astro picture for the day/thought for the day: amazing A.I. robot

ESO Vista image

I've been shocked by A.I. before, only after some exposure and testing to see that all it really is reasoning ability abstracted and computerized.  A.I. like computers in general only do things when told; when the task is finished, the A.I. just sits there waiting for the next command from an actual human. 

As with the weapons debate, yes weapons kill but it's the people who pull the trigger; the people are the problem; this will apply to A.I. as well.

Besides the more serious abuse partly addressed above, accidents of A.I. going haywire are not likely - till A.I. becomes genuine consciouse feeling entities. I've yet to see any A.I. researcher come up with a good understanding of these things; they seem nowhere close to solving awareness.

I do believe that A.I. will lead us to solving awareness; but, it will come from our failure to make A.I. conscious.  For hundreds of years  after the translations of Arab translations of Greek texts, people had hit on the idea of perpectual motion machines; the failure to do so eventually led to the science of thermodynamics; i of course think a similar thing will happen here.  Godel's theorems will be key; why do humans and life in general overcome Godel's theorems while computers generally don't?  I think I've hinted at this before somewhere in this blog - that of dynamical systems and chaos theory.  The bifercation from one structure to a more complex organised structure is like the adding of a new axiom because the previous structures axiomatic description was not strong enough to deal with everything.  And of course, chaos theory points to life's amazing ability to be spontaeneous and creative in unpredictable ways.

I still can't see the physical basis for all the theoretical evidence I've pointed out in this blog for Jacob Bronowski's ideas.  Well, o.k.  I had posted in the previous incarnation of this blog about Jacob Bronowski's ideas and A.I.  I've suggested that in order for any lifeform to get around and eat properly, it has to do some kind of mathematics or science to say whether the food it thinks is food really is.  I've seen a few times now(including the youtube of the A.I. robot above), that this is the case; that language is a kind of decodes units(or as Jacob Bronowski would call them, "infered units") from a process of generalisation, idealisation and abstraction.

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble space telescope image

A weird possible consequence of the Feynman/Drexlerian nanotech era. 

In the nanotech era, pretty much everyone will be free to run around and do everything they want.  For me, my first thought would be to visit the Egyptian Pyramids and other Egyptian sights. But a thought occured to me a few months ago.  If you have seven billion people running around and going out doing everything they want; then, the waiting line to visit just about anything(Venice, the great wall of China and so on and so forth) will be very long indeed! 

Maybe everyone will just stay in one place and make their own temple!

-----------------------------------about that nanotechnology

The Foresight Institute now holds "Foresight Conferences" every year; it used to be every other year.  One main nanotechnology developer, Zyvex, has generaly given their updates news at these Foresight Conferences.  But, this year, Zyvex and the Foresight Institute has decided to go quiet - to not say their major discoveries in public for a science organisation can only mean something farely big.  Apparently, the buzz from the Foresight Conference(2013) is that they all feel nanotechnology has gone past an "inflection point".   I'm going to have to say that I'll go ahead and not say what I think they've got or where they're at in the development of Feynman/Drexlerian nanotechnology.  I personaly consider that word phrase 'inflection point' as interesting.

astro picture for the day

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Lake

I decided to post about the recent Russian asteroid strike(poor Russians; they always get the exciting(dangerous depending on how you want to look at it), because there seems to be confusion about whether the asteroid actually hit and left a crater.

Arthur C Clarke was one of the first and still the best presentation of the 1908 siberian comet strike.  Unfortunately, nobody has put the whole program in one youtube; i'll show part one, and I'm sure you can find the other two.

I actually first heard of the Tunguska event from a book about black holes that my father had on his book shelves; the author apparently decided to mention the Tunguska event because of speculation that it might have been a black hole; today, such speculation seems silly.

Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke seem to me to have hoped that Humans find E.T's or at least bacterial life on Mars(or better yet, fish like life in the seas of Europa); they seemed to have the hope that this would lead to a Renaissance and a questioning of beliefs.  Of course this hasn't happened.  Another hope would be an asteroid strike that would get world politicians to make a united space colonization effort. Well, this latest Russian asteroid strike hasn't led to world leaders getting a hearton for space colonization; but, you can almost feel a Renaissance like awakening happening.  The asteroid strike has captured the imaginations of peoples around the world.

-------------------------------------crazy science/technology extra

Dna-nanotech has overcome lots of technical bottlenecks as I've reported even here on this blog.  But, apparently, one problem has been the cost for dna strands.  Well, someone has worked to drastically cut the costs(still a little bit expensive; but, I'd imagine they could find even better cost reductions as they perform this latest advance) of dna strands.  This was for synthetic biology; making artificial bacterial cells, or replacing the dna and taking over the ribosomes of Eukaryatic cells.  But, this dna strand cost reduction can be generalised to dna-nanomanufacturing as well.

Solve for X: Austen Heinz on democratizing creation

and for the recent excitement over synthetic biology

MIT-developed genetic circuits have logic and memory functions

With synthetic biology alone, we can solve two of the major problems that Eric Drexler for one notes that nanotechnology can solve - energy and medical.  It can't solve the manufacturing of arbitrary technologies like computers and spaceships and so on of course.  Dna-nanotech can't either; but, it could bootstrap to a more robust nanomanufacturing system.

astro picture for the day/ Eratosthenes poem Hermes

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

thought for the day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I read in Thomas Heath's "Hisory of Greek Mathematics" volume 2 that Eratosthenes(who first calculated the circumference of the Earth over two thousand years ago) wrote a poem about some Greek god Hermes.  The poem is about Hermes and some twelve constellations and Hermes apparently dies and goes to heaven.  Eratosthenes of course lived two hundred years before the supposed life of Jesus Christ.  But here, with Eratosthenes Hermes poem, we have something analogous to the Gospel story of Jesus Christ, and it's astrotheological. 

I can't find an english translation; it's all in German.  The following is the best I've been able to google.

book review; the Hermes poem is mentioned when talking about chapter five

here's a wiki of the extant Greek manuscript

There's also a Catasterismi, another Eratosthenes poem about the Heavens(a pre Jesus Christ Gospel?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catasterismi

DNA-nanomanufacturing video for the day . . .  . . . .

Eric Winfree dna nanomanufacturing video

I just found this; it's dated to 2008.  He says he's gotten dna-nanomanufacturing to do just about everything; the only problem is speed of self-organising everything.  Of course, just over a month or two ago, two dna-nanotechnology breakthroughs have been reported that has sped up dna-nanomanufacturing from weeks and days to minutes; combine the two(one is to just use short dna pieces instead of one long Paul Rothemund origami style dna; the other basicaly showed that if you just keep the temperature constant, the dna folds up within minutes; combine these two, and we're talking about seconds or less I would think), and dna-nanotechnologists should be able to make a primitive(non-Drexlerian daimondoid nanomanufacturing system) nanomanufacturing system.  Combine this primitive nano-factory with graphene, buckyballs, proteins/peptoids, and one should see that dna-nanomanufacturing can bootstrap to Drexlerian/Feyman daimondoid(or better materials yet) nanosystems. 

There's been no news coming out of the dna guys since the last two major breakthroughs; i can only suspect that they are just having so much fun with it they are too busy to report anything.  It could be that the next dna-nanomanufacturing announcement will be that of a primitive nano-factory.

astro picture for the day/ Human space colonization starting to happen

Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/L. Decin et al

This is a latest picture from Herschel space telescope image of Betelgues - a star of the orions belt.  This is a supergiant star that has been around for awhile.  Astronomers think it's ready to go supernova.  It could go off tomorrow, or in a thousand years.

thought for the day;

Industrialism gives humanity the power to solve a lot of problems, even go out to space.  But, it comes with a ticking time bomb - that of the dependence on non-renewable resources.   The problem is compounded by the fact of how many people industrialism allows to live above the level of animals.  If the plug is pulled from out under industrialisms rug, billions of people have grown up conditioned to live in a concrete forest; they don't know how to forage much less farm.  The contribution of science to the human condition can come crashing down real fast.  There's two solutions; one space expansion, and two nanomanufacturing.  Seems that both possibilities are maturing together!

A few days ago, Planetary Resources decided to make an update on their progress to tap the material resources of outer space.

As it turns out, Planetary resources has competition!

http://deepspaceindustries.com/media/

Of course, SpaceX is solving the rocket problems, Bigalow is providing inflatable space stations, and nanotube guys are making space elevators possible! 

astro picture for the day/ technology and mathematics

W50 supernova remnant in radio (green) against the infrared background of stars and dust (red). Credits: NRAO/AUI/NSF, K. Golap, M. Goss; NASA’s Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE).

thought for the day,

I have for a few years recognized a little problem of my connection between James Burke's connections and Jacob Bronowski's theory of knowledge in his "Origin of Knowledge and Imagination."  The problem is that technology is material and mathematics is symbols.  Why do both worlds(material not symbolic) have this daming up of nature leading to concepts/technologies?  I'm surprised I didn't hit on this years ago.  Because, I remember almost a decade ago now that mathematics is as much a technology as material technologies.  Even natural language can be viewed as a technology. That is my thought last night. 

Homo Erectus as everyone knows used fire for hundreds of thousands of years; that act alone put mankind a cut above any lifeform on Earth ever before.  Homo Erectus essentialy already existed in a science fictiony time. Isaac Asimov in his "Chronology of Science and Technology" says there's evidence that the cave painters of tens of thousands of years ago used wax that would come from the application of fire to cooking animal meat.  Maybe the cave painters made bon fires and explored just how hot a fire they could make, but we don't know.  We only know that fire led to metallergy in Mesopotamia around 3700 B.C.(almost six thousand years ago).

The nature of fire had to wait a longer time to the modern day scientific era of mankind.  This story brings us back to my point about mathematics being a symbolic technology and my problem of how come there's this same pattern of James Burke connections/Jacob Bronowski infered units.  The solution is to define the vague word 'technology.' 

Fire was used but not understood all this time(almost six thousand years).  They at first argued a phlogiston theory for fire; the idea that fire was composed of another substance all together from normal matter.  This is kind of like the problem mankind had in understanding the heavens for a long time.  They thought things in the heavens stayed up there because they were made of another substance all together.  As Jacob Bronowski notes in the video above(episode four of his Ascent of Man), if you have this theory of fire, you have to give it all kinds of impossible properties(this relates to the problems scientists had with the aether theory which when disproved by the michelson-morley experiment of the 1800s led to Einstein's Special and General theory of relativity).  Phlogiston and fire really were vague words just like technology was for me in my problem about technology connections and mathematical connections. 

astro picture for the day/ thought for the day . . . Ardi and Lucy running around at the same time!

Image Credit: GeMS/GSAOI Team, Gemini Observatory, AURA
Processing: Rodrigo Carrasco (Gemini Obs.), Travis Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage)

thought for the day;

I just read an article in Scientific American about Ardi and Lucy(australopithacines). The article basicaly shows a Ardi decendent living at the same time as Australopithacines. The suggestion, or point, is that we can't just find our common ancestor by finding a bipedal ape. And, that there were two bipedals running around at the same time.

Lots of times, I hear physical anthropologists suggesting that by finding fossil bones of our ancient ancestors, we can learn something of how intelligence arose in today's Homo Sapiens. I've always been a bit skeptical at this notion. Maybe if someday we make a Jurrasic park of Australopithacines and now Ardipithacus, and Homo Erectus, then maybe we can somehow study the evolution of human thought. There's other things to say about intelligence though.

Seems to me that life is intelligence. All life reasons its' way around. One could even say that bacterial swapping of genes is like mixing and matching of ideas. But, what caused mankind to perform art, science/mathematics, and technology(a bit of a bungaboo also; spiders make webs, birds make nests, beavers make dams). Our intelligence seems a step above(how many people today know deductive logic?).

Let me point out an observation of mine; Renaissances appear to happen after a dark ages. Everyone knows of of the 1500's(with overlap into the 1400s; actually, there were two Renaissances; one occured around 1000 A.D. with the translations of Arab translations of Greek works in Arab Spain; it was pretty much shortshifted by the 'black plague') in Italy(also partly due to the migration of Greeks from Constantinople). But, what few people note is that the Greek enlightenment that everyone thinks of when the word "Greek" is mentioned, was after a Greek dark ages. This is the dark ages after the fall of the civilizations that led to the legends of the city of Troy(maybe real, but the story is legend). What's more, before the Greeks, there was the Babylonian mathematical spring. Then, they went into a dark ages, only they never really went into a Renaissance; they became a giant dictatorship in the Persian empire to combat the upstart Greeks because the Greeks were doing weird things like mathematics and democracy. But anyways, point is that intelligence in our species doesn't seem to occur without some stimulous. Like, how about competition?

All life much less bipedal primates grew up knowing how to forage/hunt for its survival. It doesn't need to do science or technology generaly. Most physical anthropologists I would imagine would raise their hands and say 'environmental forces.' Yet, this doesn't make total sense with the long timespans in technological innovation in the evolution of bipedal primates to Homo Sapiens. Reading this latest Ardi stuff may suggest a reason why some primates that obviously led to us somehow maybe thought to make some new technology at least!

Certainly, when this certain lifeform decided to make technology, it had a more generalisable skill set. Or, the topology of the bipedal primates lent itself to greater technological potential. And, the use of that technology took a while to affect the biology to change and require more brains and more technology. But, maybe it was competition that led somebody to decide to make technology in the first place!

-------------------------------------crazy science/technology for the day