From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Jun 1 20:41:36 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2018 15:41:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism Message-ID: This is change your mind some about it: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-makes-people-distrust-science-surprisingly-not-politics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db8e52a95a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_31_12_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db8e52a95a-68993993 bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 4 05:03:06 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 22:03:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] sterile neutrino? Message-ID: <000e01d3fbc1$53d5d960$fb818c20$@rainier66.com> This is just weird. https://www.livescience.com/62721-sterile-neutrino-detected-fermilab.html Sterile neutrino? Indeed? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Mon Jun 4 05:56:56 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 22:56:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism Message-ID: <6739b2c142dfe73e453b8c1f832de56e.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Bill W wrote: > This is change your mind some about it: > > https://aeon.co/ideas/what-makes-people-distrust-science-surprisingly-not-politics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db8e52a95a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_31_12_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db8e52a95a-68993993 The article you posted seems to ignore that there is an antiscience movement on the left also that asserts that science is a tool of colonization and oppression used by whites to victimize people of color. https://reason.com/blog/2016/10/14/watch-leftist-students-say-science-is-ra What I'm taking away from this is that "science skepticism" is really a symptom of the divisiveness that has been plaguing society of late. One of the many defense mechanisms being deployed by subcultures to retain socio-political identity and heterogeneity in a world that is increasingly falling sway to a one-size-fits-all homogeneous globalist consumer-capitalist mindset. These people might be rejecting science in order to avoid being assimilated by the Borg of neoliberalism. Otherwise, why would the number of Flat-Earthers be increasing in light of all of the evidence to the contrary? Evidence that is now more copious and freely available than in any other time in history? Maybe people *need* to feel different and special even if they must dispense with rationality to do it. Stuart LaForge From avant at sollegro.com Mon Jun 4 05:56:38 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 22:56:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism Message-ID: <49e94e6d676d75dad4ddbb5c602de8eb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Bill W wrote: > This is change your mind some about it: > > https://aeon.co/ideas/what-makes-people-distrust-science-surprisingly-not-politics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db8e52a95a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_31_12_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db8e52a95a-68993993 The article you posted seems to ignore that there is an antiscience movement on the left also that asserts that science is a tool of colonization and oppression used by whites to victimize people of color. https://reason.com/blog/2016/10/14/watch-leftist-students-say-science-is-ra What I'm taking away from this is that "science skepticism" is really a symptom of the divisiveness that has been plaguing society of late. One of the many defense mechanisms being deployed by subcultures to retain socio-political identity and heterogeneity in a world that is increasingly falling sway to a one-size-fits-all homogeneous globalist consumer-capitalist mindset. These people might be rejecting science in order to avoid being assimilated by the Borg of neoliberalism. Otherwise, why would the number of Flat-Earthers be increasing in light of all of the evidence to the contrary? Evidence that is now more copious and freely available than in any other time in history? Maybe people *need* to feel different and special even if they must dispense with rationality to do it. Stuart LaForge From avant at sollegro.com Mon Jun 4 06:15:01 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 23:15:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Computer simulations show wealthy people are not better just luckier Message-ID: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 A study which which dispels any illusion that society is any kind of meritocracy by showing why wealth in society follows a power-law distribution (80-20 rule) when every possible measure of human talent (IQ, hours worked, etc.) follow a normal distribution (bell curve). Excerpt: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world?s poorest 3.8 billion people. This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth? The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role. But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else. And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What?s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures. What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process. The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science. Pluchino and co?s model is straightforward. It consists of N people, each with a certain level of talent (skill, intelligence, ability, and so on). This talent is distributed normally around some average level, with some standard deviation. So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else. This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar. The computer model charts each individual through a working life of 40 years. During this time, the individuals experience lucky events that they can exploit to increase their wealth if they are talented enough. However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their wealth. These events occur at random. At the end of the 40 years, Pluchino and co rank the individuals by wealth and study the characteristics of the most successful. They also calculate the wealth distribution. They then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome. When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies. ?The ?80-20? rule is respected, since 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital,? report Pluchino and co. That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn?t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. ?The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,? say the researchers. So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? ?Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,? say Pluchino and co. The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. ?It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,? they say. ?And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.? That has significant implications for society. What is the most effective strategy for exploiting the role luck plays in success? Pluchino and co study this from the point of view of science research funding, an issue clearly close to their hearts. Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the European Research Council recently invested $1.7 million in a program to study serendipity?the role of luck in scientific discovery?and how it can be exploited to improve funding outcomes. It turns out that Pluchino and co are well set to answer this question. They use their model to explore different kinds of funding models to see which produce the best returns when luck is taken into account. The team studied three models, in which research funding is distributed equally to all scientists; distributed randomly to a subset of scientists; or given preferentially to those who have been most successful in the past. Which of these is the best strategy? The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists. In these cases, the researchers are best able to take advantage of the serendipitous discoveries they make from time to time. In hindsight, it is obvious that the fact a scientist has made an important chance discovery in the past does not mean he or she is more likely to make one in the future. A similar approach could also be applied to investment in other kinds of enterprises, such as small or large businesses, tech startups, education that increases talent, or even the creation of random lucky events. Clearly, more work is needed here. What are we waiting for? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stuart LaForge From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 16:45:32 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 11:45:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism In-Reply-To: <49e94e6d676d75dad4ddbb5c602de8eb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <49e94e6d676d75dad4ddbb5c602de8eb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: Stuart: The article you posted seems to ignore that there is an antiscience movement on the left also that asserts that science is a tool of colonization and oppression used by whites to victimize people of color. I'd like to see some numbers. These people must be the same ones who believe in cultural appropriation. Every view is political - about gender, race, etc. Now there has never been a shortage of people who believed whatever they wanted to, and there is not any now. What I want to know is just how many people we are talking about. If you asked the average American about cultural appropriation I'll bet not 5 % have ever even heard of it, much less believe it. Big Ivy league school profs get ink, and so far out ideas get posted here and there. BFD. bill w On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 12:56 AM, Stuart LaForge wrote: > Bill W wrote: > > > This is change your mind some about it: > > > > https://aeon.co/ideas/what-makes-people-distrust-science- > surprisingly-not-politics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_ > campaign=db8e52a95a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_31_12_19&utm_ > medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db8e52a95a-68993993 > > The article you posted seems to ignore that there is an antiscience > movement on the left also that asserts that science is a tool of > colonization and oppression used by whites to victimize people of color. > > https://reason.com/blog/2016/10/14/watch-leftist-students- > say-science-is-ra > > What I'm taking away from this is that "science skepticism" is really a > symptom of the divisiveness that has been plaguing society of late. One of > the many defense mechanisms being deployed by subcultures to retain > socio-political identity and heterogeneity in a world that is increasingly > falling sway to a one-size-fits-all homogeneous globalist > consumer-capitalist mindset. > > These people might be rejecting science in order to avoid being > assimilated by the Borg of neoliberalism. > > Otherwise, why would the number of Flat-Earthers be increasing in light of > all of the evidence to the contrary? Evidence that is now more copious and > freely available than in any other time in history? > > Maybe people *need* to feel different and special even if they must > dispense with rationality to do it. > > Stuart LaForge > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 4 17:25:51 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 10:25:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism In-Reply-To: References: <49e94e6d676d75dad4ddbb5c602de8eb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: <002801d3fc29$16e9dc00$44bd9400$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] science skepticism ? These people must be the same ones who believe in cultural appropriation. ?bill w Hi BillW, I would like to understand this better, for we were introduced to it recently with respect to a traditional cub scout bridging ceremony. At age 10, cub scouts bridge over to boy scouts in an elaborate ceremony where a literal bridge is constructed of wooden poles and rope, where the scouts cross. It is paws on the path to feet on the trail. If one is into that culture, it is a big big deal. It is taken very seriously. Part of that (in some cases) is to have the adult leader dress up as an Indian Chief, as he leads the young scout warrior Akela to manhood. If you don?t know anything about that culture, do let me assure you, it is priceless. So this leader gets up the deerskin outfit, the beads, the eagle feathered headset, the works (this costume, used once a year, costs more than a good used car.) Hey, tradition. So now we have people telling us this is cultural appropriation. But? this is cub scout culture. We honor the Native Americans, even if they are called by the now-out-of-fashion term Indians. Scouting weaves Indians into the cultural fabric at every opportunity. The reasoning behind this is that in 1910, when scouting was starting up in America, it was believed that Indians had all these outdoor skills, the survival, the this and that, and I suppose they did. So they are written up as larger than life in scouting lore. Now we see these traditional societies such as scouts drawn into modern culture wars and it isn?t at all clear how to deal with it. So far, the scouts have been continuing with status quo. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 17:35:28 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 13:35:28 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Computer simulations show wealthy people are not better just luckier In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 4:17 AM Stuart LaForge wrote: > > A study which which dispels any illusion that society is any kind of > meritocracy by showing why wealth in society follows a power-law > distribution (80-20 rule) when every possible measure of human talent (IQ, > hours worked, etc.) follow a normal distribution (bell curve). > It seems to me like they're not taking into account the feedback loop that compounds wealth loss and gain. If you want to achieve $2 billion net worth, your odds of doing that vastly improved if your current net worth is $1 billion versus $1 million or $100k. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 18:05:00 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 13:05:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] science skepticism In-Reply-To: <002801d3fc29$16e9dc00$44bd9400$@rainier66.com> References: <49e94e6d676d75dad4ddbb5c602de8eb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> <002801d3fc29$16e9dc00$44bd9400$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Hey, Spike - what if I don't understand it myself? I still think it's a tiny part of the cultural mix. I think if the 'Indians' don't mind, why should we? I don't see any picketing at the Cleveland Indians stadium. There's no movement to change all the Indian names of rivers, towns, counties, states, etc. Taken properly the boy scout ritual is a tribute to the Indians, isn't it? Atlanta Braves also sees no picketing, though Chief Nockahoma is gone along with his teepee. I have been out West and seen dozens of places where the Indians sell their culture: rugs, trinkets, everything. Are they doing something improper? Nah. Just write this off as another wacko idea by ultraliberals which will pass soon - I hope. If it doesn't and we have to return all lands to the Indians, we'll have to move back to Europe, eh? If we keep going the way we are going, maybe that's a good idea. bill w On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 12:25 PM, wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *William Flynn Wallace > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] science skepticism > > > > > ? These people must be the same ones who believe in cultural > appropriation. ?bill w > > > > > > Hi BillW, > > > > I would like to understand this better, for we were introduced to it > recently with respect to a traditional cub scout bridging ceremony. At age > 10, cub scouts bridge over to boy scouts in an elaborate ceremony where a > literal bridge is constructed of wooden poles and rope, where the scouts > cross. It is paws on the path to feet on the trail. If one is into that > culture, it is a big big deal. It is taken very seriously. > > > > Part of that (in some cases) is to have the adult leader dress up as an > Indian Chief, as he leads the young scout warrior Akela to manhood. If you > don?t know anything about that culture, do let me assure you, it is > priceless. So this leader gets up the deerskin outfit, the beads, the > eagle feathered headset, the works (this costume, used once a year, costs > more than a good used car.) Hey, tradition. > > > > So now we have people telling us this is cultural appropriation. But? > this is cub scout culture. We honor the Native Americans, even if they are > called by the now-out-of-fashion term Indians. Scouting weaves Indians > into the cultural fabric at every opportunity. The reasoning behind this > is that in 1910, when scouting was starting up in America, it was believed > that Indians had all these outdoor skills, the survival, the this and that, > and I suppose they did. So they are written up as larger than life in > scouting lore. > > > > Now we see these traditional societies such as scouts drawn into modern > culture wars and it isn?t at all clear how to deal with it. So far, the > scouts have been continuing with status quo. > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 20:12:08 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 13:12:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Strange mystery explained Message-ID: A few years ago there was considerable news about genetic studies that at first looked like 17 women were reproducing to every man who did so. There was a lot of discussion but no consensus emerged. Now a couple of students at Stanford have published a potential solution. How they reached this solution is fascinating in itself. However, to cut to the chase, it looks like patrilineal early farming groups were killing off each other's males. This considerably diminished the variations of Y chromosomes since when one group got the upper hand, it was common for the winners to kill the losers to the last man (and boy) and take the young women as booty. It seems this process started when the Neolithic agricultural revolution began and ended when violence between patrilineal clans was suppressed by Chieftains or a State. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6#article-comments It's not an easy article to read, but worth it. It's a case where a social/cultural invention (agriculture) eventually resulted in a huge genetic change. I wonder if there is a signal in that data of how often war between the tribes broke out? This would give us an idea of how fast the population reproduced in the early days of agriculture. The quote from Numbers seems to be backed up by genetics. Wow. Keith From sjv2006 at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 22:37:28 2018 From: sjv2006 at gmail.com (Stephen Van Sickle) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 15:37:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Strange mystery explained In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 1:12 PM, Keith Henson wrote: It seems > this process started when the Neolithic agricultural revolution began > and ended when violence between patrilineal clans was suppressed by > Chieftains or a State. > Could it also have ended with the invention of widespread slavery? Prisoners then become a valuable commodity rather than a dangerous liability. s -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 4 23:39:40 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2018 16:39:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Strange mystery explained Message-ID: There is another more popular sort of article here: https://www.futurity.org/neolithic-y-chromosome-bottleneck-1772632-2/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral Best wishes, Keith On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 1:12 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > A few years ago there was considerable news about genetic studies that > at first looked like 17 women were reproducing to every man who did > so. There was a lot of discussion but no consensus emerged. > > Now a couple of students at Stanford have published a potential > solution. How they reached this solution is fascinating in itself. > However, to cut to the chase, it looks like patrilineal early farming > groups were killing off each other's males. This considerably > diminished the variations of Y chromosomes since when one group got > the upper hand, it was common for the winners to kill the losers to > the last man (and boy) and take the young women as booty. It seems > this process started when the Neolithic agricultural revolution began > and ended when violence between patrilineal clans was suppressed by > Chieftains or a State. > > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6#article-comments > > It's not an easy article to read, but worth it. It's a case where a > social/cultural invention (agriculture) eventually resulted in a huge > genetic change. I wonder if there is a signal in that data of how > often war between the tribes broke out? This would give us an idea of > how fast the population reproduced in the early days of agriculture. > > The quote from Numbers seems to be backed up by genetics. > > Wow. > > Keith From sparge at gmail.com Thu Jun 7 20:51:29 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 16:51:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] 3 Stories of Sex and Death in Evolution Message-ID: I've mentioned Josh Mitteldorf here before. Here's his latest blog posting: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2018/05/14/3-stories-of-sex-and-death-in-evolution/ *Time and again, evolution has learned (after repeated blind alleys) to do what is best for the community in the long term and not always what is best for the individuals in the short term. But such gains are fragile, easily lost if a cheater can gain a short-term advantage and its progeny take over the community.* *Human societies have rules that encourage cooperation, and enforcement mechanisms for people who are reluctant to cooperate. Cooperation in biology is very old, and it turns out that evolution thought about enforcement a billion years before Thomas Hobbes. To see what this has to do with theories of aging, you?ll have to be patient.* Story #1: Conjugation and Cell Senescence Story #2: Sex Required for Reproduction in Plants and Animals Story #3: Antagonistic Pleiotropy ? a Revisionist Theory To begin, I?m going to ask you to think fresh thoughts about sex. (Have I lost you already?) Sex and reproduction, reproduction and sex. Go together like a horse and carriage, right? Well, how did it come to be that way? Sex is not a way to reproduce. Sex is a way to share genes. But sex has become so tightly linked to reproduction that it requires mental gymnastics to imagine that it might have been otherwise. Reproduction without sex?that?s not too hard. It?s cloning. Or it?s mitosis, simple cell division which is how bacteria do it. But sex without reproduction? What?s that? Remember?sex is the mixing of genomes between different individuals with different genomes. Does anyone do that except as a prelude to reproduction? What would it even look like? Bacteria share genes willy-nilly. They shed plasmids, which are little loops of DNA, and they pick up plasmids from around them. The plasmid may be from the same kind of bacteria or another kind of bacteria entirely. Sometimes the gene they pick up is useful; sometimes, not so much; sometimes the imported gene kills them. Bacteria can afford this daredevil lifestyle because there are a lot of them, and their credo is experimentation. Change or die. Bacteria are constantly changing, not only because their generations are measured in hours instead of years, but the change from generation to generation is also greater than large animals and plants. Under stress, they mutate and change even faster. Bacteria are artists of change, and their genius is figuring out what it takes to survive in the environment where they happen to be now. For bacteria, sex is spitting out plasmids and picking them up. ? Bacterial plasmid (electron micrograph) Story #1: Conjugation and Cell Senescence Protists, or protoctista, are single-cell eukaryotes?far more complex and structured than bacteria, with a cell nucleus and many more organelles, a million times bigger than bacteria but still a single cell. Examples are amoebas and paramecia. Protists share genes by a process called conjugation that challenges our idea of the individual. As promised, sex in protists is not linked to reproduction?well, maybe indirectly linked, as we?ll see. ? (This movie isn?t conjugation; it?s a hunting expedition.) In conjugation, two paramecia (Dick and Jane) sidle up to each other and their cell membranes coalesce, forming one big cell. Then the cell nuclei, where the chromosomes live, find each other and the two nuclear membranes open up and merge, just as the cells did. A double size cell with double size nucleus, and two copies of each chromosome. Somehow the chromosomes pair up with the appropriate partner. Like blind people trying to navigate a crowded room, how do the chromosomes arrange a meeting place with their partners? (If chromosomes had telephones, I suppose they would be cell phones. OK, it isn?t funny.) Somehow, Dick?s chromosomes finds Jane?s corresponding chromosome, nearly identical but for the crucial variations that make them individuals. The chromosomes line up in pairs so they can swap genes with one another. Genes cross over until each chromosome contains about half Dick?s genes and half Jane?s. Then?again using their cell phones for coordination?the chromosomes segregate. One from each pair goes north, the other goes south, so that when the nucleus splits in two again, each half has a full complement. Two cells go their separate ways, but the cells that emerge from this process are no longer Dick and Jane. Each one of them is half Dick and half Jane, in its genes, in its cytoplasm, and in its mitochondria. ? THIS is conjugation. It only takes place between protozoa of the same species. Conjugation is sex without reproduction. We started with two cells and ended with two cells. They pooled their genes, but didn?t produce ?offspring?. Both Dick/Jane and Jane/Dick will someday undergo mitosis and copy themselves, but Dick and Jane have ceased to be, merged instead into an amalgam. This has nothing to do with propagating The species is continued as so many are (among the smaller creatures) by fission (and this species is very small next in order to the amoeba, the beginning one) The paramecium achieves, then, immortality by dividing But when the paramecium desires renewal strength another joy this is what the paramecium does: The paramecium lies down beside another paramecium Slowly inexplicably the exchange takes place in which some bits of the nucleus of each are exchanged for some bits of the nucleus of the other This is called the conjugation of the paramecium. poem by Muriel Rukeyser Individual Selection and Group Selection, Short-term Advantage and Long-term Welfare Why do cells do this? Let?s talk about fitness. In the short term, the race is to the swift. Reproduction is everything, especially among microbes which are always in a tight race with billions of others, and the one that reproduces fastest is the victor in Darwin?s lottery. So natural selection at the individual level motivates Dick and Jane to get on with the business of copying themselves as fast aspossible. Why did they take time out to merge their genes? Dick and Jane individually must have thought they had a good thing going, each having survived a long while, and beaten out the competition. They each had a combination of genes that work well together. Why would they take a flier on the off-chance that their genes might do even better in some other combination? ?Survival of the fittest? at its crudest level simply means that those who reproduce fastest crowd out everyone else. Sharing genes takes time and energy. You can?t afford it. To make this less abstract: Imagine a puddle with cells swimming in it, all the same species. Suppose some of the cells?the Joneses?go straight to work reproducing, doubling their numbers, while others?the Smiths?stop along the way to have sex with other Smiths. They?re all increasing exponentially, but the Joneses grow at a faster rate. More doublings of the Joneses leads to a powerful numerical advantage. Pretty soon, the Joneses have overwhelmed the Smiths and crowded them out. The Smiths are a thing of the past, driven to extinction. We say, ?the Joneses have evolved to fixation.? Short-term individual selection says ?Don?t do it! Don?t have sex!? But in the long run, the communal legacy is more robust if they DO share genes. Having many diverse combinations of genes is insurance against changes in the environment, and a high-risk investment that just might yield big dividends if the right opportunity opens up in the future. But there?s a danger that the Joneses will crowd out the Smiths in short order, and they won?t live to see the day when their robust diversity shows to their advantage. After many, many cycles of losing sex in the short term and missing diversity in the long term, evolution stumbled on an expedient. A counter was built into the chromosomes, counting replications. Everyone is allowed to clone about a hundred times, without sharing genes. After that, without conjugation, the cell slows down and dies, stopped dead in its tracks. Every so often, every cell lineage must take time out for conjugation, or the lineage dies. The counter is the telomere. To enforce conjugation, nature arranged for telomerase to be locked away (in paramecia and other protists) during mitosis. Each act of reproduction makes the telomeres a little shorter. Only during conjugation is telomerase unlocked, and the counter is reset, so the lineage can continue to clone. Twenty years ago, William Clark wrote two books on this subject at a level accessible to readers of this column. Sex and the Origins of Death, followed by A Means to an End. I read both as they came out, and they had a profound effect on my thinking about evolution and aging. Cell senescence is programmed death. Can this be an evolutionary advantage? Can programmed death evolve to protect the community from the fast crowd that doesn?t want to share their genes? Sure, there is a long-term advantage, but how was evolution so clever as to arrange this? How did it happen that telomerase came to be sequestered, available only during conjugation? I?ve looked through the evolutionary literature, and found no explanations, so I have asked this question myself, modeling with a computer simulation. The model works surprisingly well. One important feature of the model is that there is a limited reservoir of the food that cells need in order to grow. This means that the ?cheaters? who avoid conjugation and reproduce faster don?t have an advantage for long, because they use up the available food store faster. Another crucial feature is that conjugation sometimes leads to combinations of genes that are more efficient at using food resources. Here is a preliminary write-up ? I plan to finish and publish this work in the near future. Story #2: Sex and Reproduction in Plants and Animals Half a billion years ago, there was an explosion of multicelled life. Gene sharing is not so easily arranged when there are billions or trillions of cells in each fully-grown organism. Sure, all life passes through an embryo stage, starting with a single cell. But embryos are hardly in a position to seek out a partner and share genes. So evolution needed to invent anew both the mechanics of gene sharing and a means to enforce it on individuals whose primary Darwinian motivation was to reproduce as fast as possible. So nature took the bull by the horns (or perhaps another part of his anatomy). She laid down the law: ?From now on, it takes two to tango. Anyone who wants to reproduce is going to have to share genes.? Sex and reproduction were tied together anatomically, and the connection was so tight that no would-be cheater could get around the barriers. For some (dioecious) species, there were two separate sexes so that no single individual had the tools to reproduce by itself. In other (hermaphroditic) species, each individual could make both eggs and sperm, and there had to be barriers to self-fertilization, custom-designed for each anatomy. Exactly how this came about is unknown. Meiosis is an operation of baroque complexity, though clearly an outgrowth of both protist conjugation and mitosis. Graham Bell (quoting Emerson) called it the Masterpiece of Nature, but neither he nor anyone proposed an evolutionary pathway that might have created it. We know that this whole business of separate sexes and all the cellular and metabolic complexity that it entails managed to evolve, and we know that it offers no conventional advantage in terms that neo-Darwinist theory can understand. No one doubts that the link between sex and reproduction femerged from a process of evolution, but the standard mechanisms recognized by conservative evolutionary theory are at a loss to explain it. How do we understand evolution of sex? What is the accepted explanation? Classical evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) is in a bind. The theory inherited from R. A. Fisher in the early part of the 20th Century insists that there is only one mechanism of evolution, and that is one-mutation-at-a-time. Each incremental change has to provide a benefit that is capable of gradually spreading through the gene pool. In other words, all by itself and immediately it has to offer the bearers (on average) a faster rate of reproduction. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of complex adaptations (like sexual reproduction) that provide no immediate benefit for reproduction, and that require many changes to many genes in order to be functional at all. Classical evolutionary theory just says, ?that?s a tough problem that we haven?t solved yet.? But it?s more than that. The very limited repertoire of mechanisms recognized by classical evolutionary theory quite obviously can never explain the provenance of sex, or of aging, or of countless other common traits. Classical evolutionary theory is going to have to adapt or die. I haven?t tried to model the evolution of sex because I can?t think how to do it. The problem is just too hard?all the advantage is with the cheaters, who can reproduce twice as fast because they don?t have two different sexes to support. Nevertheless, look around you?somehow nature managed to arrange most plants and animals in two sexes. Story #3: Antagonistic Pleiotropy ? a Revisionist Theory Like sex, aging is a trait that benefits the community in the long run, but is costly to the individual in the short run. It?s not as extreme as sex?the benefit is not so essential, and the cost is much less than the cost of sex. (Two sexes cuts fitness by half, by the classical definition of ?fitness?. Time and energy required for the mechanics of sex only add to the cost.) So the problem is not as severe as Story #2, but once again, nature has a problem: How to make death obligatory, so that there is population turnover and population diversity and (more important) so the population doesn?t explode past sustainable levels, leading to population crashes and extinction. Nature?s solution was once again to tie together aging with reproduction, but the link isn?t nearly so tight and consistent as in the case of sex. In fact, population can be kept within sustainable limits either by controlling fertility or limiting lifespan, or any combination of the two, so tying longer lifespan to lower fertility (and vice versa) helps to allow for diversity and flexible strategies, while guarding against those deadly population blooms. The name for nature?s solution is Antagonistic Pleiotropy. Fertility and longevity are coded in the genome in such a way that inheritance of lifespan and fertility are inversely linked. Higher fertility goes with shorter lifespan. Lower fertility goes with longer lifespan. As long as the two vary together in this way, the threat of population explosion can be kept at bay. You might be thinking: pleiotropy is everywhere. We don?t need an explanation for pleiotropy, because it?s built into the way genomes are organized. Very few genes have just one mission. A web of regulation affects everything at once, so that distinct traits emerges from many genes, and every gene contributes to many traits. This is true of the way that adaptive traits are realized in nature. To think this way, you have to think of aging as an adaptive trait that nature actively wants to protect. The Classical view of Antagonistic Pleiotropy Contrast this with the orthodox theory of Antagonistic Pleiotropy, which has become the best-accepted theory for the evolution of aging. In the orthodox theory, genes for fertility and other traits that are highly beneficial to the individual are tightly linked to deterioration that we call ?aging?. Out of the box, the genes work this way, and the forces of evolution have been unable, over half a billion years, to tease the two apart. There is a mighty motivation (says classical theory) to separate aging from fertility so that the individual can have the best of both worlds, but there are physical limitations or logical connections that make this impossible. Hence, natural selection has had to swallow the bitter pill of aging in order to get the sweet nectar of faster reproduction. In my version, antagonistic pleiotropy is an evolved linkage, after the fact. In the standard version, antagonistic pleiotropy is an inescapable precondition, a given fact about the way genes work that evolution, with all her wiles, has been unable to evade. How do we know that my interpretation of AP is the right one and all the theorists have it wrong? Because the classic theory requires that every ?aging gene? must have a benefit that more than compensates, and after 30 years of genetic experiments, pleiotropic costs.have been identified for only about half of the known aging genes. We?ve seen that evolution is capable of some amazing feats. It just doesn?t pass muster that evolution has been trying to find a pleiotropy bypass for half a billion years but doesn?t seem to be able to find one. Because some of the best-known cases involve quasi-pleiotropic linkages that can be broken in the lab. It?s just not that hard to have your cake and eat it, too. The first example was AGE-1, the first bona fide aging gene to be discovered (in lab worms, 1989). When you look at the actual mechanisms of pleiotropy, many of them don?t seem to be functionally essential, but involve unexpected connections between unrelated functions. The most recent example is that methylation aging seems to be inversely related to telomerase expression. Of these 3 stories, the story of evolved Antagonistic Pleiotropy (#3) is the easiest to model and simulate, which is to say that the model requires few assumptions and works to evolve pleiotropy without a lot of adjustment or tinkering. This alone gives me confidence that AP is evolved, and that the usual interpretation for the meaning of AP is upside down. I have been working to turn my computer model into an academic article, and a draft of the paper, not yet submitted, is posted here. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 7 22:32:06 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 15:32:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Spike, please post [science scepticism] In-Reply-To: <2063892933.2064635.1528408878027@mail.yahoo.com> References: <2063892933.2064635.1528408878027.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <2063892933.2064635.1528408878027@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <004f01d3feaf$5e415c30$1ac41490$@rainier66.com> OK Alan, here ya go: From: Alan Brooks Sent: Thursday, June 7, 2018 3:01 PM To: spike at rainier66.com Subject: Spike, please post [science scepticism] "...science in general (?Science is just one of many opinions?)..." The religious may not be skeptical of pure science as a whole, yet might be skeptical of Newtonian-derived science-- inchoately suspecting Newtonian science to be outdated in some way. The distinction between pure and applied science is often blurred. Though the article mentions that the religious are the group most skeptical of science, the religious may not be skeptical of scientific research albeit they could very well be of its application. A religious person could trust a scientist to be unbiased; yet an engineer, industrial contractor--and so forth--applying the results of research would not be perceived as being unbiased. Not that the religious necessarily feel that applying science is hopeless in outcomes, however there may be a sense of the dislocation involved negating positive gain. Perhaps all positive material gains. Eschatology is not concerned with laboratory research-- but rather, of the outcomes of human endeavor, which naturally includes scientific application. Eschatology itself is not based on hopelessness, it is about spiritual redemption in a post-apocalyptic world. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 8 01:44:17 2018 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 18:44:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Organics in them there hills? Message-ID: <35615BFF-2785-4A50-87BC-FD06810A47CE@gmail.com> https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/07/us/nasa-mars-curiosity-rover-findings/index.html I reckon some non-biological processes can cook these up too. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Jun 7 17:10:38 2018 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 10:10:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Computer simulations show wealthy people are not better just luckier In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3D6119D7-6EB6-4C2A-9C54-BB904DBB7B57@taramayastales.com> The interpretation that this disproves meritocracy is simply ideological marxist nonsense. All it means is that a small advantage has disproportionate gains. Take a gazelle which is only a little bit faster shouldn?t have all the offspring than gazelle which is a bit slower (and eaten by the lion before it can reproduce). To be sure, luck may have been involved, but also speed, or else gazelles would run no faster than turtles. Marxists want equality of outcome, which is not only not how meritocracies actually work, it?s not how meritocracies are supposed to work. Tara > > But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a > power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal > distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, > intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is > 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Jun 8 21:15:27 2018 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 17:15:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Organics in them there hills? In-Reply-To: <35615BFF-2785-4A50-87BC-FD06810A47CE@gmail.com> References: <35615BFF-2785-4A50-87BC-FD06810A47CE@gmail.com> Message-ID: If Mars was habitable (in terms of Earth life) 3.5 billion years ago, then--depending on the f_1 coefficient in the Drake Equation--the simplest explanation for organics could be that it was indeed [in]habited. If this is the case, then--depending on the f_i coefficient, and the probability of developing reliable short-distance space travel as well as of developing technology for terraforming (I guess it would be marsiforming)--I find it easy to believe that Earth was pushed towards developing life by an intelligent civilization on Mars. In fact, the probability of this having occurred is almost the same as the probability of life having developed on Earth, just with the onus shunted to a Martian origin (and multiplied by the marsiforming likelihood coefficient.) Look at it this way: we have, very literally, barely scratched the surface of Mars, and we've already found organic molecules. That lends credibility to rejecting the null of no life on Mars. If we find that *some* organics developed on Mars at a time when it was like Earth, chances seem high that a *lot* of organics developed; please correct me if this is a foolish belief. If we had within our reach a planet which we knew bore the characteristics of Earth before life developed, and we were stable enough to focus on interplanetary shit, and there was a consensus that active experimentation on the conditions for the formation of life was more important than potentially upsetting an already extant quasi-experimental development of early life molecules on that planet, I'm relatively sure that we would be trying to see what kind of actions to the planet caused life-like entities to form, or even putting our own lifeforms there and seeing if they took. Just wondering, is that a crazy belief to have? Or do y'all think it's plausible that Martian civilization seeded life on Earth? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Fri Jun 8 21:33:08 2018 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 14:33:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Weird finding with mtDNA Message-ID: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html The original paper is here: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Stoeckle-Thaler-Final-reduced.pdf TL;DR? Basic conclusion seems to be all the mtDNA appears to line up about a hundred thousand years ago. Could it be artifact of testing process? Maybe retrovirus? Or what? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 9 13:57:24 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 09:57:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?World=E2=80=99s_Fastest_Supercomputer?= Message-ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/technology/supercomputer-china-us.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 9 22:24:25 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2018 18:24:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Helping Moore's law continue Message-ID: The reason some people were saying Moore's law is soon going to come to a end i ?s? because of quantum tunneling, when switches are very small and are supposed to be off there will still be electrons flowing through it, and this leakage current increases exponentially the smaller the switch gets. It had long been the consensus that nothing insulates against tunneling better than empty space so it places a limit on how small electronic circuits can get; but in the June 6 2018 issue of Nature this was shown to be untrue. A molecule has been found that insulated better than empty space and potentially much better; it does a good job even at distances of less the one nanometer. Even better the substance is silicon based, an element semiconductor manufacturers have a lot of experience with, so it could become commercially practical sooner than technologies that use some other element. https://engineering.columbia.edu/press-releases/quantum- interference-smaller-insulators https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0197-9 John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Jun 10 12:41:09 2018 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2018 13:41:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Why the 2008 crisis ended capitalism and democracy Message-ID: Is the global economy just a giant debt scam? What the financial elite doesn?t want you to know Yanis Varoufakis saw power up close. He says capitalism is dead, democracy is crumbling and we?re ruled by debt Andrew O'Hehir June 9, 2018 Quote: What was the cumulative global result of all these processes? Do you really need to ask? Is this where we get back to Trump and Brexit and the rise of authoritarianism and right-wing nationalism around the world? It is. Varoufakis sees all those things as clearly connected and part of an unmistakable backlash. After mainstream politicians had cynically transferred those billions of dollars in banking losses onto ordinary people both in America and Europe -- magically combining the high taxation of social democracy with the austerity state of free-market capitalism -- they then pretended to be baffled by what happened next. The political movements that benefited from this climate, as Varoufakis puts it, were those fueled by racism and xenophobia, "the right-wing monsters that breed in the environment of deflation." Establishment parties then "wondered why it was that the discarded people from our neighborhoods and villages and towns turned against them and decided to vote for somebody that peeved them, annoyed them, just in order to get back at the establishment that had discarded them. Great wonder, isn?t it?? --------------------- This is a long article, but well worth reading, as it explains a lot of the world weirdness. BillK From brent.allsop at gmail.com Sun Jun 10 16:17:51 2018 From: brent.allsop at gmail.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2018 10:17:51 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Helping Moore's law continue In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Wow, exciting, thanks for the update. On Sat, Jun 9, 2018, 4:26 PM John Clark wrote: > The reason some people were saying Moore's law is soon going to come to a > end i > ?s? > because of quantum tunneling, when switches are very small and are > supposed to be off there will still be electrons flowing through it, and > this leakage current increases exponentially the smaller the switch gets. > It had long been the consensus that nothing insulates against tunneling > better than empty space so it places a limit on how small electronic > circuits can get; but in the June 6 2018 issue of Nature this was shown to > be untrue. A molecule has been found that insulated better than empty space > and potentially much better; it does a good job even at distances of less > the one nanometer. Even better the substance is silicon based, an element > semiconductor manufacturers have a lot of experience with, so it could > become commercially practical sooner than technologies that use some other > element. > > > https://engineering.columbia.edu/press-releases/quantum-interference-smaller-insulators > > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0197-9 > > John K Clark > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Sun Jun 10 20:41:21 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2018 13:41:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Strange mystery explained Message-ID: <948ac0033064c63a71382ccef1ed4acc.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Keith Henson wrote: > However, to cut to the chase, it looks like patrilineal early farming > groups were killing off each other's males. This considerably diminished > the variations of Y chromosomes since when one group got the upper hand, > it was common for the winners to kill the losers to the last man (and boy) > and take the young women as booty. It seems this process started when the > Neolithic agricultural revolution began > and ended when violence between patrilineal clans was suppressed by > Chieftains or a State. > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6#article-comments The author's hypothesis convincingly tells us "what" happened but doesn't tell us "how" it happened. The winners killing the losers to last man is not sufficient to explain the bottle neck, because it does not explain why the winners were consistently the winners in each and every confrontation. Lions in the wild, for example, operate like this normally where young wandering males challenge older established males for territory and the prides of females that come along with that territory. Should the challenger win, he kills all the cubs of the previous lion. Despite this consistent infanticide, approximately 1 in 5 male lions still manages to survive and reproduce, so you don't see a genetic bottleneck of limited diversity such as the 1 in 17 figure quoted in the paper. This is because the contests between lions is fair: teeth, claws, and manes all around with speed, strength, and cunning being the deciding factors. In order for the same patrilineal clans to have won those wars every time, they would have had to have had a considerable technological advantage over their competitors. Whilst agriculture, and the large amounts of land it requires, would have given motivation for such wars, I don't see it giving early farmers a tactical advantage over hunter-gatherers. Instead, the technological advantage could have been metal weaponry that was concomitantly developed along with farming tools such as scythes. It turns out that the time period during which the bottleneck occurred which is stated to be about 7000 BP to 5000 BP, in the article, corresponds to about 5000 BC to 3000 BC. This pretty closely coincides with the Chalcolithic period or the Copper Age which was a transition period between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age which followed it. The oldest confidently dated archaeological evidence of copper smelting comes from the Belovode site on Rudnick Mountain in Serbia. It is dated to 5000 BC which is about same time the bottleneck and presumably the culling of males began. The availability of copper would have allowed those with the knowledge of smelting to fashion "Otzi the Iceman" style copper axes. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZmmU7hLPq7w/hqdefault.jpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmmU7hLPq7w While one can clearly see the advantage a copper axe would have had over the handaxe shown, one has to wonder if the copper axe shown would be all that advantageous over the hafted stone axe shown. Especially considering bows with stone tipped arrows were extant and still quite deadly as evidenced by Otzi's own fate. Then again, perhaps the availability of copper tools allowed the fashioning of true armor for the first time in history? Something like this: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/archaeologists-unearth-4000-year-old-siberian-knight-armour-102090 Regardless, it is an interesting question. Stuart LaForge From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 11 13:03:19 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2018 08:03:19 -0500 Subject: [ExI] groaner of the day Message-ID: Does getting constantly nagged make one shrewd? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Tue Jun 12 13:42:38 2018 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 06:42:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Law of the Sea Message-ID: <052D9CCB-C03A-4D64-AD0F-2B8B32325451@taramayastales.com> China has been frightening its neighbors with its exaggerated claims in the South China sea. But is it so terrible to build new islands in the ocean, if it weren?t for the missiles China is planting there? Given our level of technology, the deep blue is no longer a wilderness, and maybe it?s time to rethink treating the ocean as a Commons, to be abused by anyone, or fought over by the law of the jungle. Maybe we should re-draw borders in the sea, and actually assign each bit of the ocean to ? well, that?s the rub. To who? I am interested in the Seasteader movement, but I don?t see how they are going to uphold claims to new colonies without a navy. Perhaps it would be better to divide up the sea among existing countries and then allow them to sell of the ocean to individuals or groups as a way to raise money. This would turn the ocean into property, but we would still want to protect the right of passage, so perhaps it could be a form of entailed property, which requires that the owners allow passage of shipping and sea life and water itself, etecera. I?m just throwing out ideas to see if any of you smart folks have better ones! Tara From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Tue Jun 12 17:52:54 2018 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 10:52:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Law of the Sea In-Reply-To: <052D9CCB-C03A-4D64-AD0F-2B8B32325451@taramayastales.com> References: <052D9CCB-C03A-4D64-AD0F-2B8B32325451@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Dear Tara, Check out the United Nations Law of the Sea On Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 6:44 AM Tara Maya wrote: > > China has been frightening its neighbors with its exaggerated claims in > the South China sea. But is it so terrible to build new islands in the > ocean, if it weren?t for the missiles China is planting there? > > Given our level of technology, the deep blue is no longer a wilderness, > and maybe it?s time to rethink treating the ocean as a Commons, to be > abused by anyone, or fought over by the law of the jungle. Maybe we should > re-draw borders in the sea, and actually assign each bit of the ocean to ? > well, that?s the rub. To who? > > I am interested in the Seasteader movement, but I don?t see how they are > going to uphold claims to new colonies without a navy. Perhaps it would be > better to divide up the sea among existing countries and then allow them to > sell of the ocean to individuals or groups as a way to raise money. > > This would turn the ocean into property, but we would still want to > protect the right of passage, so perhaps it could be a form of entailed > property, which requires that the owners allow passage of shipping and sea > life and water itself, etecera. I?m just throwing out ideas to see if any > of you smart folks have better ones! > > > Tara > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Jun 12 23:09:57 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:09:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Genesis City land speculation boom... Message-ID: "Genesis City is a plot of virtual land, roughly the size of Washington, D.C., that investors can buy slices of for obscene amounts of money. Even a simple 1,100 square foot plot can go for as much as $200,000, according to *Bloomberg* . This bizarre bubble market was born from the promise of a VR future. Ray Kurzweil has predicted that, in a matter of years, physical workplaces will be a thing of the past , replaced by virtual ones. By 2020, virtual reality and augmented reality are predicted to rake in an estimated $162 billion in revenue. So, naturally, if there?s real estate to be had (even if it?s virtual), people will pop up to buy and sell it." https://futurism.com/virtual-real-estate/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Jun 12 23:42:06 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:42:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Researcher Wants to Test the Effects of Microdosing on Cognitive Ability and Productivity Message-ID: "To trendsetters, artists, and tech nerds, microdosing is nothing new: in Silicon Valley, people have doing it for a long time , aiming to optimize their performance. Microdosing involves using tiny, controlled doses of psychedelic drugs in the same manner one might use nootropic stacks or Adderall to give themselves an edge in a hyper-competitive environment. In practice, microdosing is just like it sounds: taking between five to ten percent of a recreational dose of a hallucinogen such as LSD, mescaline (peyote), or psilocybin (magic mushrooms). Such a small dose can?t send you on a ?trip? or make you feel high, but it?s just enough to give you an overall sense of well-being, and expand your behaviors and thought patterns to become more creative. In short, microdosing ? when it works as intended ? has been said to give adherents more productive, happier days . However, even the most diehard proponents of microdosing can?t point to any scientific studies on the practice, and instead have to rely on their own anecdotal evidence to convince others (assuming they care to try and want to share their secret). Thus far, Sofia University?s James Fadiman has produced the best evidence of microdosing?s positive effects. Fadiman and his research partner collected anecdotal evidence of users for analysis. While the users? reports of more creative thinking and energy, and less procrastination and depression may be convincing to laypeople, this is not the kind of evidence drug regulators and lawmakers are looking for." https://futurism.com/a-researcher-wants-to-test-the-effects-of-microdosing-on-cognitive-ability-and-productivity/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Jun 12 23:48:59 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:48:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?America_Now_Has_The_Fastest_Supercomputer_In_The?= =?utf-8?q?_World=2E_Here=E2=80=99s_Why_That_Actually_Matters?= Message-ID: "According to *The Wall Street Journal* , researchers will be using Summit to try and solve some big medical questions, such as developing new treatments for Alzheimer?s or addiction. And as *MIT Technology Review reported *, Summit marks the first time that a supercomputer was designed specifically to work with the latest in artificial intelligence developments. This means that even more than its incredible computing power, Summit is built to find answers to questions in ways that people wouldn?t even think to program into a computer. For instance, Summit?s machine learning capabilities could be trained to go through as much medical data as could possibly be fed to it to find never-before-detected causes or signs of diseases. The researchers who built Summit hope to use it as a trial for the supercomputers of the future. If Summit is able to perform as engineers expect it to, and the new tricks they used to build it (like the emphasis on machine learning) pan out, then Summit could inspire computers capable of so-called exascale computing, the name for when a computer could complete one quintillion calculations per second, according to *MIT Technology Review* . For reference, Summit only has one-fifth the power of an exascale supercomputer. So we?ve got a ways to go." https://futurism.com/america-fastest-supercomputer-summit/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 13 00:18:27 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 17:18:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?America_Now_Has_The_Fastest_Supercomputer_In_The?= =?utf-8?q?_World=2E_Here=E2=80=99s_Why_That_Actually_Matters?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <003901d402ac$11ba9ce0$352fd6a0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Grigg Subject: [ExI] America Now Has The Fastest Supercomputer In The World. Here?s Why That Actually Matters " According to The Wall Street Journal, researchers will be using Summit to try and solve some big medical questions? John Grigg! Where the heck have you been, me lad? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eh at edwardhaigh.com Tue Jun 12 23:30:34 2018 From: eh at edwardhaigh.com (Edward Haigh) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:30:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Genesis City land speculation boom... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Finally, an investment even riskier than crypto. Virtual real estate, bought and sold with cryptocurrency. -- Edd On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 12:09 AM, John Grigg wrote: > "Genesis City is a plot of virtual land, roughly the size of Washington, > D.C., that investors can buy slices of for obscene amounts of money. Even a > simple 1,100 square foot plot can go for as much as $200,000, according to > *Bloomberg* > > . > > This bizarre bubble market was born from the promise of a VR future. Ray > Kurzweil has predicted that, in a matter of years, physical workplaces > will be a thing of the past > , > replaced by virtual ones. By 2020, virtual reality and augmented reality > are predicted to rake in an estimated $162 billion > > in revenue. So, naturally, if there?s real estate to be had (even if > it?s virtual), people will pop up to buy and sell it." > https://futurism.com/virtual-real-estate/ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 13 02:36:54 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 19:36:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Strange mystery explained Message-ID: "Stuart LaForge" wrote: Keith Henson wrote: >> However, to cut to the chase, it looks like patrilineal early farming >> groups were killing off each other's males. This considerably diminished >> the variations of Y chromosomes since when one group got the upper hand, >> it was common for the winners to kill the losers to the last man (and boy) >> and take the young women as booty. It seems this process started when the >> Neolithic agricultural revolution began >> and ended when violence between patrilineal clans was suppressed by >> Chieftains or a State. >. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6#article-comments . >The author's hypothesis convincingly tells us "what" happened but doesn't >tell us "how" it happened. The winners killing the losers to last man is >not sufficient to explain the bottle neck, because it does not explain why >the winners were consistently the winners in each and every confrontation. They didn't need to be. The only requirement for their model was that one patrilineage wiped out another. This happened many times over thousands of years and thinned down the number of Ys. Keith From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 13 15:17:19 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 11:17:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing Message-ID: I thought this video was very good, if you're interested in quantum computers you should take a look. https://blog.ycombinator.com/john-preskill-on-quantum-computing/ John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 13 19:51:55 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:51:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The metaphor about the book came off as misleading to incorrect depending on the interpretation - and, rather than trying to clearly explain what entanglement actually is, going off on how it's all mysterious and spooky. The comparison to the water bottle reinforced that impression. At that point I judged it to be yet more pablum and lost interest. (No, when you look at an entangled particle, its information is not hidden from you. Rather, if you look at one entangled particle, the unusual thing is that you then know properties about its entangled partner - even if said partner is light years away, you know the information instantly.) On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 8:17 AM, John Clark wrote: > I thought this video was very good, if you're interested in quantum > computers you should take a look. > > https://blog.ycombinator.com/john-preskill-on-quantum-computing/ > > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From atymes at gmail.com Wed Jun 13 20:26:46 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 13:26:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Law of the Sea In-Reply-To: <052D9CCB-C03A-4D64-AD0F-2B8B32325451@taramayastales.com> References: <052D9CCB-C03A-4D64-AD0F-2B8B32325451@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Lack of a navy isn't the biggest problem with the Seasteader movement. It's lack of people. If you had an island with 100,000 - possibly just 10,000 - people actually living there (no "virtual" or promises to, but actually physically there most of the time), that would be the beginnings of something the international community might recognize. But just 10 or less? No way. Of course, actually having 100,000 people physically there would also make having a navy easier. Also, part of the problem with building new islands where China is doing, is that they are trying to take away territorial waters owned (via claims previously more thoroughly established) by other nations. This is distinct from building new islands far out at sea away from anyone. On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 6:42 AM, Tara Maya wrote: > > China has been frightening its neighbors with its exaggerated claims in the South China sea. But is it so terrible to build new islands in the ocean, if it weren?t for the missiles China is planting there? > > Given our level of technology, the deep blue is no longer a wilderness, and maybe it?s time to rethink treating the ocean as a Commons, to be abused by anyone, or fought over by the law of the jungle. Maybe we should re-draw borders in the sea, and actually assign each bit of the ocean to ? well, that?s the rub. To who? > > I am interested in the Seasteader movement, but I don?t see how they are going to uphold claims to new colonies without a navy. Perhaps it would be better to divide up the sea among existing countries and then allow them to sell of the ocean to individuals or groups as a way to raise money. > > This would turn the ocean into property, but we would still want to protect the right of passage, so perhaps it could be a form of entailed property, which requires that the owners allow passage of shipping and sea life and water itself, etecera. I?m just throwing out ideas to see if any of you smart folks have better ones! > > > Tara > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 14 01:39:24 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 21:39:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: ?> ? > The metaphor about the book came off as misleading to incorrect > Given that Preskill is one of the world's leading experts on quantum information and is the Richard J Feynman J Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology it might be wise to entertain the possibility that you could learn more from him about physics than he could learn from you *?>?going off on how it's all mysterious and spooky* Niels Bohr said it best: "*Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it*." *?>?Rather, if you look at one entangled particle, the unusual thing is > that you then know properties about its entangled partner - even if said > partner is light years away, you know the information instantly* That is the simplest possible ?? example of quantum entanglement involving a single Qbit, Preskill was talking about far more complex systems where thousands or millions of Qbits are entangled ?? , the sort of thing you'd need for a quantum computer. ?John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Jun 14 02:03:12 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 19:03:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 6:39 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> The metaphor about the book came off as misleading to incorrect > > Given that Preskill is one of the world's leading experts on quantum > information and is the Richard J Feynman J Feynman Professor of Theoretical > Physics at the California Institute of Technology ...is an appeal to authority, and says nothing about the statements to which I objected. >> going off on how it's all mysterious and spooky > > Niels Bohr said it best: > > "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Anything that is initially shocking fades from that status as it becomes more familiar. This is true even of quantum theory. To be continually shocked by the same reality is a classic indicator of failure to comprehend it. To insist that only those continually shocked may truly understand is to, frankly, lie. >> Rather, if you look at one entangled particle, the unusual thing is that >> you then know properties about its entangled partner - even if said partner >> is light years away, you know the information instantly > > That is the simplest possible > example of quantum entanglement involving a single Qbit, Preskill was > talking about far more complex systems where thousands or millions of Qbits > are entangled > , the sort of thing you'd need for a quantum computer. And? Each and every one of them is entangled with another particle; perhaps some pairs might be among that thousands or millions. This does not render the whole collection immeasurable. Unless he is trying to redefine the term "quantum entanglement". If so, that is far closer to "hyping up the spooky and mysterious" than "clearly explaining", and thus is not worth listening to if one is seeking an explanation. From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 14 16:55:59 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:55:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:03 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >> Given that Preskill is one of the world's leading experts on >> quantum information and is the Richard J Feynman Professor of >> Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology > > > ...*is an appeal to authority, and says nothing about the statements > to which I objected.* An appeal to authority is not always without merit. If a professor of physics at Caltech says something about physics and Adrian Tymes says he's dead wrong and is just spewing pablum I think it is a tad more likely that Mr. Tymes has misunderstood the professor than that the professor has misunderstood physics. *> Anything that is initially shocking fades from that status as it becomes > more familiar. This is true even of quantum theory.* I guess you're smarter than Feynman because he admitted me didn't understand quantum mechanics and didn't think anybody else did either. But then he never met you. > >> That is the simplest possible example of quantum entanglement involving >> a single Qbit, Preskill was talking about far more complex systems where >> thousands or millions of Qbits are entangled, the sort of thing you'd need >> for a quantum computer. > > *>And? Each and every one of them is entangled with another > particle; perhaps some pairs might be among that thousands or millions. > This does not render the whole collection immeasurable.* Preskill never said the information in the whole collection was immeasurable, if it was it would be useless for quantum computers; he was trying to explain how to make things more robust with quantum error correction; if the particles are entangled in a clever way and the outside environment interacts with just one particle in a many particle system the quantum information in the entire system will not be lost. And that?s vitally important because you?re never going to able to isolate the computer completely from interacting with the environment. *> Unless he is trying to redefine the term "quantum entanglement". If so, > that is far closer to "hyping up the spooky and mysterious? than "clearly > explaining", and thus is not worth listening to if one is? ?seeking an > explanation.* Nobody has an explanation why things behave the way they do in the quantum world, but some people know rules that allow them to make statistical predictions about what will happen. Nobody is very happy about these rules because they make little sense and would be universally rejected except for one thing, they work. In fact most physicists have given up trying to figure out why they work and thus aren?t interested in Copenhagen or Many Worlds, they are adherents of the ?Shut Up And Calculate? quantum interpretation. A quantum computer engineer need not understand why the rules work he just needs to know that they do. John K Clark If you always assume you know more than your teacher how can you ever learn? I think you could use a dash of humility , maybe just maybe other people know things you don't. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Jun 14 17:12:47 2018 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 10:12:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0E49DC12-C717-4865-9BFE-161B829D1B2B@gmail.com> On Jun 14, 2018, at 9:55 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:03 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >>> >> Given that Preskill is one of the world's leading experts on quantum information and is the Richard J Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology >> >> > ...is an appeal to authority, and says nothing about the statements to which I objected. > > An appeal to authority is not always without merit. If a professor of physics at Caltech says something about physics and Adrian Tymes says he's dead wrong and is just spewing pablum I think it is a tad more likely that Mr. Tymes has misunderstood the professor than that the professor has misunderstood physics. Imagine it were a professor of philosophy at, say, Oxford and John Clark says said Professor is dead wrong and is just spewing pablum, isn?t it a tad more likely that Mr. Clark has misunderstood the Professor than that the professor has misunderstood philosophy? Couldn?t resist that. ;) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Jun 15 00:04:46 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 20:04:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] John Preskill on Quantum Computing In-Reply-To: <0E49DC12-C717-4865-9BFE-161B829D1B2B@gmail.com> References: <0E49DC12-C717-4865-9BFE-161B829D1B2B@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 1:12 PM, Dan TheBookMan wrote: ?>*?* > *Imagine it were a professor of philosophy at, say, Oxford and John Clark > says said Professor is dead wrong and is just spewing pablum, isn?t it a > tad more likely that Mr. Clark has misunderstood the Professor than that > the professor has misunderstood philosophy? * > Not necessarily because physics is a science and, although there is much we don't know, it contains a body of facts that are beyond dispute; such as the fact that quantum error correction has been demonstrated to exist, so even if one particle in a complex system interacts with the outside environment the information in the entire system is not lost. On the other hand what is today called ?philosophy? by people that work in the philosophy department of universities is not a science and contains no facts that are beyond dispute. ? John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 15 08:31:00 2018 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:31:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] IQ scores are falling and have been for decades Message-ID: IQ scores are falling and have been for decades, researchers say Posted: Jun 13, 2018 Quotes: IQ scores have been steadily falling for the last few decades, and environmental factors are to blame, a new study says. The researchers suggest that environmental factors -- not genes -- are driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study published Monday. Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 -- but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975. Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, and Estonia, have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway, and co-author of the study. "The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors," said Rogeburg who believes the change is not due to genetics. "It's something to do with the environment because we're seeing the same differences within families," he said. These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, said Rogeberg. ------------------------------- The obvious solution is that the internet generation say "Who needs IQ? Just Google it." Or, alternatively, peer pressure directs people to conform to their friends on Facebook and spend their time on social trivia. BillK From natasha at natasha.cc Sat Jun 16 19:13:13 2018 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2018 12:13:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] H+ Blockchain Prize - "Mutual Benefits between Blockchain and Transhumanism" Message-ID: <001b01d405a6$131b1900$39514b00$@natasha.cc> Submit your essays to essay at humanityplus.org by June 23 midnight! Valued Humanity+ member Hadrien Majoie is the generous sponsor of the BLOCKCHAIN ESSAY PRIZE. An enormous thank you to Hardrien for his vision and support! What we are looking for are new ideas, ways to bridge gaps, solution finding for humanity. Your essay does not have to be lenthy! We are looking for concise, unique ideas, schemes, designs, proposals, propositions, action points, and visions. Don't forget to submit your essay and win $1,000 - $5,000 USD. Thank you! Natasha Dr. Natasha Vita-More Executive Director, Humanity+, Inc. Author and Co-Editor: The Transhumanist Reader Lead Science Researcher: Memory Project Professor, Graduate and Undergraduate Departments, UAT -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image006.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9416 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image007.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image008.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 976 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image009.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 874 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image010.png Type: image/png Size: 29366 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 22:08:50 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:08:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] IQ scores are falling and have been for decades In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Or don't compare IQ scores between different times, when they have been normalized for different generations. If people got super-smart relative to their parents, then the IQ scores were adjusted so they became the new norm, of course the measured IQ scores would drop during that adjustment. On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 1:31 AM, BillK wrote: > IQ scores are falling and have been for decades, researchers say > Posted: Jun 13, 2018 > > > > Quotes: > > IQ scores have been steadily falling for the last few decades, and > environmental factors are to blame, a new study says. > The researchers suggest that environmental factors -- not genes -- are > driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study published > Monday. > > Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born > between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 > percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 -- > but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975. > > Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, > and Estonia, have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores, > said Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch > Center for Economic Research in Norway, and co-author of the study. > > "The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to > environmental factors," said Rogeburg who believes the change is not > due to genetics. "It's something to do with the environment because > we're seeing the same differences within families," he said. > > These environmental factors could include changes in the education > system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online > more, said Rogeberg. > ------------------------------- > > > The obvious solution is that the internet generation say "Who needs > IQ? Just Google it." Or, alternatively, peer pressure directs people > to conform to their friends on Facebook and spend their time on social > trivia. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 22:29:21 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:29:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?China=E2=80=99s_new_fleet_of_unmanned_assault_bo?= =?utf-8?q?ats_to_use_artificial_intelligence=2C_experts_say?= Message-ID: "China isn?t alone in developing unmanned vehicles, as the United States and other Western counties are working on creating ?ant swarms? for operations on the ground, ?drone swarms? for aerial operations and ?shark swarms? for the sea. " https://americanmilitarynews.com/2018/06/chinas-new-fleet-of-unmanned-assault-boats-to-use-artificial-intelligence-experts-say/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 22:33:05 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:33:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Meet_the_skyrmions=E2=80=94exotic_quasiparticles?= =?utf-8?q?_could_revolutionise_computing?= Message-ID: "Unique physical properties of these "magic knots" might help to satisfy demand for IT power and storage using a fraction of the energy." https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skyrmionsexotic-quasiparticles-revolutionise.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 22:42:11 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:42:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] China's social credit system has blocked people from taking 11 million flights and 4 million train trips Message-ID: - *The social credit system is used to punish citizens for bad behavior with numerous blacklists preventing them from traveling, getting loans or jobs, or staying in hotels, and even by limiting internet access.* - *China intends to roll out a more comprehensive, national social credit system in 2020, which has gained comparisons to the show "Black Mirror."* http://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-blocked-people-taking-flights-train-trips-2018-5 I am horrified! Big brother embraces information technology... But then the Nazis would have had a field day with our present day tech... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 22:47:31 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:47:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] This is the world's best bookstore and it's in Uppsala, Sweden Message-ID: To me there is something very sacred about a bookshop... We have some nice ones here in Phoenix, Arizona... I wonder if Anders has ever wandered inside this store... We need an insider's report of how it is... : ) "This year, the London Book Fair picked The English Bookshop in Uppsala as its International Excellence bookstore of the year. Previously awarded to the iconic Shakespeare & Co in Paris, this prize puts a community bookshop in a small Swedish city firmly on the map. The Local's contributor Madeleine Hyde met the owner, Jan Smedh, to hear the story of how his passion produced a bookstore worthy of international recognition. " https://www.thelocal.se/20180528/this-is-the-worlds-best-bookstore-and-its-in-uppsala-sweden-english-bookshop -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Jun 18 23:00:49 2018 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 00:00:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] IQ scores are falling and have been for decades In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 18 June 2018 at 23:08, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Or don't compare IQ scores between different times, when they have > been normalized for different generations. If people got super-smart > relative to their parents, then the IQ scores were adjusted so they > became the new norm, of course the measured IQ scores would drop > during that adjustment. > Oh, I think they are well aware of that problem. :} IQ tests are re-standardised every so often and researchers have already been worrying about the Flynn effect which showed increasing IQ scores when people took the older tests. So it was a surprise when they started finding decreasing IQ scores instead. BillK From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 20 00:32:34 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 17:32:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> Ok here ya go. From: Alan Brooks Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 9:23 AM To: spike at rainier66.com Subject: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. [Spike, please post. Thanks.] https://study.com/academy/lesson/mass-hysteria-moral-panic-definitions-causes-examples.html Today the exaggerated emotions of both religionists and far-leftists are on full display. Religionists become super-emotional concerning the unborn. Far leftists have a new cause-- yet the same teary-eyed reactions. The latest, and perhaps most hysterical, cause for far-leftists is illegal (or 'undocumenteds', if one prefers) immigrant families, who are split apart after immigrating. "The poor innocent children," goes the mantra: the emotions are identical to religionist reaction to abortion. Sobbing; finger-pointing (it is usually Someone Else's fault for abortion and split illegal immigrant families) are dominant in each case. How otherwise stable grown men and women become hysterical re these issues is more mysterious than the issues themselves. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sen.otaku at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 02:03:07 2018 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 21:03:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <3CE92E35-B597-4A1A-9D13-BD3096116A7E@gmail.com> Emotional reactions to situations involving children should be expected. It?s survival instinct. If we didn?t have an instinct to protect children, humans would not still exist. The human brain doesn?t fully develop until the mid twenties. Sent from my iPhone > On Jun 19, 2018, at 19:32, wrote: > > Ok here ya go. > > > > From: Alan Brooks > Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 9:23 AM > To: spike at rainier66.com > Subject: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. > > [Spike, please post. Thanks.] > https://study.com/academy/lesson/mass-hysteria-moral-panic-definitions-causes-examples.html > Today the exaggerated emotions of both religionists and far-leftists are on full display. > Religionists become super-emotional concerning the unborn. Far leftists have a new cause-- > yet the same teary-eyed reactions. The latest, and perhaps most hysterical, cause for far-leftists is illegal (or 'undocumenteds', if one prefers) immigrant families, who are split apart after immigrating. "The poor innocent children," goes the mantra: the emotions are identical to religionist reaction to abortion. > Sobbing; finger-pointing (it is usually Someone Else's fault for abortion and split illegal immigrant families) are dominant in each case. How otherwise stable grown men and women become hysterical re these issues is more mysterious than the issues themselves. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 06:27:45 2018 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 08:27:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: <3CE92E35-B597-4A1A-9D13-BD3096116A7E@gmail.com> References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> <3CE92E35-B597-4A1A-9D13-BD3096116A7E@gmail.com> Message-ID: Right. We become emotional when children are involved, and this is how it must be. One would hope that leftists would understand the emotional reactions of the right to abortion, and rightists would understand the emotional reaction of the left to immigrant children separated from their parents, but that's probably too much to ask. G. On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 4:03 AM, SR Ballard wrote: > Emotional reactions to situations involving children should be expected. > It?s survival instinct. If we didn?t have an instinct to protect children, > humans would not still exist. The human brain doesn?t fully develop until > the mid twenties. > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Jun 19, 2018, at 19:32, > wrote: > > Ok here ya go. > > > > > > > > From: Alan Brooks > Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 9:23 AM > To: spike at rainier66.com > Subject: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. > > > > [Spike, please post. Thanks.] > > https://study.com/academy/lesson/mass-hysteria-moral-panic-definitions-causes-examples.html > > Today the exaggerated emotions of both religionists and far-leftists are on > full display. > > Religionists become super-emotional concerning the unborn. Far leftists have > a new cause-- > > yet the same teary-eyed reactions. The latest, and perhaps most hysterical, > cause for far-leftists is illegal (or 'undocumenteds', if one prefers) > immigrant families, who are split apart after immigrating. "The poor > innocent children," goes the mantra: the emotions are identical to > religionist reaction to abortion. > > Sobbing; finger-pointing (it is usually Someone Else's fault for abortion > and split illegal immigrant families) are dominant in each case. How > otherwise stable grown men and women become hysterical re these issues is > more mysterious than the issues themselves. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 13:07:18 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 08:07:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> <3CE92E35-B597-4A1A-9D13-BD3096116A7E@gmail.com> Message-ID: I think that abortion is wrong in many cases and I have a friend who runs an abortion clinic who agrees with me. That said, I am opposed to any laws regarding regulation of anyone's body in any way. Those who don't empathize with children in cages separated from their parents might be bordering Asperger's Syndrome - insensitive to humanity. bill w On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 1:27 AM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > Right. We become emotional when children are involved, and this is how > it must be. One would hope that leftists would understand the > emotional reactions of the right to abortion, and rightists would > understand the emotional reaction of the left to immigrant children > separated from their parents, but that's probably too much to ask. > > G. > > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 4:03 AM, SR Ballard wrote: > > Emotional reactions to situations involving children should be expected. > > It?s survival instinct. If we didn?t have an instinct to protect > children, > > humans would not still exist. The human brain doesn?t fully develop until > > the mid twenties. > > > > Sent from my iPhone > > > > On Jun 19, 2018, at 19:32, > > wrote: > > > > Ok here ya go. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > From: Alan Brooks > > Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 9:23 AM > > To: spike at rainier66.com > > Subject: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. > > > > > > > > [Spike, please post. Thanks.] > > > > https://study.com/academy/lesson/mass-hysteria-moral- > panic-definitions-causes-examples.html > > > > Today the exaggerated emotions of both religionists and far-leftists are > on > > full display. > > > > Religionists become super-emotional concerning the unborn. Far leftists > have > > a new cause-- > > > > yet the same teary-eyed reactions. The latest, and perhaps most > hysterical, > > cause for far-leftists is illegal (or 'undocumenteds', if one prefers) > > immigrant families, who are split apart after immigrating. "The poor > > innocent children," goes the mantra: the emotions are identical to > > religionist reaction to abortion. > > > > Sobbing; finger-pointing (it is usually Someone Else's fault for abortion > > and split illegal immigrant families) are dominant in each case. How > > otherwise stable grown men and women become hysterical re these issues is > > more mysterious than the issues themselves. > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 13:24:24 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 09:24:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 8:36 PM wrote: > *From:* Alan Brooks > > The latest, and perhaps most hysterical, cause for far-leftists is illegal > (or 'undocumenteds', if one prefers) immigrant families, who are split > apart after immigrating. > It's not just "far-leftists" who are appalled by the intentional separation of families seeking political asylum. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 14:56:50 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:56:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved. In-Reply-To: References: <146919382.1252599.1529338979972.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <146919382.1252599.1529338979972@mail.yahoo.com> <017d01d4082e$2f6541f0$8e2fc5d0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 9:24 AM, Dave Sill wrote: ?> ? > It's not just "far-leftists" who are appalled by the intentional > separation of families seeking political asylum. > That is true and I'm very glad to hear you say that, there is hope for Extropians yet! Donald Trump has weaponized child abuse and is using it as a tool to implement his nationalistic policies; the man is not just an ignorant fool, he is evil. John K Clark ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 15:12:01 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 11:12:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What the Earth looked like Message-ID: I like this, it shows you what the Earth looked like with an animated globe between now and 750 million years ago: http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0 John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From henrik.ohrstrom at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 18:28:32 2018 From: henrik.ohrstrom at gmail.com (Henrik Ohrstrom) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 20:28:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] de Waal In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I'm not saying there is a gene for religion, I'm saying there is a gene > that predisposes the young to believe what adults tell them. If adults > don't push religion onto their kids then they probably won't grow up to be > religious nuts. And church attendance may be in decline, at least in > Europe, but I don't think mosque attendance is in decline > > John K Clark > >From observing our new citizens here in sweden, first arrival are a mixed lot vsv religion. Second generation who came young or born here by new arrival parents, confused and go to mosques quit a lot. 3:e generation, about as eager as your normal swede. That is, not a lot. /henrik > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 19:52:32 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:52:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] de Waal In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: see bottom On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 1:28 PM, Henrik Ohrstrom wrote: > > > >> I'm not saying there is a gene for religion, I'm saying there is a gene >> that predisposes the young to believe what adults tell them. If adults >> don't push religion onto their kids then they probably won't grow up to be >> religious nuts. And church attendance may be in decline, at least in >> Europe, but I don't think mosque attendance is in decline >> >> John K Clark >> > > From observing our new citizens here in sweden, first arrival are a mixed > lot vsv religion. Second generation who came young or born here by new > arrival parents, confused and go to mosques quit a lot. 3:e generation, > about as eager as your normal swede. That is, not a lot. > /henrik > ?I think what is being searched for here is simply the influence of conformity and compliance. One learns early that Mom and Dad's rules are obeyed or negative consequences occur. If they are religious, then that gets put in early. But soon the kids go to school and conformity pressure is enormous. Many studies show that conformity is greater to the society at large, exemplified by the school kids, than to the parents. By the teen years, parents are largely ignored - are considered 'out of it' and irrelevant, causing even more stress at home and differences between home and school. So yes, there is definitely a tendency to believe what you are told (parents don't generally teach a child to consider all alternatives; that is, presenting a one-sided argument that is rather easily refuted by later exposure to two-sided arguments). College is often a time of great stress because one is exposed to opinions sometimes far different from what one got at home and at school. I, for example, was a small town boy and when I went to LSU and encountered Arabs and Armenians? and Cajuns, well, it was a different world with far more variety than I ever expected and thus for me, college was a time of having my beliefs challenged and challenging them myself. I'm still not sure about everything I believe and that's a good thing. Being sure is commonly a sign of a closed mind. bill w > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 21:16:34 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:16:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] People Are Doing Ridiculous Things with Elon Musk's Flamethrowers Message-ID: Elon Musk's release of a "home flamethrower" makes me think he is beginning to look like a character from a Cory Doctorow or Rudy Rucker story... https://www.livescience.com/62848-boring-flamethrowers-elon-musk.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 21:22:29 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:22:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? Message-ID: Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? And can we afford to have one? "President Donald Trump's call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space activities. While the idea of a separate, space-focused military branch is not new, Trump's surprise announcement caused a buzz on social media and news outlets.President Donald Trump's call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space activities. While the idea of a separate, space-focused military branch is not new, Trump's surprise announcement caused a buzz on social media and news outlets." https://www.livescience.com/62868-trump-space-force-debate.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 21:32:14 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:32:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] This Speedy Genetic Tool Might Soon Let Scientists Create New Genes 'Overnight' Message-ID: "Two graduate students developed a method for synthesizing DNA that could make it much faster, cheaper and easier for biologists to create synthetic DNA sequences. Right now, if you want to create a new gene ? maybe to make a tomato plant more bug resistant or to add a modification to your army of supersoldier goats ? the process is slow and expensive. Bases, the building blocks of genetic code , get added one at a time to a growing strand of DNA. The process sometimes fails, and it always runs out of juice once a sequence reaches just 200 bases (a very short patch of code in genetic terms), according to a statement from the researchers. Want to go longer? Better to write lots of different bits of genetic code and then stitch them all together using enzymes ? chemicals that living things produce to help along the chemical reactions in their bodies ? even knowing how likely that is to fail. The new method, which the students published Monday (June 18) in the journal Nature Biotechnology , could eliminate many of those problems. [Genetics by the Numbers: 10 Tantalizing Tales ]" https://www.livescience.com/62856-overnight-genetic-genes-sequence.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Jun 20 22:15:55 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 15:15:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Game-changing finding pushes 3D-printing to the molecular limit Message-ID: "New research proves that advanced materials containing molecules that switch states in response to environmental stimuli such as light can be fabricated using 3D printing. The study findings have the potential to vastly increase the functional capabilities of 3D-printed devices for industries such as electronics, healthcare and quantum computing." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180620162430.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 20 22:33:18 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 15:33:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Grigg Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? And can we afford to have one? >?"Presi? call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space activities. ? https://www.livescience.com/62868-trump-space-force-debate.html It does make one wonder what their boot camp would be like, and why. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Jun 21 00:46:28 2018 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:46:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: And all the students at their military academy will be "space cadets!" Lol! On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 3:33 PM, wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *John Grigg > > *Subject:* [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? > > > > Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? And can > we afford to have one? > > > > > > > > > > > > >?"Presi? call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. > military ? which he called the "Space Force" > > ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to > better manage military space activities. ? > > > > > > https://www.livescience.com/62868-trump-space-force-debate.html > > > > > > > > > > > > It does make one wonder what their boot camp would be like, and why. > > > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Thu Jun 21 05:08:01 2018 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 07:08:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Regardless of the merit of this specific proposal, more emphasis on space is good. On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 2:46 AM, John Grigg wrote: > And all the students at their military academy will be "space cadets!" Lol! > > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 3:33 PM, wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of >> John Grigg >> >> Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? >> >> >> >> Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? And can >> we afford to have one? >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >?"Presi? call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. >> > military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate >> > about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space >> > activities. ? >> >> >> >> >> >> https://www.livescience.com/62868-trump-space-force-debate.html >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> It does make one wonder what their boot camp would be like, and why. >> >> >> >> spike >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 21 05:15:17 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 22:15:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <010301d4091e$d8902060$89b06120$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of John Grigg Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? >> It does make one wonder what their boot camp would be like, and why. spike >?And all the students at their military academy will be "space cadets!" Lol! If they did boot camp on-orbit, it would sure make the pushup easy. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 21 16:54:49 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 09:54:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Moving Stars Message-ID: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/combat-expanding-universe-aliens-could-hoard-stars?tgt=nr What's a bit strange about this is that the way to move stars is obvious. Eric Drexler and I discussed it way back in the 1970s. There is even a nice painting of a star fixed up this way somewhere. (The artwork even had a slice out of the light sails to keep planets illuminated.) For those who have not heard about it, you hover actively controlled solar sails over one hemisphere of a star. This makes the star into a fusion/photon drive. The acceleration isn't much, but a G type star looked like it could cross the average distance between galaxies before it burned out. Keith PS. For your amusement, the word "extropic" shows up on page 67 of the Feb 2018 Scientific American. From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 21 17:41:11 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 10:41:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Moving Stars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005a01d40987$0bbc1ee0$23345ca0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Keith Henson Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 9:55 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] Moving Stars https://www.sciencenews.org/article/combat-expanding-universe-aliens-could-h oard-stars?tgt=nr What's a bit strange about this is that the way to move stars is obvious. Eric Drexler and I discussed it way back in the 1970s. There is even a nice painting of a star fixed up this way somewhere. (The artwork even had a slice out of the light sails to keep planets illuminated.) For those who have not heard about it, you hover actively controlled solar sails over one hemisphere of a star. This makes the star into a fusion/photon drive. The acceleration isn't much, but a G type star looked like it could cross the average distance between galaxies before it burned out. Keith PS. For your amusement, the word "extropic" shows up on page 67 of the Feb 2018 Scientific American. _______________________________________________ Keith this is so cool! I had not heard that you and the K.Eric had already worked all this out while I was struggling thru grade school. If I offer any insight, it is that the reflectors need not hover: they can be in orbit and still have the photon drive effect. The reflectors slow down on the warm side and speed up as they fall toward the cool side, thus spending more time on the side from which they are gently tugging the star gravitationally. Granted it takes a bit of rethinking to recognize that the usual orbit equations fail when photon pressure is no longer negligible. Of course it requires a lot more mass to do it that way, but the orbiting reflection notion pays off in other ways, specifically heat control. Even with orbiting reflectors, the warm side still gets really hot. Explanation of how I am using the terms: imagine a star with skerjillions of individual orbiting nodes which turn and reflect light to the left. When they are on the left side of the star, they turn sideways to let most of the light pass them by. When they are on the right side, they turn to reflect most of the light to the left. Result: several meters per square year acceleration to the right. 15 million years later, we swoosh past where Proxima Centauri is now (it won't be there anymore) at a rate about typical of a Boeing 737. Sure it takes a while, but I don't know how the heck else to get to another star other than to bring along our own personal multi-generation ship, which is our planet (since it also gets tugged along with our power source.) spike From aleksei at iki.fi Thu Jun 21 17:52:06 2018 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:52:06 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Moving Stars In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 7:54 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > https://www.sciencenews.org/article/combat-expanding-universe-aliens-could-hoard-stars?tgt=nr > > What's a bit strange about this is that the way to move stars is > obvious. Eric Drexler and I discussed it way back in the 1970s. > There is even a nice painting of a star fixed up this way somewhere. > (The artwork even had a slice out of the light sails to keep planets > illuminated.) > > For those who have not heard about it, you hover actively controlled > solar sails over one hemisphere of a star. This makes the star into a > fusion/photon drive. The acceleration isn't much, but a G type star > looked like it could cross the average distance between galaxies > before it burned out. Yeah, I thought this is commonly called a "Shkadov Thruster". Googling this term leads to plenty of pages that discuss it. (Apparently Shkadov shouldn't have been considered the first to analyze it, though, since it was as late as 1987 when he put out a paper on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Shkadov ) -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From sen.otaku at gmail.com Fri Jun 22 02:05:13 2018 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 21:05:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <010301d4091e$d8902060$89b06120$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <010301d4091e$d8902060$89b06120$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: While I do like the increased focus on space, I have a few issues. 1. The US military infrastructure is becoming quite old. Many planes are flying well past their projected decommissioning. 2. The current US military forces are over-extended. There are not enough troops, and so the ratio of deployed troops to support troops is not favorable. 3. The US is rapidly shifting it?s foreign policies and attitudes. I imagine more and more countries will be on edge over this if it continues for any serious length of time, especially if we have military orbiting over various countries. Space doesn't have ?restricted airspace? to any appreciable degree. 4. The US struggles to fund it?s current budget initiatives, or national needs, such as the creation and maintenance of public infrastructure, social welfare programs, among other things. 5. Wouldn?t this potentially violate the Outer Space Treaty? But despite that, I am interested to see where this takes us. The Space Race brought us many interesting and useful technologies that we enjoy today. From atymes at gmail.com Fri Jun 22 17:50:11 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 10:50:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <010301d4091e$d8902060$89b06120$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Good points, which I suspect will be included in Congress's rationale (so far as one is presented) for not funding this. On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 7:05 PM, SR Ballard wrote: > While I do like the increased focus on space, I have a few issues. > > 1. The US military infrastructure is becoming quite old. Many planes are flying well past their projected decommissioning. > > 2. The current US military forces are over-extended. There are not enough troops, and so the ratio of deployed troops to support troops is not favorable. > > 3. The US is rapidly shifting it?s foreign policies and attitudes. I imagine more and more countries will be on edge over this if it continues for any serious length of time, especially if we have military orbiting over various countries. Space doesn't have ?restricted airspace? to any appreciable degree. > > 4. The US struggles to fund it?s current budget initiatives, or national needs, such as the creation and maintenance of public infrastructure, social welfare programs, among other things. > > 5. Wouldn?t this potentially violate the Outer Space Treaty? > > But despite that, I am interested to see where this takes us. The Space Race brought us many interesting and useful technologies that we enjoy today. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Fri Jun 22 18:04:15 2018 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 11:04:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: In 1998 the space War plan was giving a little rest when a number of physicists left the program the fun fact is that Woodstock 99 was held on the grounds of that space War project I personally knew a prominent physicist who left this program and told me we're on the Woodstock 99 property this or that building or this or that part of the space War project was being investigated and then he left and went to work for the the planetarium company A space force program is old news which was considered criminal at the end of the 1990s as no safety precautions are possible From Any Nation please do some research and open up that old Regan nut of war in space I don't think there's anything cute about it it's Criminal there is no research that is worth taking away the value of human individuality. People who are not aware of this history might be stepping into a dog dooo. Smile ilsa On Jun 20, 2018 2:25 PM, "John Grigg" wrote: Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? And can we afford to have one? "President Donald Trump's call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space activities. While the idea of a separate, space-focused military branch is not new, Trump's surprise announcement caused a buzz on social media and news outlets.President Donald Trump's call this week that to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military ? which he called the "Space Force" ? has reopened a wider debate about whether such a move is necessary to better manage military space activities. While the idea of a separate, space-focused military branch is not new, Trump's surprise announcement caused a buzz on social media and news outlets." https://www.livescience.com/62868-trump-space-force-debate.html _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 23 16:05:03 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 12:05:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 6:33 PM, wrote: > > ?> ? > *Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military?* No but it sounds neat, and with Trump that's the only important thing. > *?>?And can we afford to have one?* ? Sure, the wall is an even dumber idea and Trump says we can afford that. Oh but I forgot, we're getting the wall for free because Mexico is going to pay for it. ? John K Clark? > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Jun 23 16:11:47 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 11:11:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 11:05 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 6:33 PM, wrote: > > > >> >> ?> ? >> *Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military?* > > > ?How many intelligence agencies do we have? Way too many, because they compete with each other, withholding information, just like the military ones do. How many agencies get involved with a disaster, like FEMA? Several, and yes, they do compete. Proliferation of agencies (when was the last time you heard of one being merged or just closed?) is a very poor thing, it seems to me. Another variety of pork. bill w? > > >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Sun Jun 24 00:04:48 2018 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 17:04:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Max More, Seth Blaustein, Tim Urban and Natasha @ The Assemblage NY City! "Humanity Unbound. Message-ID: <008901d40b4e$f7c4c710$e74e5530$@natasha.cc> Greetings! You are invited to attend the July 19 "Humanity Unbound" event at The Assemblage: * Date: July 19, 7-10 PM * Location The Assemblage, 114 East 25th Street, NY, NY 10010 * Tickets: https://events.theassemblage.com/humanityunbound * If you are members of Alcor, please email me for the discount code. Thank you. See you there! Natasha Dr. Natasha Vita-More Professor, Graduate and Undergraduate Departments, UAT Executive Director, Humanity+, Inc. Author and Co-Editor: The Transhumanist Reader Lead Science Researcher: Memory Project -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1134 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 978 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 884 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.png Type: image/png Size: 29366 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Sun Jun 24 07:15:05 2018 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 08:15:05 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5B2F44F9.8060908@zaiboc.net> Seeing as there are no space-aliens, presumably this Space Force would be intended to defend the 'free world' from the Chinese, so trumplogically, the Chinese would pay for it. The only thing we can be sure of, though, is that it wouldn't be intended to defend the earth from asteroid strikes. Ben Zaiboc From sen.otaku at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 03:51:07 2018 From: sen.otaku at gmail.com (SR Ballard) Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 22:51:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space?] In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> The US really does have a proliferation of agencies which compete. For example: CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. I think it would be cheaper to combine them somehow, so they could pool resources and intelligence. It doesn?t seem to me that this type of redundancy is useful. As far as agencies being merged... well, Trump is floating a merger of Department of Education and Department of Labor, into, I?m not sure, maybe a Department of Education, Training, & Employment. Not sure if I agree with the move because his motives seem suspect, but we?ll see how it plays out. But another thing to consider is maybe we actually need more agencies/ departments. Which sounds insane, I know, but hear me out. Look at all the agencies and departments involved with the US Immigration system. They are absolutely inefficient and make the whole system insufferably complicated, because ?one hand doesn?t know that the other hand is doing?. And that makes accountability hard, because they can all just point fingers at each other. The entire US government is way too bloated and redundant in all the wrong ways. It?s definitely ?too big? in the sense that it could do more with less. Maybe we need to go through with the pain and expense of reorganizing and streamlining the whole thing. > On Jun 23, 2018, at 11:11, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > >> On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 11:05 AM, John Clark wrote: >>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 6:33 PM, wrote: >>> >>> >>> ?> ? Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? >> > ?How many intelligence agencies do we have? Way too many, because they compete with each other, withholding information, just like the military ones do. How many agencies get involved with a disaster, like FEMA? Several, and yes, they do compete. > > Proliferation of agencies (when was the last time you heard of one being merged or just closed?) is a very poor thing, it seems to me. Another variety of pork. > > bill w? >> >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 04:30:58 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 21:30:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg Message-ID: I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does interesting stuff, I noticed this today https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a large number of civilizations." If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. Which is a lot better than being doomed. Best wishes, Keith PS, the actual paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf From avant at sollegro.com Mon Jun 25 04:13:47 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 21:13:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Koko dead at 46 Message-ID: Koko the lowland gorilla, famous for being the first non-human creature to master a human language (American Sign Language) died unexpectedly last Tuesday June 18, 2018 in her sleep. Among her accomplishments are the acquisition of a 1000 word sign language vocabulary, the use of mirrors to groom herself, the teaching of sign language to other apes, and the use of sign language to express sophisticated counter-factual ideas such the desire to have children, lies, and even "jokes". http://time.com/5318710/koko-gorilla-life/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJf1mB5PjQ Having found out about this just after reading Anders and Drexler's new article about the Fermi Paradox, I experienced an intense feeling of existential loneliness and grief difficult to describe and quite unexpected given that she was a gorilla and moreover one I had never met. Stuart LaForge From giulio at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 05:34:32 2018 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 07:34:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Awesome, as everything that comes from Anders. Why did he leave the list? Does anyone know? On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 6:30 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > large number of civilizations." > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > > Best wishes, > > Keith > > PS, the actual paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 06:38:42 2018 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 23:38:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Jun 24, 2018, at 10:34 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > > Awesome, as everything that comes from Anders. Why did he leave the > list? Does anyone know? Too much partisan politics, IIRC. And he publicly stated this, IIRC. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst From pharos at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 10:55:25 2018 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 11:55:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 25 June 2018 at 05:30, Keith Henson wrote: > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > large number of civilizations." > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > I think the big mistake is to assume that advanced technological civilisations will be pretty similar to us, but maybe with faster rockets and a nicer iPhone. :) Humans have only had 'advanced' tech for about a hundred years and look at the difference! The next 100 years will see the internet, AI, robot intelligences, nanotech, life extension, disease cured, birth rate dropping drastically, VR and total dependence on social systems and connectivity, etc. etc..... Now think about a few thousand years, still a blink of an eye in universe time. We have no conception of what the motivations and culture will be for these really advanced civilisations. Spamming and polluting the galaxy is obviously not one of their objectives. :) BillK From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 25 15:42:56 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 08:42:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> My theory on what this is really about: When I was working for one of the aerospace majors, I was a subsystem tech lead. When a subsystem was ready and all the tests were done and passed, we would have a meeting called a buy-off, where we (the tech leads) would present the data to the customer and have him go over the paperwork, see that you had done all the tests and gotten all the numbers you need, inside the tolerance window. My area was tech performance only (so we didn't talk money there, only performance of the subsystem (after I was finished, the program manager would take over (I could leave if I wished (I wished.)) In my buy-off there were usually about 6 yo 8 guys: my program manager, the company VP, I could bring in one of my tech team if I needed him (I didn't) and usually about 3 to 5 customer types: my tech lead counterpart, my program manager's counterpart, sometimes a scribe if necessary, a quality assurance guy, sometimes the customer's big boss would show, but that was it. We would have a small meeting, my part would take about hour (or less if the subsystem was really a shining star in test) then the papers would be signed, hands would be shook and see ya again in 10 to 20 months, no worries. In 2009 everything changed. I heard we were to meet in this other 100 seat conference room, so just put the data in PowerPoint and don't worry about paper copies of everything (?) just the PowerPoint. Before we would do everything on a tabletop on paper, but now we were to project it (?) and talk (?) to the customer. I get down there and there are about 70 people in the room. Huh? Who are all these people? Why do we need 70 people in the room to do a routine buy-off? But my job isn't to ask questions, it's to answer them. So I did. That subsystem was our best ever, the numbers would make any father proud. So the buy-off was great fun, and they bought the system, but I still didn't know who all those people were and why they were. This sudden change created an unexpected heartburn for several of the other tech leads: they weren't accustomed to public speaking. I didn't have any problem with it, but some of the others did. They would get tongue-tied, even the smartest ones. Heh. I noticed something about the crowd later at the after-event dinner: they seemed young (many in their 20s and 30s) and the way they dressed and carried themselves. After watching all this, it occurred to me that the crowd I had addressed were probably military ossifers. I have been around that type enough to notice they treat each other with respect, they treat everyone they meet with a certain formality and decorum, they carry themselves a certain way. Tattoos and piercings will not be seen. Edgy tee-shirts, even at a picnic, will not be seen there. Go to any event where military ossifers hang out, you will immediately see what I am talking about. My conclusion: about in 2009, the military decided it wanted to have its own people doing a lot of what the aerospace biggies had been doing for decades. And why not have the military do it? Why not have the military people building all its own stuff? Why do we need aerospace companies doing that? spike From atymes at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 15:56:02 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 08:56:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: The Air Force doesn't build its own planes, missiles, or any of that. I fail to see what a Space Force would actually build that the Air Force does not now build. (Small test satellites, maybe. Large satellites or spacecraft, or launch vehicles, no.) On Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 8:45 AM wrote: > > My theory on what this is really about: > > When I was working for one of the aerospace majors, I was a subsystem tech > lead. When a subsystem was ready and all the tests were done and passed, > we would have a meeting called a buy-off, where we (the tech leads) would > present the data to the customer and have him go over the paperwork, see > that you had done all the tests and gotten all the numbers you need, inside > the tolerance window. My area was tech performance only (so we didn't talk > money there, only performance of the subsystem (after I was finished, the > program manager would take over (I could leave if I wished (I wished.)) > > In my buy-off there were usually about 6 yo 8 guys: my program manager, > the company VP, I could bring in one of my tech team if I needed him (I > didn't) and usually about 3 to 5 customer types: my tech lead counterpart, > my program manager's counterpart, sometimes a scribe if necessary, a > quality assurance guy, sometimes the customer's big boss would show, but > that was it. We would have a small meeting, my part would take about hour > (or less if the subsystem was really a shining star in test) then the > papers would be signed, hands would be shook and see ya again in 10 to 20 > months, no worries. > > In 2009 everything changed. I heard we were to meet in this other 100 > seat conference room, so just put the data in PowerPoint and don't worry > about paper copies of everything (?) just the PowerPoint. Before we would > do everything on a tabletop on paper, but now we were to project it (?) and > talk (?) to the customer. > > I get down there and there are about 70 people in the room. Huh? Who are > all these people? Why do we need 70 people in the room to do a routine > buy-off? > > But my job isn't to ask questions, it's to answer them. So I did. That > subsystem was our best ever, the numbers would make any father proud. So > the buy-off was great fun, and they bought the system, but I still didn't > know who all those people were and why they were. > > This sudden change created an unexpected heartburn for several of the > other tech leads: they weren't accustomed to public speaking. I didn't > have any problem with it, but some of the others did. They would get > tongue-tied, even the smartest ones. Heh. > > I noticed something about the crowd later at the after-event dinner: they > seemed young (many in their 20s and 30s) and the way they dressed and > carried themselves. After watching all this, it occurred to me that the > crowd I had addressed were probably military ossifers. I have been around > that type enough to notice they treat each other with respect, they treat > everyone they meet with a certain formality and decorum, they carry > themselves a certain way. Tattoos and piercings will not be seen. Edgy > tee-shirts, even at a picnic, will not be seen there. Go to any event > where military ossifers hang out, you will immediately see what I am > talking about. > > My conclusion: about in 2009, the military decided it wanted to have its > own people doing a lot of what the aerospace biggies had been doing for > decades. And why not have the military do it? Why not have the military > people building all its own stuff? Why do we need aerospace companies > doing that? > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 25 16:15:48 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 09:15:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 8:56 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? >?The Air Force doesn't build its own planes, missiles, or any of that. I fail to see what a Space Force would actually build that the Air Force does not now build. (Small test satellites, maybe. Large satellites or spacecraft, or launch vehicles, no.) Adrian Why not? I know they don?t now, but why not? spike >>?My conclusion: about in 2009, the military decided it wanted to have its own people doing a lot of what the aerospace biggies had been doing for decades. And why not have the military do it? Why not have the military people building all its own stuff? Why do we need aerospace companies doing that? spike _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 16:17:17 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:17:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space?] In-Reply-To: <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 11:54 PM SR Ballard wrote: > The US really does have a proliferation of agencies which compete. For > example: CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. I think it would be cheaper to combine them > somehow, so they could pool resources and intelligence. It doesn?t seem to > me that this type of redundancy is useful. > Yeah, I get the distinction between domestic and international surveillance, but there are too many spy agencies. As far as agencies being merged... well, Trump is floating a merger of > Department of Education and Department of Labor, into, I?m not sure, maybe > a Department of Education, Training, & Employment. Not sure if I agree with > the move because his motives seem suspect, but we?ll see how it plays out. > Education and Labor are different enough that I don't think combining them makes sense. But another thing to consider is maybe we actually need more agencies/ > departments. Which sounds insane, I know, but hear me out. Look at all the > agencies and departments involved with the US Immigration system. They are > absolutely inefficient and make the whole system insufferably complicated, > because ?one hand doesn?t know that the other hand is doing?. And that > makes accountability hard, because they can all just point fingers at each > other. > That implies that we need fewer agencies, not more. The entire US government is way too bloated and redundant in all the wrong > ways. It?s definitely ?too big? in the sense that it could do more with > less. Maybe we need to go through with the pain and expense of reorganizing > and streamlining the whole thing. > It's also "too big" in the sense of trying to do too much and spending more than we have. But with our current political system I don't see any way for that trend to reverse. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 17:45:42 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:45:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Why not? I know they don?t now, but why not? spike What if the gov. built its own stuff? Not having been in business of any kind (academia) I have no idea whether the quality would be better, worse, or no different if there weren't any profit motive to building those things. I suspect worse, but I dunno. bill w On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 11:15 AM, wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat *On Behalf > Of *Adrian Tymes > *Sent:* Monday, June 25, 2018 8:56 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? > > > > >?The Air Force doesn't build its own planes, missiles, or any of that. I > fail to see what a Space Force would actually build that the Air Force does > not now build. (Small test satellites, maybe. Large satellites or > spacecraft, or launch vehicles, no.) Adrian > > > > > > > > Why not? I know they don?t now, but why not? > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >>?My conclusion: about in 2009, the military decided it wanted to have > its own people doing a lot of what the aerospace biggies had been doing for > decades. And why not have the military do it? Why not have the military > people building all its own stuff? Why do we need aerospace companies > doing that? > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 17:46:53 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:46:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space?] In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> Message-ID: But with our current political system I don't see any way for that trend to reverse. -Dave It's the same old same old - kick the bastards out. Elect new bastards. bill w On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Dave Sill wrote: > > > On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 11:54 PM SR Ballard wrote: > >> The US really does have a proliferation of agencies which compete. For >> example: CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. I think it would be cheaper to combine them >> somehow, so they could pool resources and intelligence. It doesn?t seem to >> me that this type of redundancy is useful. >> > > Yeah, I get the distinction between domestic and international > surveillance, but there are too many spy agencies. > > As far as agencies being merged... well, Trump is floating a merger of >> Department of Education and Department of Labor, into, I?m not sure, maybe >> a Department of Education, Training, & Employment. Not sure if I agree with >> the move because his motives seem suspect, but we?ll see how it plays out. >> > > Education and Labor are different enough that I don't think combining them > makes sense. > > But another thing to consider is maybe we actually need more agencies/ >> departments. Which sounds insane, I know, but hear me out. Look at all the >> agencies and departments involved with the US Immigration system. They are >> absolutely inefficient and make the whole system insufferably complicated, >> because ?one hand doesn?t know that the other hand is doing?. And that >> makes accountability hard, because they can all just point fingers at each >> other. >> > > That implies that we need fewer agencies, not more. > > The entire US government is way too bloated and redundant in all the wrong >> ways. It?s definitely ?too big? in the sense that it could do more with >> less. Maybe we need to go through with the pain and expense of reorganizing >> and streamlining the whole thing. >> > > It's also "too big" in the sense of trying to do too much and spending > more than we have. But with our current political system I don't see any > way for that trend to reverse. > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 18:34:45 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 14:34:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space?] In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:57 PM William Flynn Wallace wrote: > It's the same old same old - kick the bastards out. Elect new bastards. > bill w > Except we don't even kick the bastards out. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 18:49:12 2018 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 14:49:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:49 PM William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > What if the gov. built its own stuff? Not having been in business of any > kind (academia) I have no idea whether the quality would be better, worse, > or no different if there weren't any profit motive to building those > things. I suspect worse, but I dunno. > We know from NASA experience that the gov't *can* build its own stuff (yeah, they subbed most of it out). I'm skeptical that the gov't can be competitive with commercial makers, if any exist. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From DOBBradshaw at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 18:35:47 2018 From: DOBBradshaw at gmail.com (Dan Brad) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 19:35:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 177, Issue 7 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I would just like to chime in on the question; Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? That's also assuming we don't have some sort of presence out there already. Somebody does. Its just that even after 18 years of research, im not quite sure who it is. It would be smart to conquer space, it just requires the application of a living philosophy. The gift of space travel requires responsibility and humility - a military presence is not the correct approach. -V Virus-free. www.avg.com <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> On 25 June 2018 at 11:56, wrote: > Send extropy-chat mailing list submissions to > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of extropy-chat digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? > (William Flynn Wallace) > 2. Max More, Seth Blaustein, Tim Urban and Natasha @ The > Assemblage NY City! "Humanity Unbound. (Natasha Vita-More) > 3. Re: Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? (Ben Zaiboc) > 4. Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military > Presence in Space?] (SR Ballard) > 5. Anders Sandberg (Keith Henson) > 6. Koko dead at 46 (Stuart LaForge) > 7. Re: Anders Sandberg (Giulio Prisco) > 8. Re: Anders Sandberg (Dan TheBookMan) > 9. Re: Anders Sandberg (BillK) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 11:11:47 -0500 > From: William Flynn Wallace > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? > Message-ID: > gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 11:05 AM, John Clark wrote: > > > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 6:33 PM, wrote: > > > > > > > >> > >> ?> ? > >> *Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military?* > > > > > > > ?How many intelligence agencies do we have? Way too many, because they > compete with each other, withholding information, just like the military > ones do. How many agencies get involved with a disaster, like FEMA? > Several, and yes, they do compete. > > Proliferation of agencies (when was the last time you heard of one being > merged or just closed?) is a very poor thing, it seems to me. Another > variety of pork. > > bill w? > > > > > > > >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: attachments/20180623/5c3c3da3/attachment-0001.html> > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 17:04:48 -0700 > From: "Natasha Vita-More" > To: "'ExI chat list'" , > > Subject: [ExI] Max More, Seth Blaustein, Tim Urban and Natasha @ The > Assemblage NY City! "Humanity Unbound. > Message-ID: <008901d40b4e$f7c4c710$e74e5530$@natasha.cc> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Greetings! > > > > You are invited to attend the July 19 "Humanity Unbound" event at The > Assemblage: > > > > * Date: July 19, 7-10 PM > * Location The Assemblage, 114 East 25th Street, NY, NY 10010 > * Tickets: https://events.theassemblage.com/humanityunbound > > * If you are members of Alcor, please email me for the discount code. > Thank you. > > > > See you there! > > Natasha > > > > > > Dr. Natasha Vita-More > > Professor, Graduate and Undergraduate Departments, > UAT > > Executive Director, Humanity+, Inc. > > Author and Co-Editor: > Philoso > phy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519771534&sr=8-1& > keywords=the+tran > shumanist+reader> The Transhumanist Reader > > Lead Science Researcher: > Memory Project > > > > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: attachments/20180623/c99078ab/attachment-0001.html> > -------------- next part -------------- > A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: image001.jpg > Type: image/jpeg > Size: 1134 bytes > Desc: not available > URL: attachments/20180623/c99078ab/attachment-0003.jpg> > -------------- next part -------------- > A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: image002.jpg > Type: image/jpeg > Size: 978 bytes > Desc: not available > URL: attachments/20180623/c99078ab/attachment-0004.jpg> > -------------- next part -------------- > A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: image003.jpg > Type: image/jpeg > Size: 884 bytes > Desc: not available > URL: attachments/20180623/c99078ab/attachment-0005.jpg> > -------------- next part -------------- > A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: image004.png > Type: image/png > Size: 29366 bytes > Desc: not available > URL: attachments/20180623/c99078ab/attachment-0001.png> > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 08:15:05 +0100 > From: Ben Zaiboc > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? > Message-ID: <5B2F44F9.8060908 at zaiboc.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Seeing as there are no space-aliens, presumably this Space Force would > be intended to defend the 'free > world' from the Chinese, so trumplogically, the > Chinese would pay for it. > > The only thing we can be sure of, though, is that it wouldn't be > intended to defend the earth from asteroid strikes. > > > Ben Zaiboc > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 22:51:07 -0500 > From: SR Ballard > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military > Presence in Space?] > Message-ID: <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C at gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > The US really does have a proliferation of agencies which compete. For > example: CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. I think it would be cheaper to combine them > somehow, so they could pool resources and intelligence. It doesn?t seem to > me that this type of redundancy is useful. > > As far as agencies being merged... well, Trump is floating a merger of > Department of Education and Department of Labor, into, I?m not sure, maybe > a Department of Education, Training, & Employment. Not sure if I agree with > the move because his motives seem suspect, but we?ll see how it plays out. > > But another thing to consider is maybe we actually need more agencies/ > departments. Which sounds insane, I know, but hear me out. Look at all the > agencies and departments involved with the US Immigration system. They are > absolutely inefficient and make the whole system insufferably complicated, > because ?one hand doesn?t know that the other hand is doing?. And that > makes accountability hard, because they can all just point fingers at each > other. > > The entire US government is way too bloated and redundant in all the wrong > ways. It?s definitely ?too big? in the sense that it could do more with > less. Maybe we need to go through with the pain and expense of reorganizing > and streamlining the whole thing. > > > On Jun 23, 2018, at 11:11, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > > > > > > >> On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 11:05 AM, John Clark > wrote: > >>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 6:33 PM, wrote: > >>> > >>> > >>> ?> ? Does the United States need a Space Force branch of the military? > >> > > ?How many intelligence agencies do we have? Way too many, because they > compete with each other, withholding information, just like the military > ones do. How many agencies get involved with a disaster, like FEMA? > Several, and yes, they do compete. > > > > Proliferation of agencies (when was the last time you heard of one being > merged or just closed?) is a very poor thing, it seems to me. Another > variety of pork. > > > > bill w? > >> > >>> > >> > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> extropy-chat mailing list > >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: attachments/20180624/5553accb/attachment-0001.html> > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 5 > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 21:30:58 -0700 > From: Keith Henson > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg > Message-ID: > mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > large number of civilizations." > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > > Best wishes, > > Keith > > PS, the actual paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 6 > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 21:13:47 -0700 > From: "Stuart LaForge" > To: "Exi Chat" > Subject: [ExI] Koko dead at 46 > Message-ID: > inmotionhosting.com> > > Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8 > > Koko the lowland gorilla, famous for being the first non-human creature to > master a human language (American Sign Language) died unexpectedly last > Tuesday June 18, 2018 in her sleep. Among her accomplishments are the > acquisition of a 1000 word sign language vocabulary, the use of mirrors to > groom herself, the teaching of sign language to other apes, and the use of > sign language to express sophisticated counter-factual ideas such the > desire to have children, lies, and even "jokes". > > http://time.com/5318710/koko-gorilla-life/ > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJf1mB5PjQ > > > Having found out about this just after reading Anders and Drexler's new > article about the Fermi Paradox, I experienced an intense feeling of > existential loneliness and grief difficult to describe and quite > unexpected given that she was a gorilla and moreover one I had never met. > > Stuart LaForge > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 7 > Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 07:34:32 +0200 > From: Giulio Prisco > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Anders Sandberg > Message-ID: > gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > Awesome, as everything that comes from Anders. Why did he leave the > list? Does anyone know? > > On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 6:30 AM, Keith Henson > wrote: > > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > > large number of civilizations." > > > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > > > > Best wishes, > > > > Keith > > > > PS, the actual paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 8 > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 23:38:42 -0700 > From: Dan TheBookMan > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Anders Sandberg > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > On Jun 24, 2018, at 10:34 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > > > > Awesome, as everything that comes from Anders. Why did he leave the > > list? Does anyone know? > > Too much partisan politics, IIRC. And he publicly stated this, IIRC. > > Regards, > > Dan > Sample my Kindle books at: > http://author.to/DanUst > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 9 > Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 11:55:25 +0100 > From: BillK > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Anders Sandberg > Message-ID: > mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > On 25 June 2018 at 05:30, Keith Henson wrote: > > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > > large number of civilizations." > > > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > > > > > I think the big mistake is to assume that advanced technological > civilisations will be pretty similar to us, but maybe with faster > rockets and a nicer iPhone. :) > Humans have only had 'advanced' tech for about a hundred years and > look at the difference! The next 100 years will see the internet, AI, > robot intelligences, nanotech, life extension, disease cured, birth > rate dropping drastically, VR and total dependence on social systems > and connectivity, etc. etc..... > > Now think about a few thousand years, still a blink of an eye in universe > time. > We have no conception of what the motivations and culture will be for > these really advanced civilisations. Spamming and polluting the galaxy > is obviously not one of their objectives. :) > > BillK > > > > ------------------------------ > > Subject: Digest Footer > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > ------------------------------ > > End of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 177, Issue 7 > ******************************************** > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Mon Jun 25 19:03:55 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:03:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <003b01d40cb7$44479f40$ccd6ddc0$@rainier66.com> From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Dave Sill Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 11:49 AM To: Extropy chat Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:49 PM William Flynn Wallace > wrote: What if the gov. built its own stuff? Not having been in business of any kind (academia) I have no idea whether the quality would be better, worse, or no different if there weren't any profit motive to building those things. I suspect worse, but I dunno. >?We know from NASA experience that the gov't *can* build its own stuff (yeah, they subbed most of it out). I'm skeptical that the gov't can be competitive with commercial makers, if any exist. -Dave Sure but consider a quiet transition. Picture in your mind warfare please. You might have imagined fighter planes swooping around, guys in trenches with machine guns, nukes and submarines and carriers and tanks and grenade launchers and things. But modern warfare is none of that. Real modern warfare all takes place inside the computer. Over time, a warfighting system is becoming more and more software based. The effectiveness of a system depends more and more on secrecy, how the system works and even its existence. Think it over: you can?t even write a specification for it. We know how to write specs for a carrier or a fighter plane or any of the stuff we don?t need anymore. How do you write a specification for a system which will get into an adversary?s computer and cause havoc? And if you did, how can you put something like that out for competitive bids? Answer: ya can?t. So, get military ossifers to do the work, all of it, because they can be controlled. Prediction: most military equipment once built by aerospace biggies will transition to where it is being done by military people. Much of it already has. What branch of service will control the most advanced stuff? The navy has been the traditional answer, but why not the Space Force? It sidesteps the existing deeply-entrenched power structure, the usual headaches in admirals protecting their turf, etc. Who would know if most of what it was doing had nothing to do with earth orbit? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Jun 25 19:04:54 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 14:04:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Merging of agencies [ was Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space?] In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <6E2347F2-6A6E-46A4-90C5-3802E6F1096C@gmail.com> Message-ID: This may be a new topic: from my very tiny understanding of rules in the U S Senate and House, if you are new, you had better kowtow to the leaders and vote their way or any bills you might have hope of getting into law will never make it out of committee. In the Senate, there are some rules now that make it impossible for anything to pass unless it's has 60% support. Not 51% - 60%. Now I think that's downright unamerican. Unconstitutional, isn't it? The Senate is worse than the house because of the power of seniority. Some Southern senators were famous for sitting of bills that a big majority wanted to vote on but the senator (South Carolina was it? Jesse Helm?) had the power to stop anything he wanted to. One person outvoting, in effect, the entire Senate. There's a lot more wrong with the way Congress works, but that's a start. Please forgive my ignorance if I have made stupid errors. bill w On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:34 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 1:57 PM William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > >> It's the same old same old - kick the bastards out. Elect new bastards. >> bill w >> > > Except we don't even kick the bastards out. > > -Dave > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Mon Jun 25 19:28:21 2018 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 20:28:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi Paradox (was: Anders Sandberg) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5B314255.8060601@zaiboc.net> Keith Henson wrote: >If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, that has dire implications for humanity's future. Not necessarily. This doesn't have to imply a 'big filter', it could just be a consequence of physics. We're probably all familiar with the argument that the speed of light imposes big penalties on any large-scale expansion of advanced civilisations. Maybe they all inevitably expand 'downwards', into the nanoscale and further, and end up being vast and enormously long-lived societies (subjectively) that have no discernible footprint on the cosmos. We've still barely begun to comprehend the implications of Feynman's famous statement that "There's plenty of room at the bottom". Maybe the answer to the question 'Where are they?' is 'everywhere', but they are still forever unreachable, and even undetectable. Ben Zaiboc From robot at ultimax.com Mon Jun 25 22:08:18 2018 From: robot at ultimax.com (Robert G Kennedy III, PE) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:08:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Koko dead at 46 Message-ID: Well, I (we) did meet one, albeit highland not lowland. I know I'll never forget the encounter as long as I live. Still wearing the same shoes, in fact. These shoes have seen a lot. www.ultimax.com/pic/gorillatrackingteam.png . I'm behind the camera, that's my wife in front of it. There is a good reason our companions (excellent guides, too) are carrying all that heat--we were 30 or so klicks from the Congo border. Did you know that gorillas purr, like huge housecats? With a bit of horse nickering blended in. Practically infrasonic, but clearly audible from meters away. No doubt adaptive, to keep the kids informed where mama is in dense mountain jungle with limited visibility. www.ultimax.com/pic/gorillamissionsuccess.png She is about a meter away from me, having a nosh (second breakfast), completely unperturbed. OTOH, the big fella (I haven't put that pic up yet) barked like a *very* big dog, and charged a couple meters a few times, just to make a point. I don't get to write about SETI as often as I would like (only one published item in JBIS 2 years ago), but as for the skeptics about Koko's communication ability... some quoted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla) ...I think it is wise to be humble about what we believe cannot be, based on what we think we know. You'd think after Copernicus, or Clarke's Second Law, we'd have more humility already about nonhuman intelligence. We're so parochial. Thanks for the heads-up, Stuart, and sorry for y|our loss. On Sun, 24 Jun 2018 21:13:47 -0700, "Stuart LaForge" , wrote: > Having found out about this just after reading Anders and Drexler's new > article about the Fermi Paradox, I experienced an intense feeling of > existential loneliness and grief difficult to describe and quite > unexpected given that she was a gorilla and moreover one I had never > met. RGK3 -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com 1994 AAAS/ASME Congressional Fellow U.S. House Subcommittee on Space From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 04:01:24 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 21:01:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 9:15 AM, wrote: > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of > Adrian Tymes > Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 8:56 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? >>?The Air Force doesn't build its own planes, missiles, or any of that. I >> fail to see what a Space Force would actually build that the Air Force does >> not now build. (Small test satellites, maybe. Large satellites or >> spacecraft, or launch vehicles, no.) Adrian > > Why not? I know they don?t now, but why not? In short, because governments on average inherently suck at building useful stuff, relative to private industry. Why does one build anything? Either because the result is expected to be useful in some way, or because the act of building is itself expected to be useful. The former is the traditional type most people first think of. You build a car because you expect to drive it. You build a statue because you expect to show it off. You build an orbital habitat because you expect people (perhaps including yourself) to live there. The latter covers craftsman-type "toy" projects, such as most model rocketry, where the objective is to learn to build something. It also covers jobs programs, where even if what you're building proves useless, causing the employment of a bunch of people is politically useful. Unfortunately, most large government programs are hijacked for short-term political capital by the latter justification, which immunizes them from being kept useful. But in corporations, it is rare (though not entirely unheard of, especially in large corporations) for there to be that much political capital, thus their projects are kept focused on being actually useful. The hype around space projects means there is a lot more political capital to be gained from them. This, combined with the immaturity of space technology (relative to most other industrial sectors, such as automobiles or planes), mean that government-directed space programs are about keeping politicians in office, far more than about building stuff people will actually use. Consider GPS. Initially a military asset, and still maintained as one, but the vast majority of its utility has come from commercial applications just riding along on the signals. We could continue to fight wars without too much degradation - for a short while - if we lost GPS, but consider the impact to our economy in that case - and specifically to the industrial logistics networks that route supplies so ammunition, food, guns, vehicles, and other such things can be manufactured in quantity for the military. Or consider the Space Shuttle. At first it was a decently reusable space truck, but then stakeholders from many branches of the government tried to insert their own political demands, resulting in something that was more rebuldable than reusable, and eventually retired after the economic consequences became unavoidable. A private company would have no such stakeholders, and be focused on making a truly reusable space truck - so (assuming sufficient competence and resources) it would do just that. Notice the direction many of our large private space programs are headed, now that they have been able to get started (mainly by there being enough non-government space customers that these private companies no longer exist solely at the whim of government funding agencies). Also consider why communism fell. For all their attempts at five year plans and the like, they were simply too vulnerable to hijacking projects for short term political gain as opposed to building what they would actually need in five years. Despite their vast land and natural wealth, they could not build their industry as fast as we could, leaving Reagan an opening to tip them over the edge of sustainability by diverting enough of their funds into an arms race (which we could afford much better than they could). More to the point, consider the Space Launch System - much-delayed, yet to launch anything, and over budget (because the point is to spend money on jobs) - versus SpaceX's development - which has already launched a bunch of stuff into space, and is now working on reusability. Many in the Air Force know this, and want there to be stuff that will actually help them with the missions they will actually have in 10 or 20 years. They also see what doesn't happen with highly politically visible projects such as their next-generation fighter. Thus why they leave building stuff to the commercial sector when they can (which is, when there is a significant non-governmental use for the stuff too). From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 26 04:44:44 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 21:44:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <008001d40d08$67dd1ab0$37975010$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Monday, June 25, 2018 9:01 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 9:15 AM, wrote: > From: extropy-chat On Behalf > Of Adrian Tymes >>>... (Small test satellites, maybe. Large satellites or spacecraft, or launch vehicles, no.) Adrian > >>... Why not? I know they don?t now, but why not? >...In short, because governments on average inherently suck at building useful stuff, relative to private industry...Adrian _______________________________________________ Ja to all, Adrian, and it is a well-thought essay. I am going in a different direction. We have the notion of building defensive systems such as carriers and fighter planes and such, and of course those will still need traditional aerospace biggies. But now consider information warfare, which we have been in for years now. It has become more apparent recently, as we have come to suspect that American adversaries managed to influence US primaries to get both major parties to nominate their very worst candidate. This is modern warfare. America lost the first major battle. It isn't even clear who the adversaries are, but it is clear enough that at least some of them are within our borders. Consider that in the future, some of the most devastating weapons will be entirely software, systems that are developed by a small team of 20 to 50 perhaps, no factory necessary, but absolute secrecy is critical. If the effectiveness of a system depends completely on absolute secrecy, then I can imagine the following characteristics: the team will need to stay small, it will likely need to be geographically isolated perhaps as much as Los Alamos was, no bids can be issued, no subcontracts, very few people briefed even in government, resulting in a system which will cause confusion and uncertainty that any weapon system was ever used. There will be no immediately-obvious destruction of property, no direct injuries or deaths, no projectiles, no starving refugees, just a general feeling something went really wrong, a trail of chaos, a culture-war with no apparent underlying cause (as we had in the culture war of the 1960s where we at least had a questionable war to argue over (what do we have now that is analogous to that? (Do think carefully before answering (no election outcome can be legitimately considered analogous to a war.)))) We are seeing warfare transition dramatically, but there is an important point to my scenario: if a major offensive military subsystem like this is developed, it has all the characteristics which will require for it to be created by the military. They can take a select group of highly-focused people, remove them to an isolated place for security reasons, take care of their mundane needs, control access, do all the stuff necessary to develop a system completely dependent on secrecy to be effective. Einstein once commented "I don't know what weapons will be used in World War 3, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." I disagree. I view the cold war between capitalism and communism as being World War 3, which pretty much just dwindled to nothing in the 1980s, and we are living in World War 4 now. spike From atymes at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 05:28:20 2018 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2018 22:28:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <008001d40d08$67dd1ab0$37975010$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> <008001d40d08$67dd1ab0$37975010$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 9:44 PM, wrote: > There will be no immediately-obvious destruction of property, no direct injuries or deaths, no projectiles, no starving refugees, just a general feeling something went really wrong, a trail of chaos, a culture-war with no apparent underlying cause (as we had in the culture war of the 1960s where we at least had a questionable war to argue over (what do we have now that is analogous to that? (Do think carefully before answering (no election outcome can be legitimately considered analogous to a war.)))) Can't it? War is politics by other means. If Russia wanted to install its puppets ruling over America - well, the result is (hopefully) short term (unless there's a real chance of Trump winning the 2020 election at this rate), but it is still achieved. And was this not information warfare against the American public? From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 15:03:11 2018 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 17:03:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness Message-ID: Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness ... Perhaps life is special and perhaps we are still far from understanding life, let alone building it. The physics of biology could be much more complex than particle physics or cosmology, and a flower much more complex than a black hole. https://turingchurch.net/things-i-have-sort-of-changed-my-mind-on-2-life-and-consciousness-b0b0419821a2 From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 26 15:15:39 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 08:15:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2018 8:03 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness ... Perhaps life is special and perhaps we are still far from understanding life, let alone building it. The physics of biology could be much more complex than particle physics or cosmology, and a flower much more complex than a black hole. https://turingchurch.net/things-i-have-sort-of-changed-my-mind-on-2-life-and -consciousness-b0b0419821a2 _______________________________________________ There is a good free course in Khan Academy on cell biology. Studying just that top-level course gives one a feeling that even a single cell is more complicated than a black hole. Perhaps life really is extremely rare, to the extent we really are the only ones on our scale. Reasoning: there really is plenty of room at the bottom. Going inward really is a lot easier than going outward. spike From giulio at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 15:44:49 2018 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 17:44:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness In-Reply-To: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> References: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Well, cells are complex and common on Earth, why shouldn't complex life be common in the universe? Perhaps the causal gaps that I mention (quantum collapse, fractal chaos etc.) conspire to make life both complex and common. That's what I like to think. On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 5:15 PM, wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of > Giulio Prisco > Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2018 8:03 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and > consciousness > > Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness > > ... Perhaps life is special and perhaps we are still far from understanding > life, let alone building it. The physics of biology could be much more > complex than particle physics or cosmology, and a flower much more complex > than a black hole. > > https://turingchurch.net/things-i-have-sort-of-changed-my-mind-on-2-life-and > -consciousness-b0b0419821a2 > _______________________________________________ > > > > > > There is a good free course in Khan Academy on cell biology. Studying just > that top-level course gives one a feeling that even a single cell is more > complicated than a black hole. Perhaps life really is extremely rare, to > the extent we really are the only ones on our scale. Reasoning: there > really is plenty of room at the bottom. Going inward really is a lot easier > than going outward. > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Tue Jun 26 16:08:53 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 09:08:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness In-Reply-To: References: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <000101d40d67$faa90340$effb09c0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco Subject: Re: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness >...Well, cells are complex and common on Earth, why shouldn't complex life be common in the universe? Perhaps the causal gaps that I mention (quantum collapse, fractal chaos etc.) conspire to make life both complex and common. That's what I like to think... Giulio Giulio, check this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05203 Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe Dan Hooper (Submitted on 13 Jun 2018) The presence of dark energy in our universe is causing space to expand at an accelerating rate. As a result, over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable, but entirely inaccessible, thus limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them. Here, we consider the likely response of a highly advanced civilization to this situation. In particular, we argue that in order to maximize its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilization would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson Spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the center of the civilization. We find that such efforts will be most effective for stars with masses in the range of M?(0.2?1)M?, and could lead to the harvesting of stars within a region extending out to several tens of Mpc in radius, potentially increasing the total amount of energy that is available to a future civilization by a factor of several thousand. We also discuss the observable signatures of a civilization elsewhere in the universe that is currently in this state of stellar harvesting. Here's the pdf: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05203.pdf I posted Dan Hooper a note. Let's see if he responds. spike On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 5:15 PM, wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat On Behalf > Of Giulio Prisco > Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2018 8:03 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life > and consciousness > > Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness > > ... Perhaps life is special and perhaps we are still far from > understanding life, let alone building it. The physics of biology > could be much more complex than particle physics or cosmology, and a > flower much more complex than a black hole. > > https://turingchurch.net/things-i-have-sort-of-changed-my-mind-on-2-li > fe-and > -consciousness-b0b0419821a2 > _______________________________________________ > > > > > > There is a good free course in Khan Academy on cell biology. Studying > just that top-level course gives one a feeling that even a single cell > is more complicated than a black hole. Perhaps life really is > extremely rare, to the extent we really are the only ones on our > scale. Reasoning: there really is plenty of room at the bottom. > Going inward really is a lot easier than going outward. > > spike > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 16:09:23 2018 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:09:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Should the US Have a Military Presence in Space? In-Reply-To: <008001d40d08$67dd1ab0$37975010$@rainier66.com> References: <004601d408e6$b0940d20$11bc2760$@rainier66.com> <001201d40c9b$30dab210$92901630$@rainier66.com> <003e01d40c9f$c795be80$56c13b80$@rainier66.com> <008001d40d08$67dd1ab0$37975010$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 12:44 AM, wrote: > But now consider information warfare, which we have been in for years > now. It has become more apparent recently, as we have come to suspect that > American adversaries managed to influence US primaries to get both major > parties to nominate their very worst candidate. This is modern warfare. > America lost the first major battle. It isn't even clear who the > adversaries are, but it is clear enough that at least some of them are > within our borders. > > Consider that in the future, some of the most devastating weapons will be > entirely software, systems that are developed by a small team of 20 to 50 > perhaps, no factory necessary, but absolute secrecy is critical. If the > effectiveness of a system depends completely on absolute secrecy, then I > can imagine the following characteristics: the team will need to stay > small, it will likely need to be geographically isolated perhaps as much as > Los Alamos was, no bids can be issued, no subcontracts, very few people > briefed even in government, resulting in a system which will cause > confusion and uncertainty that any weapon system was ever used. > > There will be no immediately-obvious destruction of property, no direct > injuries or deaths, no projectiles, no starving refugees, just a general > feeling something went really wrong, a trail of chaos, a culture-war with > no apparent underlying cause (as we had in the culture war of the 1960s > where we at least had a questionable war to argue over (what do we have now > that is analogous to that? (Do think carefully before answering (no > election outcome can be legitimately considered analogous to a war.)))) > > We are seeing warfare transition dramatically, but there is an important > point to my scenario: if a major offensive military subsystem like this is > developed, it has all the characteristics which will require for it to be > created by the military. They can take a select group of highly-focused > people, remove them to an isolated place for security reasons, take care of > their mundane needs, control access, do all the stuff necessary to develop > a system completely dependent on secrecy to be effective. > > governments entering the memewars will be at a disadvantage: showing up late where the international/global brands have been setting the stage for 50 years. ok, maybe they'll have their own sandbox for ideology ... as long as cash continue to flow, megacorps will allow governments to have their regional influences -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 17:01:24 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:01:24 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Giulio wrote: and a flower much more complex than a black hole. That's a given. Take coffee - over two thousand chemicals and we know only a very few of them. Take a tree - influenced by other trees, microbes in the soil, pollutants in the air (read National Book Award winner "Overstory" and you will never think of trees the same way again). Yes, biological nature is far more complex. It's that tiny god doing all this: DNA bill w On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 10:03 AM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness > > ... Perhaps life is special and perhaps we are still far from > understanding life, let alone building it. The physics of biology > could be much more complex than particle physics or cosmology, and a > flower much more complex than a black hole. > > https://turingchurch.net/things-i-have-sort-of-changed- > my-mind-on-2-life-and-consciousness-b0b0419821a2 > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Jun 26 22:56:04 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 17:56:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] NSA and idle curiosity Message-ID: Here is a quote from The Girl in the Spider's WEb - Lisbeth Salander; by another author, Lagercrantz, not the original STieg Larssen "He..was.. in charge of ' monitoring strategic technologies'- more cynically known as industrial espionage, that part of the NSA which give the American tech industry a helping hand in global competition." We know China and Russia do this and hand the information to their industries and military. Do we? Surely we hack into the militaries, but private business? And then give the info to our own private businesses, and if so, how do they pick which ones to get the very valuable info? Or is this like the book - fiction? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 27 18:58:59 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 13:58:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] psychologist Message-ID: I asked Spike and he didn't know if there was another psychologist on this list. I thought there was and I emailed his a time or two. But like I told Spike, my memory isn't what it used to be - it used to be bad. Anyone out there? bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Wed Jun 27 19:02:42 2018 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 15:02:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] psychologist In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <793515FA-E708-41E8-B0F3-630273A29E81@alumni.virginia.edu> Me. > On Jun 27, 2018, at 2:58 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > I asked Spike and he didn't know if there was another psychologist on this list. I thought there was and I emailed his a time or two. > > But like I told Spike, my memory isn't what it used to be - it used to be bad. > > Anyone out there? > > bill w > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Jun 27 19:46:21 2018 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:46:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] psychologist In-Reply-To: <793515FA-E708-41E8-B0F3-630273A29E81@alumni.virginia.edu> References: <793515FA-E708-41E8-B0F3-630273A29E81@alumni.virginia.edu> Message-ID: Thanks. My memory is vindicated, except that I did not remember your name. bill w On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 2:02 PM, Henry Rivera wrote: > Me. > > On Jun 27, 2018, at 2:58 PM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > I asked Spike and he didn't know if there was another psychologist on this > list. I thought there was and I emailed his a time or two. > > But like I told Spike, my memory isn't what it used to be - it used to be > bad. > > Anyone out there? > > bill w > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Jun 27 21:12:57 2018 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:12:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 177, Issue 9 Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 11:59 AM, > wrote: snip > We are seeing warfare transition dramatically, but there is an important point to my scenario: if a major offensive military subsystem like this is developed, it has all the characteristics which will require for it to be created by the military. They can take a select group of highly-focused people, remove them to an isolated place for security reasons, take care of their mundane needs, control access, do all the stuff necessary to develop a system completely dependent on secrecy to be effective. I don't find this to be plausible. You can't isolate people who are trying to work at the leading edge of technology. Not now anyway. If you are going to let a developer access files on GetHub, what's the point of isolation? Even if you are as good as the CIA was, there will always be someone like Snowden. And what would you have this isolated group do? Programs to churn out effective propaganda? Or maybe a weapon system to collapse the vacuum? > Einstein once commented "I don't know what weapons will be used in World War 3, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." I disagree. I view the cold war between capitalism and communism as being World War 3, which pretty much just dwindled to nothing in the 1980s, and we are living in World War 4 now. I don't see at the worldwide scale why, after WWII, we should have had wars. The per capita income rose most of the time over the last 60 years in both "religious" blocks. That keeps people out of "war mode." Keith > spike > > > From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Jun 27 23:11:50 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 19:11:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness In-Reply-To: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> References: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 11:15 AM, wrote: > ?> ? > > > *There is a good free course in Khan Academy on cell biology. Studying > justthat top-level course gives one a feeling that even a single cell is > morecomplicated than a black hole.* No doubt. It would take millions of numbers to describe a cell but you only need 3 for a Black Hole ?;? the only difference between one Black Hole and another is the mass, spin and electrical charge, and in the real world the charge would be very small or zero. Black Holes are the simplest macroscopic object there is. ? ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike at rainier66.com Wed Jun 27 23:19:31 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 16:19:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <013f01d40e6d$4e50a880$eaf1f980$@rainier66.com> Forwarded for Alan Brooks: From: hi there Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2018 4:18 PM To: spike at rainier66.com Subject: re: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved [Spike, this is Alan Brooks at new e-address] "It's not just 'far-leftists' who are appalled by the intentional separation of families seeking political asylum." This is the last time will be writing on this topic, for the reason stated below. Not that *far-leftists* are mistaken, yet they may be using the child-separation issue as a political weapon; meaning children are being politically-weaponized by both sides. What is irksome is that someone says: "children", and we are automatically supposed to become saddened. Pavlov rings a bell, says "children"-- and someone becomes unhappy. To clarify, not that the emotions involved are necessarily wrong, but that both sides (shall we write here Nationalists versus anti family-separationists) are using and will continue to use extreme emotional manipulation. When they do not have to. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Thu Jun 28 00:11:33 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 17:11:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness Message-ID: <8c676ed8966c0662f01ce6900c1cb1a5.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Bill W wrote: > That's a given. Take coffee - over two thousand chemicals and we know > only a very few of them. Take a tree - influenced by other trees, > microbes in the soil, pollutants in the air (read National Book Award > winner "Overstory" and you will never think of trees the same way again). > Yes, > biological nature is far more complex. > > It's that tiny god doing all this: DNA DNA is only tiny in two out of three of its spatial dimensions. It is quite large in the third dimension. DNA is like a very long and slender thread. As such, each microscopic cell nucleus in your body contains about 2 meters of DNA. You have approximately 10 trillion nucleated cells in your body, therefore all of your chromosomes in those cells unwound and spliced together end-to-end would form a gigantic but fragile circle some 20 billion kilometers in circumference. In other words, the DNA in your body alone, could encompass the orbit of Uranus yet only weigh about 60 grams. The DNA of all 7.2 billion of us humans, on the other hand, would stretch some 15 million light-years end-to-end. I can't even guess how long it would stretch if the DNA of all the organisms on earth were included in the calculation. If that doesn't sufficiently boggle your mind, add in the time dimension and realize that all that DNA has been continuously replicating, branching, and forking in an unbroken chain for billions of years. DNA might indeed be a "tiny god". Only one that becomes cosmic in scale when you look at it sideways. :-) Stuart LaForge From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Jun 28 00:53:55 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 20:53:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Now we can clearly see the emotions involved In-Reply-To: <013f01d40e6d$4e50a880$eaf1f980$@rainier66.com> References: <013f01d40e6d$4e50a880$eaf1f980$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: Alan Brooks ? wrote:? > > > > *?>?Not that *far-leftists* are mistaken, yet they may be using the > child-separation issue as a political weapon; meaning children are being > politically-weaponized by both sides. What is irksome is that someone > says:"children",and we are automatically supposed to become saddened.Pavlov > rings a bell, says "children"-- and someone becomes unhappy.* It would be difficult to complain about children being kidnapped if one is not allowed to use the word "children"; and it seems to me that sadness and anger are the emotions a civilized person should have when hearing about those, ah, small young humans being abused, especially if it is being done in their name. And speaking of Pavlovian conditioning, its been a year and a half since the election but Trump's knuckle draggers were so well conditioned that as recently as last night during one of his Nuremberg rallies Trump just had to say the word "Hillary" and the mob immediately salivated and started a thunderous "LOCK HER UP" chant. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Thu Jun 28 03:26:46 2018 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 20:26:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Star Harvesting Message-ID: <6b711d2904d974081d0f805e4aa4b8fb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Spike wrote: > https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05203 > > Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the > Accelerating Expansion of the Universe [snip] > We find that such efforts will > be most effective for stars with masses in the range of M~(0.2~1)M, and > could lead to the harvesting of stars within a region extending out to > several tens of Mpc in radius, potentially increasing the total amount of > energy that is available to a future civilization by a factor of several > thousand. Dan Hooper's idea for stellar harvesting is very interesting. But given that one is able to move stars around efficiently, having a lower cutoff of 0.2 solar masses seems like leaving energy on the table so to speak. I understand his rationale that stars of that temperature would not be able to generate the photonic thrust to make it from the outer reaches to the civilization's core in a useful time frame. But my point is that one does not have to move said runt star all the way to the core, one only has to move it to the next nearest such runt star and deliberately collide the two. A few such collisions later and one will have a nice yellow sun to truck back to ones home galaxy. Considering that red dwarfs make up something like 75% of the stars we survey, colliding them together to make hotter stars that can accelerate faster seems like a more efficient use of available energy. Of course we might want to save the red dwarfs already in our local group for the distant future since they can burn slowly for trillions of years. But the red dwarfs that would otherwise be lost to us from dark energy? I say collide them together and bring them here. Stuart LaForge From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 28 05:10:49 2018 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 22:10:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <13F75B49-6C42-45F7-9BF9-062DDE81C578@mac.com> The theory I have long considered most likely is that technological evolved species seldom survive the run up to Singularity. Why? Because they must overcome their evolved psychology and evolved limited intelligence quite rapidly in order to avoid a catastrophic failure to deal with ever accelerating change and ever more complex issues. Their likely evolved psychology, if we assume non-exceptionalism relative to our own evolved psychology, does not tend to the level of cooperation, trust, and understanding of true mutual benefit that are likely needed. Of course the other successful civs could have us in a box controlling what we do and do not perceive of their works while they wait to see if we are ?keepers? or not. > On Jun 24, 2018, at 9:30 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > I thought of Anders as the most interesting person on the Extropy > list. Unfortunately, he left some times ago. He still does > interesting stuff, I noticed this today > > https://www.rt.com/news/430736-aliens-search-fermi-paradox/ > > Eric Drexler is one of the co-authors. > > "The researchers assigned each of the equation?s parameters a range > from the smallest to the largest values they could possibly have, > based on current knowledge. This revealed that in a third of the > cases, the galaxy would be absolutely devoid of intelligent life > anywhere else but Earth. In other scenarios, however, there could be a > large number of civilizations." > > If civilizations are common and we don't see or hear from any of them, > that has dire implications for humanity's future. But if they are > really uncommon, then our future is unknown and without precedent. > Which is a lot better than being doomed. > > Best wishes, > > Keith > > PS, the actual paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 28 14:45:35 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2018 07:45:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: <13F75B49-6C42-45F7-9BF9-062DDE81C578@mac.com> References: <13F75B49-6C42-45F7-9BF9-062DDE81C578@mac.com> Message-ID: <003c01d40eee$ac7ceaa0$0576bfe0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins Subject: Re: [ExI] Anders Sandberg >...The theory I have long considered most likely is that technological evolved species seldom survive the run up to Singularity. Why? Because they must overcome their evolved psychology and evolved limited intelligence quite rapidly in order to avoid a catastrophic failure to deal with ever accelerating change and ever more complex issues. Their likely evolved psychology, if we assume non-exceptionalism relative to our own evolved psychology, does not tend to the level of cooperation, trust, and understanding of true mutual benefit that are likely needed. >...Of course the other successful civs could have us in a box controlling what we do and do not perceive of their works while they wait to see if we are ?keepers? or not... Ja certainly that is a possibility, but another idea we kicked around over two decades ago is growing on me. Suppose the silence of the cosmos can be explained by our just not being interesting enough. We haven't yet figured out how to organize matter all the way down to the atomic level, but we are far enough along to realize the possibilities down there. If we can make some kind of human-like consciousness with a milligram of material (thirty billion billion atoms) then we could have a hundred thousand human-like things for every one of us using just the mass currently used up as part of an existing human. So cool, for every current Anders Sandberg (since he is the worthy subject line of this thread) we would have a hundred thousand Anderses. What a world that would be. But wait, there's more (matter and more energy we haven't used) The total mass of humanity is about 3 to 6 E11 kg, ja? But this planet is about 6E24 kg of rocky stuff so we still have a factor of 10 trillion we haven't even started imagining converting to Anders-equivalents, and since we are on a flight of fancy, why not imagine all of us as smart as gentle, kindhearted and good as Anders is now? I don't see why not. So imagine all of this big mostly useless rock converted into six million trillion trillion Anders-equivalents, with a few spike-equivalents thrown in just to ask questions of the others and enjoy the marvelous company in this world we somehow managed to create. I could be the future equivalent to our current Down syndrome children (who can't really do as much academically as the others but seem to enjoy life better than the others.) In such a world, it is easy enough to imagine there is little interest in contacting other rocky worlds yet unable to organize its mass into a MegaYottaAnders. We are too dumb. So, they don't, or it doesn't, bother talking to us. So, the cosmos is silent. spike From spike at rainier66.com Thu Jun 28 19:25:08 2018 From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com) Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:25:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness References: <007d01d40d60$8b188b10$a149a130$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <002301d40f15$ba3bd440$2eb37cc0$@rainier66.com> -----Original Message----- From: spike at rainier66.com Subject: RE: [ExI] Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness >...Giulio, check this: >... https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05203 >...Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe >...Dan Hooper >...Here's the pdf: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05203.pdf >...I posted Dan Hooper a note. Let's see if he responds. >...spike I posted to Dan Hooper who wrote the propulsar paper. He posted back right away, within a few minutes. Seems like a nice guy. Said he had worked some on the engineering of how to analyze the notion but found he hadn't mastered all the disciplines sufficiently. That makes at least two of us, and I would say three, because Robert Bradbury was unable to work all the details as well. spike From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Jun 30 16:37:13 2018 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2018 09:37:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Rocket failure Message-ID: <2C43740A-2E5C-4E33-BFCC-F2B8C854ABCE@gmail.com> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/06/30/national/science-health/hokkaido-launch-privately-developed-rocket-fails/ I feel sorry for them because now it?s two for two in terms of failures. And their second failure is worse than their first, it seems. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books at: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Jun 30 21:24:53 2018 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2018 17:24:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Star Harvesting In-Reply-To: <6b711d2904d974081d0f805e4aa4b8fb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> References: <6b711d2904d974081d0f805e4aa4b8fb.squirrel@secure199.inmotionhosting.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 11:26 PM, Stuart LaForge wrote: ?>*?* > > > *Considering that red dwarfs make up something like 75% of the stars we > survey, colliding them together to make hotter stars that can accelerate > faster seems like a more efficient use of available energy.* > I think it would be better to break up a large star and make several small stars out of it because small stars are actually more efficient than large stars. Small stars transport the energy produced in their core to the surface largely by convection so there is constant mixing of material into and out of the core, so eventually all the hydrogen fuel in the star finds its way into the core and gets burned up. But with large stars the energy transport in mainly by radiation so there is far less mixing and most of the hydrogen never gets anywhere near to the core. When a large star comes to the end of its life it still has most of the hydrogen fuel it was born with but its useless because its not in the core where its needed. Small stars don't waste any hydrogen they'll eventually burn it all up but it might take more than a trillion years. Large stars go supernova and blast up to 90%(in the very largest stars) of the hydrogen fuel in them into space. ?John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: