there is a small contingent of people who say it has to be a hoax because the idea that Andrulis is serious is far too painful and sad for them to contemplate. Meanwhile, the vultures at the Discovery Institute decided to pretend that a single awful paper in a brand new publication shows that evolution is nonsense, ignoring the simple and telling fact that every scientist who’s actually seen it is appalled it was published in the first place. But as you probably know, facts are not an area in which the Institute excels by by stretch of the imagination and as it continues to face its slow decay with denial, it has no reason to learn how to be honest now. But we digress at this point because the real question is how gibberish purporting to cover physics and macroscopic biology with no math made it to a peer-reviewed journal ran by a respectable university. After all, if you wanted to find a supposedly peer-reviewed paper that awful, you had to go to the now defunct Journal of Cosmology.

Well, let’s remember that a) peer review is not a guarantee of quality and sometimes scientists doing reviews let some serious messes through while holding back good work, b) the publication is brand new, and c) its editorial board’s reaction seems to show that no one really took it seriously. If the head of the editorial board’s comment on this mess is to say that she has no interest in her position, I wouldn’t rely on the publication for a terrific review process to say the least. With so little interest being paid, no wonder this sad wreck just slipped through the cracks. Maybe the disinterested editors didn’t even bother reviewing it because Andrulis’ record is composed almost entirely of very high quality papers on RNA. One would think that the grandiose title should have at least prompted them to take a look, but for all we know, they may have not even seen the title before a green light was issued to a well published researcher. The press offices were also asleep at the wheel when they published the release, as well as some science sites and blogs which also simply regurgitate whatever they’re given by the scientists. And one can’t really blame them because they’re not experts in the field and as the least publishable unit papers pile up, the copy/paste reflex can easily kick in before the editors realize the mistake they made and retract what they just sent out into the world, as they did in this case.

Before ubiquitous web access and open, peer-reviewed journals, this publication would’ve quickly been left to wither away in obscurity and we would’ve never seen Andrulis’ paper. But thanks to the SIWOTI Syndrome, it’s now plastered across the web and dissected for all its flaws. This would be great if the paper was somehow controversial and thought provoking, but it’s devoid of any scientific content whatsoever and is only useful for a good example of jargon-riddled nonsense we can all dissect to feel better about our education and sanity. I’d even go do far as to compare the kind of fascination we have with crank’s papers making their way around the web with fans of reality shows. Sure we may not know everything there is to know about a specific process or have a tenure-tracked research job at a world class lab, but at least we’re not embarrassing ourselves with a big treatise on magical swirling gyres of nothing which underpin the whole universe without a single equation to demonstrate a concrete physical relationship, right? And that’s really the sad part. Imagine how difficult of a time Andrulis will have publishing his next paper even if it’s the most solid and substantiated experiment with his primary research interest. Everyone will recall his crank-tastic thesis and he could pretty much kiss tenure goodbye since few colleges would even want to risk the appearance of giving tenure to a pseudoscientist…

Let’s keep in mind that conspiracy theories attract those with a certain mindset, people looking for a blueprint of how the world works and hopefully one that will make them seem like agents of freedom fighting against a sinister cabal planning to enslave humanity. They’re trying to derive order from a tangled mess, to find rather simple answers to complex problems while labeling those they mistrust as the evil masterminds behind the conspiracy they’ve invented. So what will be their first reaction when a Popular Mechanics article debunking all the arguments of 9/11 Truthers comes up when they search for something about the 9/11 conspiracy theories to bolster their latest blog entry? Obviously the government is trying to stop them and Popular Mechanics is in on the whole thing, just like everyone else who pokes holes in their arguments is either a government shill or simply one of the naive sheeple who can’t see the truth. Why would anyone who is not in cahoots with the evil conspirators ask them to question if vaccines are an alien population control tool, or if evolution is really an insidious Zionist scam? Morozov readily acknowledges this mentality, especially in anti-vaxxers…

They are far too vested in upholding their contrarian theories. Some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky. Thus, attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join them, the much-debated antidote of “cognitive infiltration” proposed by Cass Sunstein, [...] won’t work. Besides, as the Vaccine study shows, blogs and forums associated with the anti-vaccination movement are aggressive censors, swiftly deleting any comments that tout the benefits of vaccination.

In other words, they’re not willing to listen, they have too much to lose by listening to actual experts, and they’ll aggressively censor any objection to their ideas in their communities. So how can we inject skepticism into a community that will dismiss it at best, or revolt against it at worst? We can’t. If we actually try to steer people in the right mindset to accept a conspiracy theory towards a debunking, no matter how unobtrusively we try to do it, we’ll just be fueling the fire and introducing a cure that’s worse than the disease. While it may sound bizarre to just let conspiracy theorists run wild and free, if we do, we can always point to the fact that we’re letting them do as they wish and dismiss their theories based on facts and evidence. After all, what we’re really afraid of is conspiracy theorists fueled by their beliefs doing harm to others or themselves and when that happens, there is a legal and procedural framework for handling such incidents. Conspiracy theories have been around for a very long time, basically since the birth of civilization with the first networks of powerful city states and they’ll be with us forever. Why should we task ourselves with the fool’s errand of fact checking them into extinction?

Just like the issue with SOPA and PROTECT IP, the bill which opens another digital Pandora’s box has a very noble-sounding title and gives those intended to enforce it nearly limitless powers. A real world equivalent to this legislation would be declaring martial law to cut down on convenience store robberies. This isn’t just web traffic friendly hyperbole since both SOPA and PROTECT IP would’ve allowed anyone to take sites offline for any report of copyright infringement, real or not, the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographer’s Act is mandating that your ISP store absolutely everything about your activities on the web for 18 months, and when I say everything, I’m also talking about keeping your personal financial information on file. That odd rash that could be mistaken for an STD you looked up on WebMD? Or the sexy lingerie you bought online? All saved by the company providing your internet access along with your bank accounts so if someone at your ISP decides to blackmail you in the future or take a luxury vacation with your savings or your credit card, all that’s needed is access to your personal data, data that’s unlikely to be all that well secured since your ISP is not on the hook if your personal information is compromised unlike your bank or credit card issuer. They’re just storing it in data centers because they have to and PCIPA doesn’t come with any guidelines for handling sensitive data.

Basically the whole point is to give law enforcement instant access to everyone’s personal data if they want to investigate someone for involvement in child pornography and come up with arrest warrant worthy evidence in several hours rather than several weeks or months. But as for those of us who have nothing to do with sordid child abuse and whose data is to be archived for effectively all time (not to get too technical, but such data will be around for a lot more than 18 months in the real world, I assure you), there’s no safeguard that will keep all this crucial information safe from characters with dubious intentions. Personally, if someone wants to peruse my financial records for an investigation in a court of law, I have no problem with producing what’s required as I’ve committed no crime and have nothing to fear from a judge. But just because I have nothing to fear doesn’t mean that I’m fine with my financial records and internet searches just floating around for a random employee or contractor at an ISP to dig through. Unlike law enforcement, they have zero business looking through them, and having seen how seriously they take security (hint, not very at all), I don’t trust them to have any of it. To go after child pornographers and pedophiles whether they are businessmen or holy men is noble. To declare an open season on everyone who uses the web and treat them as guilty until proven innocent is not.

True, it’s hard to argue with the logic that the wealthy will be able to afford the kind of life extending treatments that the poor will not. It would also be difficult to dispute that even with universal healthcare and life extension mandated to be offered and given to all those who ask, only the citizens of wealthy nations and the wealthy in the developing world will reap the benefits. But considering that Agar is a philosopher who wrote a book that opposes many transhumanist ideas, and whose interest in this topic has little to with the science involved, he plunges into class warfare with very vague and generic statements about the risks involved in techniques for radical life extension justifying the exploitation of the poor by the rich and their doctors. How this can happen if the trials will have to be announced to the public and when there will be plenty of volunteers who want to get in on a possible cure for aging itself is left to the reader to deduce. Agra just wants us to be shocked by the cruel doctors and the vain business tycoons driving them to sacrifice the economically disadvantaged…

I suspect, then, that human guinea pigs for anti-aging trials will come disproportionately from the poor and disempowered. A recent [2011] report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues called for stronger protections for participants in clinical trials. It seeks to block Big Pharma’s old practice of finding jurisdictions less finicky about their subjects’ rights in respect of clinical trials. (For instance, American doctors purposely infected more than 700 Guatemalans with syphilis in the 1940s.) The prospect of a cure for aging will create more powerful desires than did the prospect of a better treatment for syphilis. The rich and powerful will be looking to do away with rules that they perceive as denying them millennial life spans.

Now let’s review. According to Agar, since life extension treatments will be risky, he doesn’t want to be among the first humans to try them and the American government did authorize cruel medical experiments more than half a century ago. Therefore, he puts these two ideas together and gets rich people who want more than one lifetime getting the government to entice the poor and oppressed masses into cruel experiments. To support his argument he lists only one somewhat scientifically controversial claim behind what he says are dire risks involved, and totally forgets about the very likely role of complex robotics in life extension which could save countless patients suffering from nerve or muscle damage as well as give those who are locked in the ability to communicate with the outside world rather than stay trapped in the nightmare of a living death. He’s scared and not willing to contribute to extending human lifespan with his work, or allow science to use his body for a scientifically justifiable life extension technique or two, he justifies his attitude by framing the medical science of the future as a kind of dystopian body farm for the rich. It would be one thing if he warned us that abuses of power can happen in this context and we must be on the lookout for them, but that’s not he does.

He declares that it will happen as surely as the sun will shine and implies that if we do develop technology to live indefinitely or for hundreds of years, we should all be ashamed of ourselves because we will only get this advancement through our cruelty and the corpses of those who don’t make enough to be well off. Not only did he pull this entire line of reasoning out of his lower intestine and wields it like some sort of moral hammer, he is actually trying to shame those who would want to help all humans live longer, and who want to develop the kind of technology that can be used to save lives and improve the world for all those who will inhabit it longer, casting us as overzealous and poorly informed mad scientists either unaware or dismissive of the supposed death toll we’ll leave behind. Meanwhile, he can barely summon a single scientific objection and even then it’s an issue still being debated in detail by biologists and based on his vastly oversimplified reading of one idea by a famous gerontologist presented alongside many others. I suppose this is what happens when one tires of constantly gazing into his navel and decides to explore other cavities for "profound insights."

According to a press release from RT, the government funded English-language news agency located just a stone’s throw away from the Red Square, Julian Assange will be getting his own TV show in which he picks a number of those he considers to be iconoclasts to interview. Odd. After all the man blasted the Kremlin for the iron-fisted rule by Putin and his friends and threatened to post cables detailing their corrupt dealings, and a swift change of heart seems unlikely for a self-described democracy activist who became a victim of political oppression for his promotion of freedom. The documents which claimed to show that Putin secretly amassed an exorbitant fortune and built an ostentatious villa for himself never did make it to the Wikileaks site. Instead, they were released by a Russian outfit spun off from the Wikileaks community while it looks like Assange’s decision to hold back on publishing the incriminating pictures and snippets allowed him to jump in bed with some of the Kremlin’s media bigwigs and use the resources of an authoritarian regime to promote his views of international openness and transparency. Then again, as we’ve seen time and time again with him, it’s all about politics and money, and whatever noble agenda he probably had when starting Wikileaks went horribly, horribly wrong since he’s now being featured on a corrupt and ruthless strongman’s TV channel.

Of course knowing how the Kremlin operates, there has to be a reason they want Assange to have a show on their property and the first thing that comes to mind is what the whistleblower is best known for doing. After a massive release of classified documents which he and his fans say shows that the American government is supremely corrupt and is busy gleefully reengineering the world to its liking through a web of highly elaborate conspiracies aimed at destabilizing regimes it doesn’t like, it would only make sense to take his current legal problems, and possibly those of Bradley Manning, and frame the entire context of the show around this whole diplomatic mess. Considering that any country with sprawling international business interests wants to do all it can to make certain competitors go away and secure profitable ventures for its companies, the charge that a superpower has a sinister, New World Order like policy towards the world seems awfully trumped up. A much more accurate description would be that Western nations try to use whatever money and power they still have to keep tilting the global playing field in their favor. Unsavory? Yes. But it’s true and that’s what really matters in this case. It’s just that Americans tend to take such accusations very close to heart because many of them do not want to know exactly how the proverbial sausage gets made when geopolitics get complicated.

Still, an evil America hell bent on world domination through a combination of jingoism and military might built to handle world wars and execute massive invasions, fits right into the story the Kremlin desperately wants to convince its citizens to be true. No, the United Russia officials weren’t caught stuffing ballot boxes and paying for votes across the nation, they cry, it’s all an American conspiracy to destabilize Russia for oil and to control our immense nuclear stockpile. Here, look, one of their victims is on TV telling his story and talking to people who share his view about true democracy and freedom! Never mind the crackdowns on opposing politicians, the widespread stuffing of the Duma with celebrities, blatant theft, corruption, and cronyism on a scale which even the sleaziest K Street lobbyist would find appalling and unbecoming, and forget about all those leaks in which they’re detailed held by Assange after his partnership with The Guardian went down in flames. Like a tragicomic plot device, a whistleblower who wanted to make the world a better place naively barged into a very convoluted and treacherous realm he didn’t quite understand, turned into an authoritarian who suppressed all intra-group dissent, and may now end up as a puppet of foreign strongmen spreading conspiracy theories to justify their oligarchy. That’s how sticking it to The Man can end up with you working for The Man…

An applicable old cliché would be the one often used by creationists regarding a paining and a painter. If they see a painting, someone must have painted it since paintings don’t paint themselves. Therefore, since we’re not seeing stones turn into bacterial film out of the blue, someone must have created life. Airtight logic, right? Well, no, not at all. We know that paintings have a painter because we’ve seen painters make paintings. If we doubt a painting’s origins, we could always perform a chemical analysis on them and see that yes, it’s canvas with paint on it and we know that there’s a group of painters out there who do similar work. We can even track down the original painter of a more recent work and ask her to replicate her efforts. With life, matters are much less cut and dry because we’ve never seen a designer or an architect of living things. How do we confirm that living things are made rather than self-organizing? Where do we find the designer? No, in our hearts and in a spiritual universe all around us are not valid answers because they don’t pinpoint a culprit we could ask about the creation of life. And just because scientists did something interesting in the lab doesn’t mean that the very same experiment also happened in nature, much less that a hyper-intelligent being was behind it.

Having dealt with the non-sequitur we can now move on to the argument by assertion on which this entire line of thinking is based. Just like all intelligent design talking points, which are now living well past their sell by date and never actually worked, this one relies on asserting that there must be an entity capable of creating living things and that this entity is singular. This proposition alone requires a few hundred lines of evidence to establish in any way, shape or form, and merely asserting that there’s a singular designer is not proof. If your goal is to work backwards from the standpoint that some unnamed designer (or you could just say save both the time and the trouble and say God since this "designer" facade isn’t fooling anyone), created all life and we have to work backwards form this premise, the assertion that manipulating evolution for experiments is proof of your deity makes sense. But that’s not a valid point with which to start. We have to work from what we know onwards, otherwise we’re just deluding ourselves by inventing ways to wedge evidence into a predetermined conclusion. Under this pretense, a scientist tweaking evolution the lab has to be proof that a deity had to have done something similar in the past because if he didn’t, then the chain of events don’t match what we want to believe happened. That’s not a reasonable or logical argument. It’s just wishful thinking.

Basically, the idea is that neutrons should decay at a certain rate as they bounce around trapped in magnetic fields or by gravity, and imperfections in how these fields contain them usually result in a slightly faster rate of decay than expected. But while most of the accelerations in decay rates would be due to the containment, an infinitesimal number of these decays may be caused by the neutrons switching universes. Mind you, this will happen only a handful of times during an experiment but the math says that it can happen, and it has in a few previous experiments they’ve reviewed. What’s even more interesting, they could affect the probability of such flips between universes by using a laser in the neutron trap, usually known as a bottle. After firing very precise and carefully monitored pulses at decaying neutrons, the physicists say, they should see a slight increase in how many neutrons departed for another universe using a fairly straightforward formula derived from the math they used to arrive at the conclusion that neutrons can switch cosmoses. Sounds fairly straightforward. Trap a few quadrillion neutrons, chill them to temperatures found on the icy moons of the outer solar system to slow them down a little, then fire a few laser pulses and see whether their decay rate increases ever so slightly.

Still there’s the nagging question of how exactly this experiment would prove that the neutrons are not simply decaying but switching universes. If anything, it sets up a situation very similar to an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon chides Leonard’s work for being "extremely derivative" to which the slighted Leonard replies "at least I don’t have to make the particles go through 27 dimensions just to make the math work." And as usual, Sheldon counters with "well, they’re there" to complete his circular argument. The dimensions exist because the math says they exist, much like the neutrons are supposed to decay into another universe as the math shows they could, rather than by an observation extending into another cosmos to make sure they took the trip and exited the universe. Of course their trip would also raise the question of what compensates for the sudden loss of neutrinos. Even at a rate of ten per quadrillion, an occasional exodus from this universe would add up fairly quickly when we consider how small and plentiful they are. We’d need a exouniversal neutrino to make the same journey a missing neutrino in our cosmos would’ve made but since every universe can easily end up with different laws of physics and there’s no law that requires similar universes to be side by side, we now have to consider even more radical mathematics to describe the entire inter-universal ecosystem.

Doesn’t this all seem like a whole lot of assumptions and considerations for a phenomenon we can’t verify in the real world? On what basis would we say that seeing an increase in the decay rate of neutrinos points to a subatomic trip between universes rather than a correlation between certain intra-universal phenomena and a faster decay rate for the particles? As the physicists acknowledge, we really can’t. We can only see if we could observe the correlations they calculated to see if they hold up in the next few decades. And that brings us to an illustration of the big problem with some of the more exotic branches of theoretical physics. We can test if they come up with formulas fitting observational models and confirm whether the math works out. But we just can’t test whether such mathematical conveniences as hidden dimensions or other universes really exist using an extremely speculative model showing correlation while making a leap to causation. Physics cranks who very loudly decry math as a secret codex of wily scientists, use such speculations to justify their own musings, no matter how outlandish. This doesn’t mean that theoretical physicists should abandon their work to silence cranks, of course, but they should remember that the rubber has to meet the road at some point, and floating in the realm of esoteric mathematics often doesn’t translate into real world physics for many reasons…

See: Sarrazin, M., Pignol, G., Petit, F., Nesvizhevsky V. (2012). Experimental limits on neutron disappearance into another braneworld arXiv: 1201.3949v1

The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna and in the Aluna, there’s a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

You know, there’s something that bothers me about this whole walking in from another dimension thing. As a high school geometry class will tell you, a dimension is simply a property we use to measure features of the objects around us. We’re intimately familiar with four dimensions: length, width, height, and time. Dimensions beyond these are the stuff of rather creative mathematics used by string theorists to explain phenomena we’re not able to study in controlled conditions, mathematics that can easily become esoteric enough to part with all objective reality. Just enter "arXiv" in the search box and press enter for a few dozen examples as to how. With that, when I read a treatise about entities walking into our universe from "another dimension," or in New Agey pseudoscientific technobabble, "higher dimensions," I read it as a speculation about intelligent entities which emerge from height or width, with speculations of whether height or width have any more astral and spiritual significance than length. And that, dear readers, is absolute nonsense, much like Wilde’s concept of how our intelligence emerged. Forget the MYH16 mutation and natural selection. It was all thanks to mushrooms!

While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found these mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that was previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find other humans, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.

What amazes me is the astonishing level of willful ignorance it takes to be able to spout gibberish like this in this day and age, when you can get a basic freshman college-level education on most topics online from vast university websites and their regionally accredited online courses which are open to anyone who’s willing and able to study a topic that catches his or her interest. Sure, I’ve been on the receiving end of a far more insane and elaborate worldview, but Dr. Depperman actually seemed to be certifiably, DSM V insane and trying with all the oomph his severely skewed mental faculties could possibly summon to use the ingorantly grandiose jargon deployed in post-modern platitudes. Wilde just comes off as incredibly ignorant and unwilling to even pretend that he’s ever read a popular science publication, much less took a college level course in physics or biology as one would expect from someone who decided to try and elaborate on the story of human origins. If others at least try to mention genetics, evolutionary principles, and anatomy, he gives us New Age fluff and an encounter with magic mushrooms, and thinks it’s perfectly sufficient to leave it at that.

Many space operas tend to treat empires spanning multiple solar systems much like we would treat empires on our own world, complete with borders and territorial maps included on the characters’ computers. Just one look at the surrounding stars and they know that they’re in alien territory, ready to be greeted by a space-borne version of the interstellar empire’s border patrols. But considering that not only is space three dimensional, it involves stunning distances between objects, could a species carve out a large territory in space and be able to control the borders to its territory? Would it even be able to define them? And would it even matter to have a firmly delineated border between their space and the rest of the galaxy’s? Maybe borders of an alien empires would be extremely porous, extending for dozens of light years, a sort of a buffer or transition zone throughout which their presence becomes more and more prominent and they have a chance to detect intruders? And if they do spot a wandering craft, will it be worth it to them to send out an encounter team to figure out what this craft is, then drive it off rather than try to study it? In other words, how could an alien empire be defined?

One idea of how to define ownership of multiple planets may be as simple as counting only the planets which house outposts of a space-faring species. Rather than be marked by invisible lines, aliens may jumble each others’ holdings and three planets within the same solar system, or three solar systems side by side may be alternatively claimed by one of two species. For example, let’s say that future humans would lay claim to Mars, Titan, Triton, Europa, Mercury, along with the Earth and the Moon, and own several planets around two nearby stars. At the same time, another species claims Venus, Pluto, Ganymede, plus several planets around other stars. The idea is to count the worlds on which you actually have a presence and are actively inhabiting, which makes the idea of sovereign borders relatively easy to enforce. You set up patrols only around the worlds you inhabit and watch for incoming species rather than safeguarding empty space. Plus, by giving worlds to other species if you have no use for them could facilitate a sort of unspoken truce. Everyone gets want they want as long as they don’t start flashing lasers and kinetic kill vehicles and should be willing to trade for any common resource both require. Of course such commonalities could also start conflicts, but more on that in a bit.

The other, more science-fiction like scenario is one where territory is marked by considering the beginning of sovereign cosmic holdings to be the farthest outposts patrolled or explored by a species. In this scenario, any future humans landing on a planet 25 light years away have now claimed the entire target solar system along with all the solar systems along the way to their destination. It doesn’t matter how many of the worlds they will actually inhabit, all that matters is their extent. But of course this would also allow intelligent species to hold a vast cosmic empire each because the distances between them are likely to be very significant. There’s a very strong possibility that two advanced, space-faring species could live thousands of light years apart with many thousands of years separating their rise to power and acquisitions. Suddenly, as they begin to explore, rather than having to share space with hundreds of competing species, they can lay claim to several thousand cubic light years of space without the slightest challenge. Of course the big question is how they’ll mark it as theirs, especially in a way a completely alien entity would recognize as a territorial claim. One can’t just build a Great Space Wall and line it with turrets and watch towers, and detecting incoming craft with probes would require a vast swarm of robots numbering in the billions if not trillions. It could well be practically unfeasible.

And this brings us to a dilemma. What good are borders when they’re going to be that porous and the odds of another species showing up to deliberately challenge them are so remote? This is especially true when we’re dealing with immense territories claimed to unchallenged species. Thousands of light years means millions of planets around millions of stars and an empire that big simply cannot be policed. Just like some of the vast empires on our planet learned, laying claim to an enormous territory doesn’t mean you’ll ever control it. Maybe you can reach it and survey what goes on, but odds are that anything outside of your immediate habitat would just develop on its own with little to no input from you. Species could rise, leave their cradles, and fall within a wide swath of space you claim without you knowing they exist and without them ever learning that they’re your subjects, evolved on a planet you claimed millions of years ago. Even more interesting would be the question of how you would submit your claim and actually have it recognized and announced. On Earth we have maps, international organizations, and authoritative bodies which maintain official border designations, and yet even here borders are contested. What central authority would mediate border disputes between aliens, especially when, as we’ve just seen, a cosmic border is so hard to define and locate in the first place?

[E]ven when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners , it’s not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones’ loss is the pizzeria’s gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It’s at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful.

Why would we even regard this as a balance? The Rolling Stones are in music because it’s a business. The music they create is what pays their bills. Declaring that because they’re rich, they must’ve had enough and it would be just fine to pirate it (as many downloaders do) and spending money on pizza while getting the work they did for free, is not a balance. No one from the local pizza place is going to give the Rolling Stones a cut of the profits made on selling to Joe or Jane Downloader unless they own the pizza places in question. It’s very doubtful that Yglesias actually wants to say that it’s ok to download whatever you want as long as you spend a few bucks on a snack while you enjoy your pirated acquisition, but that is indeed what he seems to be saying and by the same logic, we could say that’s perfectly fine to download his book rather than buy it as long as we pay a visit to the grocery store after we do and get something for dinner between reading the result of months and months of his work. I’m sure he intended the proceeds from the book to be used to pay his mortgage and take his family on vacation, but hey, it’s ok. The money he doesn’t get will be spent elsewhere, right?

One of the big problems with the attitude that we should be able to download what we want because we want to and the content owners will often act like bullies, is that it opens the door to abuse. New artists trying to get into the entertainment industry have their efforts pirated and even though the downloaders praise them for an innovative or well executed song or movie, these artists don’t see a dime and never get on the radar of major corporations that could make them new household names. As a result, piracy perpetuates the status quo, the sequel, the remake, and the rehash along with an online entitlement culture which says that because of bad business habits or bad faith on the part of the content owners, you are now entitled to have whatever you want for free. Just try that with a nasty car dealer and see how far you’ll get with declaring that the car you wanted to buy is too expensive and the dealer is too shady, therefore you’ll be taking it free of charge. You’d expect to end up in jail of course. But in the digital world, this kind of behavior seems to be tolerated. And come to think of it, if music and movies today are all crap, why do you even want to download them in the first place? Why not let the studios and labels release crap and fail because no one buys it or listens to it? Surely we’d be able to get something new and exciting made or produced then, something worth paying to see and hear.

While one could certainly argue that there’s great diversity of views across the web and point to sites ran by a myriad of corporations offering mainstream news reports, to forums curated by those who believe that we are all unwitting subjects of sinister Satanic aliens and demons, we can also make the argument that as the web grew and the the initial torrent of content online grew into a tsunami, it began to be corralled into cozy, uniform echo chambers connected to each other through a shared ideology. A big part of the reason why is that we’re dealing with too much data to process. Do you really read every Facebook update in your feed? Can you really look through all the 1,100+ sources Google News gives you for a top story? At some point you have to narrow the information coming to you into a manageable stream. And that’s when political biases begin to play a very significant role. Software doesn’t really care whether you’re an open-minded moderate or a partisan zealot, its only concern is to make sure that it brings you exactly what you want and nothing else. Likewise, Google and any other company offering to filter the web for you also have little care about how diverse your worldviews are and simply want to offer ads specifically customized to appeal to people with your exact preferences.

So here’s the question. Should these companies start caring? According to one paper, offering a few articles in a custom-filtered news stream does prompt some people to read something new which helps them form a more nuanced and well-rounded idea of the subject matter, exactly what one would expect after someone has read multiple viewpoints on the same issue. That doesn’t mean that the subject changed his or her opinions, just that new points were considered and factored into the thought process. Considering the furious, foaming at the mouth partisan rants across far too many sites nowadays, that alone sounds like a big step towards a more civil public discourse that leads to a small emphasis on partisan loyalty and dogmatism. However, this paper’s data set was gathered from 140 college students and the topic in question was an abstract one, with most subjects indicating they knew very little about it. Had the topic been something that hits partisan frictions rather than the transhumanist-sounding "neuro-enhancement," the results would’ve been more applicable to the context where these preference-inconsistent recommendations would matter most. We don’t know if we’d really be able to get the same students to read an article opposing their ideological stance and show at least recognition of its points, if not an outright appreciation and discussion of the opposing arguments.

So may all come down to whether you find people willing to get out of their comfort zone every once in a while, and how much their identity with a certain movement means to them. If they prize conformity and believe that a new idea is a threat rather than an opportunity to see what others thing, well-meaning inconsistencies in their filtered lists of search results and news feeds will be treated as a nuisance and ignored. If they are fine with a periodic exploration of divergent opinions, they’ll be willing to click on ideologically inconsistent matches every once in a while. Again, the goal here would be just to make sure that other opinions are not filtered out of view and the web doesn’t turn into a search engine and social media enabled collection of echo chambers where ideological dissent is met with punitive action. But it seems much more likely that we can’t do it through being sneaky with technology. That willingness has to come from the person first and foremost, and that could turn out to be either the easiest thing to change, or the hardest. Giving the open-minded a new option is more than enough, but when dealing with the most close-minded, filter-happy denizens of the web, our only recourse will be to incentivize reading ideologically opposing content. And how does one incentivize open-mindedness?

See: Schwind, C., et al. (2012). Preference-inconsistent recommendations: an effective approach for reducing confirmation bias and stimulating divergent thinking? Computers & Education, 58 (2), 787-796 DOI 10.1016…

As any science writer worth his salt, Lehrer tries to underpin his assertion with a study, in this case a study on how people tend to craft narratives based on visual cues, concluding that because humans look for cues that will tell let them build causal relationships between events and objects, we can get the story wrong. Well, yes, we certainly can, but how this supports the notion that scientists have now engaged in oversimplification isn’t exactly clear. Granted, the age of the polymath is over and scientific fields are so fiendishly complex that you’ll end up specializing in a branch of a branch for your entire research career and only the very rare few will get to explore beyond that. However, that doesn’t mean that no scientist will ever integrate any of the domain specific knowledge at higher levels and investigate how entire systems work. To use an example from my area, there isn’t all that much left to be mined from fine-tuning artificial neural networks because we’ve had the math for a number of them since the 1970s. The goal is how to make them grow and interact into large networks where discrete components grow and interact to become something more than just the sum of their parts, much the same way as astronomers studying stars and galaxies help feed models created by cosmologists.

Getting down to the basics is important because we need to know how each node in the system works before we can reassemble the whole thing and start affecting it with full knowledge of how every individual node may react to the changes. And just like Lehrer points out, that’s not an easy task. If you identify 20 components in a particular system, you could be looking at as many as 400 ways they may interact in just a preliminary sweep and testing all those interactions will take a lot of time and money. To acknowledge this fact and then strongly imply that scientists are just skipping this investigative step because it’s so expensive and time-consuming is not even wrong. And it’s even more outlandish to consider that scientists are now working with immense and complex, dynamic networks that stretch from the realm of molecules, to entire ecosystems is a failure since a discovery takes longer and tends to be less profound than say, the laws of gravity, or evolution, or genetic drift, since we’re now tackling a level of detail that would’ve been incomprehensible to any scientist working even a century ago. Science at its heart is about trial and error, and as we test more and more complex hypotheses, we’re bound to see the failure rate go up while a success opens the doors to more profound ideas and tools than ever before. If we’re always terrified of being wrong, how will we ever find what actually works?

[ illustration by Schuhle Lewis ]

Here’s what happened. Yeast growing in nutritious broth was allowed to get relatively comfortable and to start clumping into potential colonies. Then, every once in a while, the mixture was shaken and only the clumps of yeast that managed to stay together were kept. Finally, to induce multicellularity, the scientists focused on the clumps that best stayed together and took longer to reproduce as they grew. Within two months, there was an easily identifiable juvenile stage which the multicellular yeast had to complete before reproduction, and some of the cells adopted a faster lifecycle than others, decreasing in size and serving as reproductive cells. With a smaller size and shorter lifespan, they provided more spores even though it necessitated a shorter life. They were essentially adapting to die faster for the benefit of the larger organism of which they were now a part, an extremely important trait of differentiation in multicellular life. Of course there’s a huge difference between this and completely different cellular shapes and structures tasked with very specific jobs, but as the authors note in their paper, this is just after 60 days. The level of differentiation we see in macro life had to take millions of years to even become possible. Seeing specialized precursors of gametes evolving in months is a really big deal already, especially when coupled with the fact that the resulting yeast had a juvenile phase.

With this starting point, one could imagine subjecting the new multicellular organism to nutrients best suited to feed an internal colony of mutated cells which could be induced to share the products of their digestion and thus forming a digestive tract, or coating the experimental organism in cells that will keep it insulated from an external antagonist, creating a shell, and so on. We’ve often thought that cooperating unicellular organism will be able to coalesce and work together and this experiment shows that we were right. Yes, perhaps the yeast has some mechanisms encouraging multicellularity and that’s perfectly fine because it shows that the ability to combine with other cells into a new organism can evolve in unicellular entities on its own, then lie dormant until a selective pressure makes it a net benefit. In summation, this is a very neat experiment which can start new lines of inquiry into differentiation and development, something that will better illuminate why our bodies and that of all other macroscopic animals can work and develop the way they do. Sure, this may not be a one for one repeat of how multicellular life really evolved, but that’s not the real goal here. What the scientists want to see what mechanisms are at work in creating multicellular life and whether their ideas for how we could’ve went from one cell to trillions over the span of 3.5 billion years have any merit. Increasingly, it seems like they do and while we may never know the exact sequence of events, we’ll have some really, really good ideas.

See: Ratcliff, W., et al. (2012). Experimental evolution of multicellularity PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115323109

Now, this isn’t even about one’s personal beliefs. As both civil decency and the law say, you should be free to believe what you want and have the right to voice your beliefs and practice them on private property without the police showing up at your doorstep telling you to cut it out. Of course insisting that your religious practices tell you to force everyone around you to participate in your rituals or threaten them with violence or arrest is a very, very different matter altogether as does using your professed faith to imply that you’re somehow a better, more moral person that those who don’t ascribe to your beliefs, and that by default, you have more say in what goes on around you. Unfortunately all too often, Americans allow professions of faith become professions of power and selfless charity while they’re being used as anything but. Rather than going to the poor, the homeless and the temporarily needy, large chunks of budgets for numerous churches go towards staff and maintenance. In vast megachurches, millions are spent on advertising, performance pieces, and the relentless self-promotion by pastors turned religious rock stars building their own brands and selling their books filled with inspirational fluff cribbed from self help books and peppered with Biblical quotes to make sure they sell quickly.

When sports writers talk about someone like Tebow in unflattering terms based on the fact that he is not that great of a quarterback, they cite a torrent of angry e-mails accusing them of hating a Christian athlete, as if no other quarterback in the NFL also considers himself a Christian or doesn’t thank his deity of choice after a win when being interviewed by the media. The cultural message seems to be “let’s overlook that Tebow is at best mediocre and used his outward, broadly-televised fundamentalism to build his brand, look at how much of a devoted Christian he is! He came from a very religious home, he must be a great person!” Why? It’s not like a less public profession allows one to use religion as an excuse for average performance. At work, I never hear phrases in the same vein as “his code is often buggy and he violates a number of key architectural rules, but doesn’t it just inspire you when he prays before he starts banging on the keyboard?” And odds are that I never will because we’re judged by what we produce, not how devoted to our personal beliefs we are. Other athletes in the league also know how to separate their faith from their work and wait until they win to thank their deities, rather than make a huge show of their religiosity, knowing that if anything, it cheapens the faith.

Displays of very public piety don’t say that you’re devoted to your faith. They say “here, look at me, look how I’m such a devoted member of a religious group” in much the same way a self-appointed pick up artist peacocks at a nightclub. It’s far more impressive when one’s devotion comes out in quiet actions and a willingness to sit down and hold discussions which test their beliefs. Many of my religious friends are well aware that I’m an atheist and read this blog. None of them insist that I come to church with them, that being Christian somehow makes them more moral or charitable than those around them, and ask me questions about evolution, AI, and any other topic which has philosophical implications for their beliefs. And they also get annoyed at really flashy displays of piety for show. They are a much better testament to incorporating faith into one’s life to be a better, more charitable person than any self-promoting spokesperson who uses religion to cover up his greed or his mediocrity under an untouchable, cultural third rail so he and his supporters can rush to accuse you of bigotry and discrimination should you dare to offer an objective critique of what he does and how he does it. And this is why we need less Tebows and Focus on the Family types, and more curious, open-minded moderates.

Despite the fact that the archetype of the politician generally refers to someone with no spine, no principle, no regard for the needs of anyone but his or her friends and campaign donors, and constant lies, real politicians are ultimately humans just like we are and while they do schmooze and hand out empty promises like they’re going out of style and will spoil if kept, they’re certainly capable of changing their minds and having their own opinions. Yes, it’s entirely possible that some politicians when launched into space will be trying to look for a little blotch of ground underneath and proudly say "that’s mine! I’m in charge of that," spectacularly missing the whole point. But there are bound to be those officials who really do let the weight of what they see think in and realize that holy crap, we’re all one species on a floating blue rock and that we have the tools to explore what’s beyond it, and that there lies our ultimate future. When they return, they may even start lobbying for more cash to be given to space exploration, R&D, education, and other crucial areas in which a modern, First World post- industrial nation needs to excel to have both a booming economy, and offer hope for future generations. Keep in mind that said lack of hope is fueling riots and protests across the world today, so resolving this issue is a very, very big deal. Unfortunately they’ll be up against a brick wall, i.e. their vision-lacking colleagues.

Once they come back to Earth, they’ll have to face the very same problems they would have faced before flying into orbit. Constituents will want jobs, services, food, and a well-oiled infrastructure. Campaign donors whose cash fills their election funds coffers will want favors that make them better off now, not in five to ten years. And every few years there’s another election which will take a majority of our hypothetical politician’s time while any trace of long term vision or big dreams of funding exploration and education will be attacked as just wasting a lot of taxpayer cash with no clear goal in sight. Politics today work on time spans of a year at maximum, based on a protracted election cycle and attempting to appease an electorate that wants things done now and in the United States, mired in vicious and embarrassingly  petty, dangerous, and childish partisan gridlock. How does one effectively take on the world and convey an eye-opening experience to those who don’t want to listen or those who value the balances of their bank accounts after doling out promised favors to campaign donors infinitely more than they do the future of the nation they were elected to serve? No, the fundamental push for a pivot back to science, technology, and education has to come from an electorate which votes politicians who ridicule scientific projects they don’t understand as a waste and kicks out school administrators who believe that a school’s goal is to make students behave and pass tests rather than teach and inspire them.

Technically, we could do what a lot of cyberneticists do and design artificial neural networks for our rovers and probes, treating the various sensors as input neurons and the motors as output neurons. We simulate all the environments virtually and train them using backpropagation. Then, when encountering certain combinations of sensory readings, these artificial neurons transmit the signals to the motors and the machine does what it should do in that situation. If we can interrupt ongoing processes to monitor new stimuli, we could even allow them to cope with unexpected dangers. Let’s say we have a work mode and an alert mode. The work mode is endowed with the ability to pursue objects of interest, the alert mode looks out for stimuli indicating that there may be something harmful coming. So when the work mode finds a rock to drill, another simultaneous thread opens and the alert mode starts scanning the environment. Should the tire slip or the wind pick up, the alerts go out to the rover to stop and reevaluate its options. Sounds doable, right? And it is. But unfortunately, there’s a catch and that catch is the energy that will be required to run all this processing and manifest its results.

Brainpower is expensive from an energy standpoint. There’s a reason why our brain eats up a fifth of our total energy budget; its processes are very intensive and they continue non-stop. Any intelligent machine will have to deal with a very similar trade-off and allocate enough memory and energy to interact with its environment in the absence of human instruction. That means either less energy for everything else, or that the rover will now have to come with a bigger energy source. The aforementioned MER rovers generated only 140W at the peak of their operational capacity to power hardware using 20 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM. With this puny energy budget, forget about running anything that takes a little processing oomph or supports multithreading. With a no-frills operating system and a lot of very creative programming, one could imagine running a robust artificial neural network on devices comparable to early-generation smartphones, something with a 200 MHz CPU and somewhere around 256 MB of RAM. To run something like that nonstop can easily soak up a lot of the energy generated by a Mars rover, and when you’re on the same energy budget as a household light bulb, this kind of constant, ongoing, intensive power consumption quickly becomes a very, very big deal.

Hold on though, you might object, why do we need a beefier CPU? Can’t we just link multiple small ones for a boost in processing capacity? Or, come to think of it, why bother with processing capacity at all? Well, since a rover has certain calculations and checks it constantly needs to make, you need to provide time for them to do what they need to do. Likewise, you need to keep processing data from your sensors to feed the neural net in the background and handle the actual calculations from it. Detecting threats in real time with what would be a state of the art system in the 1980s seems like a tall order, especially if you expect your rover to actually react to them rather than plow onwards as the alarms go off in its robotic head, resigned to its fate, whatever it may be. On top of that, just trying to run something like an artificial neural network while performing other functions requires an overhead to keep the computations separate, much less actually having the neural net command the rest of the rover. Of course there could be something I’m missing here and there’s a way to run an artificial neural network with such a light footprint that it could be maintained on a much leaner system than I outlined, but it seems very unlikely that if bare bones systems like those used for today’s rovers could be made to run a complex cognitive routine and act on its decisions, someone wouldn’t already be doing just that.

AVIATR isn’t the first concept drone for space exploration. In fact it has a predecessor intended to scream over the surface of Mars, the ARES. While the creators of ARES had a very similar idea, their propellant was rocket fuel and as soon as this supply was used up, the drone would’ve landed to become a stationary laboratory. It seems like a rather short-lived mission because there’s only so much rocket fuel one can store in a relatively small drone. But the nuclear batteries to be employed by AVIATR would work around the issue of storing your propellant and thus limiting your drones’ range. If anything, scaling up those batteries and putting them into a larger, more powerful drone headed for Mars may be worth considering, though again, there are limitations in this scenario since a Martian drone would be subject to a third of the Earth’s gravity rather than a seventh, and have to navigate through very thin air. A plain propeller may not be up to the job of keeping it aloft, though I can see quadcopter designs having some potential merit. Ideally, it would be great if we could come up with what could be a standardized design for flying through alien atmospheres, sending drones to whatever moon just so happens to interest us enough to be worth a closer look with some high precision instruments.

But why would we want to do that rather than customize each drone for its mission, playing to the strengths of each alien environment? For one, that would allow us to mass produce these drones and send them quickly, shaving off many years of development and testing time, casting a wider exploratory net over the solar system and its most interesting worlds. Yes, maybe each drone is not perfect for its mission, but it could collect data needed to justify further exploitation and make measurements one can’t make from orbits or flybys. Why can’t we use an advance scout to help us better target extensive scientific missions while collecting data we would not ordinarily have without actually sending some sort of probe? After all, we sent probes to just have a look at different objects of interest all the time. The second advantage of mass produced extraterrestrial drones is the ability to significantly cut costs for curiosity-driven exploration. Combined with SpaceX’s ambitious plans for a fully reusable rocket, we could consider scientific study of solar system objects to consist of picking a target of interest, reaching for the next available rocket, loading it with the next available drone, and launching it with just a few months notice. Even without a reusable rocket, not having to build each drone from scratch should already save hundreds of millions of dollars for a mission. Hey, if we’ll have to boldly go on a budget, why not boldly go with an economical fleet of drones built for speed and efficiency?

See: Barnes, J., et al. (2011). AVIATR — Aerial Vehicle for In-situ Airborne Titan Reconnaissance Experimental Astronomy DOI: 10.1007/s10686-011-9275-9