#about quantum theory and the chances of extraterrestrial life

[shynerdwantscuddles]

Nobody saw me panic that didn’t happen I am so nonchalant and have black cat energy or whatever the kids are saying these days

[ri0k0]

owowowowowow

I recently got to watch a lot of movies that I didn't get the chance to before. The concept that consciousness arises from an electromagnetic field was stated as part of the basis for the alien life form in Promare and I couldn't help but wonder if that idea in the movie was based on something in real life. It turns out (google lol) that there are actual electromagnetic theories on the development/birth of consciousness. It sounded a little too specific to be something that was pulled out of one's ass. (Not that pulling things out of your ass can't be fun or entertaining or just as profound.) It's just really entertaining seeing sources from real life incorporated into a fictional universe. Also, the movie was really fun and beautiful.

And then, in Genshin, there's a ton of reference to real life religious concepts that foreshadow in game events or serve as devices/analogs to relate significance between other events/characters/locations in game and in real life.

Or, how in Pokemon S/V, the existence/introduction of foreign/extraterrestrial devices from outer space (terapagos, tera crystals) influences the continuity of space-time and provides a foundation for technology that was conducive to AI creation and "uploading" memories/"consciousness". Like, where did they find that information (google lol?) and what specific material were the devs looking at?- is what I am curious about. What specific authored body of work was referenced bc I want to read it LMAO. Especially the idea of creating an AI copy of a human because of the current state of machine learning IRL... And then, you know, the concept of being able to "transfer" consciousness is something else too that's really interesting. And also, does having a liquid/organic-carbon based brain architecture have something to do with with our capacity for consciousness and memory? How do you reconcile or bridge carbon based memory and something like computer memory? Where does quantum computing fall in all of this? Or get them to interface? This is why that even though the game is so glitchy and visually unappealing at times, I love it. I love it because for me, it has one of the most compelling stories out of all the other gens. It's the first time I ever wanted to complete the pokedex and did so. I also found my calling as a shiny hunter LMAO.

Bottom line: I think it's just nice to be in a place again where I have time to read stories, watch movies, play more games (mainstream and indie), and notice the word building in those same things.

[sciencespies]

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, and Can We Hack It?

https://sciencespies.com/space/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation-and-can-we-hack-it/

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, and Can We Hack It?

A popular cosmological theory holds that the cosmos runs on quantum codes. So how hard could it be to tweak the supreme algorithm?

If you could change the laws of nature, what would you change?

Maybe it’s that pesky speed-of-light limit on cosmic travel — not to mention war, pestilence and the eventual asteroid that has Earth’s name on it. Maybe you would like the ability to go back in time — to tell your teenage self how to deal with your parents, or to buy Google stock. Couldn’t the universe use a few improvements?

That was the question that David Anderson, a computer scientist, enthusiast of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), musician and mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, recently asked his colleagues and friends.

In recent years the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all of our innermost thoughts, is a computer simulation, running on a thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low. In an influential essay in 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford and director of the Institute for the Future of Humanity, proposed the idea, adding that it was probably an easy accomplishment for “technologically mature” civilizations wanting to explore their histories or entertain their offspring. Elon Musk, who, for all we know, is the star of this simulation, seemed to echo this idea when he once declared that there was only a one-in-a-billion chance that we lived in “base reality.”

It’s hard to prove, and not everyone agrees that such a drastic extrapolation of our computing power is possible or inevitable, or that civilization will last long enough to see it through. But we can’t disprove the idea either, so thinkers like Dr. Bostrom contend that we must take the possibility seriously. In some respects, the notion of a Great Simulator is redolent of a recent theory among cosmologists that the universe is a hologram, its margins lined with quantum codes that determine what is going on inside.

A couple of years ago, pinned down by the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anderson began discussing the implications of this idea with his teenage son. If indeed everything was a simulation, then making improvements would simply be a matter of altering whatever software program was running everything. “Being a programmer, I thought about exactly what these changes might involve,” he said in an email.

If the software was well written, tweaking it should be easy work, he reasoned. Modifications could change our laws of physics, or add new features to the universe: menu options, speed filters, closed captioning, pop-up blockers — buttons to push that would make our lives richer or more fun.

Moreover, if the software running the universe was open source — publicly available for other programmers to inspect and manipulate — then these “meta-hackers” might be amenable to our feature requests, and might even be looking for them, Dan Werthimer, Dr. Anderson’s colleague in Berkeley, suggested. Think of it as a cybernetic version of prayer, a way to petition the Great Simulator.

Dr. Anderson recently polled his colleagues to ask how they would tweak the cosmic algorithm, which he calls Unisym. He posted the responses on his blog, along with comments on how these changes might be put in effect and how well they might work.

“This was during Covid, when I was filling my ample free time by writing various essays on philosophy, politics and music and putting them on my website,” he said. The emphasis was not on eliminating war and injustice but on features that might help us cosmic small fry to navigate the vicissitudes of “life.”

For example, Dr. Anderson would like to be able to click a button and view all of the footsteps he has ever taken, glowing orange on the ground. “I can see where I’ve been in Berkeley and go to the Sierras and I can see all the hikes I’ve taken there,” he said. Clicking another button would highlight all of the footprints ever made. “Are there places no one has ever been?” he wondered. His son, he added, would like to know if a joke he was about to tell would get a good laugh.

Some feature requests from his other respondents: the ability to pause the simulation long enough to think up a snappy retort in conversation, or a rewind option to undo a regrettable remark or revisit a missed opportunity, something I would definitely up-vote.

Simple as these requests may sound, Dr. Anderson noted, using such features might require a fair bit of computational engineering behind the scenes. For instance, briefly pausing the universe to collect your thoughts would require branching your own existence into a temporary parallel simulation; then, when you knew what you wanted to say, you could hit the escape key and revert to the original simulation. Rewinding to correct the past would also cause the simulation to branch, but in this case, Dr. Anderson said, you would continue in the parallel simulation “and never hit escape.”

Of course, he added, “the usual time-travel weirdness applies.” Stepping into the future and returning would endow your present self with memories of things that hadn’t happened yet. This, in turn, would change the future, such that when you got there it wouldn’t be quite what you had remembered from your first visit.

Likewise, stepping into the past could alter what you remembered happening in the future. It might even obviate your own existence, as with the time traveler in Ray Bradbury’s classic story “A Sound of Thunder” who steps on a butterfly and returns to a future in which the Nazis run the world. (Or, as with Homer in the “Time and Punishment” episode of “The Simpsons,” who inadvertently creates a world unfamiliar with doughnuts.) Apparently, time travel is about the most dangerous thing you can do.

For my part, I’d like to be able to hit a button upon entering a restaurant that would drop a cone of silence over every other table. (My hearing isn’t what it used to be.) My wife said she would like for a hologram of her to appear whenever she was late to some appointment, and then disappear when she actually arrived, so that nobody would know she had been absent.

A popular modification is what Dr. Anderson calls “the look of death,” the ultimate expression of road rage: With a blink of your eyes, you could doom offending drivers and their cars to be incinerated by a powerful laser.

“Each such request should fork a new universe, for obvious reasons,” Dr. Anderson writes on his blog.

“It’s a safe bet that someone would give me the look of death within a day or two,” he writes. “And within a few weeks nearly all drivers would be incinerated. So it’s probably best to implement this so that each look of death forks a new universe where the requested incineration happens, but the original universe continues without it.”

What’s on your cosmic wish list? How would you tweak the supreme algorithm? The year 2023 is still young; there’s plenty of time to petition the cosmic hackers for a better deal. Just look out for the butterflies, and be careful what you wish for.

#Space

[johnjjselman]

𝑨 𝑭𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒍𝒚 𝑷𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒕'𝒔 𝑳𝒐𝒈𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑱𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒍

In Letters to Evelyn, after visiting his parents’ home, an aspiring pilot’s life begins to spin out of control when he begins to have hallucinations that may reveal his connection to an alien life form, God, and a mysterious woman named Evelyn.

𝑳𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒊𝒕𝒍𝒆

Letters to Evelyn, a true love story, is a book which when read, gives a unique point of view of our earth and ourselves. We have so much, but yet, so little. Letters to Evelyn shows us what happens when love conquers all.

𝑨𝒏 𝑬𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑳𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝑩𝒚

Letters to Evelyn was a way for me to find a structure of morals which can give people easy and many obvious ethical virtues to live by. It is always mind-boggling that certain behaviors we see on TV actually exist when we watch the news. But an imaginative, intellectual and irresistable read will give you many words of verifyable intelligence that give love a chance for anyone willing to look.

𝑨 𝑺𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒊𝒄 𝑱𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒚 𝑷𝒂𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒅𝒈𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝑰𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕

Letters to Evelyn gives a partial solution to the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. It is found using easy mathematics and although incomplete, gives motive force to find new technologies, from gravitational propulsion to quantum food solidifiers. A must read!

Hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-Mr-John-Selman/dp/1737095238/

eBook (now on sale for $2.99):

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman-ebook/dp/B0931R2YQ2/

Paperback:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman/dp/173709522X/

https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/letters-to-evelyn

Biography of John Selman

What inspired me to write Letters to Evelyn was that I was seeing so many things wrong with a negative outlook on life. I thought I would give some of my dreams away that integrate with reality.

My name is John J. Selman, I'm originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, however I grew up in Brunswick, Maine when my parents moved here when I was four. I thought Brunswick, Maine had a strong tradition with poetry so, much of what I've seen in the English language are displayed in a lyrical sense.

I graduated first in my NROTC class at the University of Maine with a B.A. in German and a minor in economics, and with my degree, I chose to join naval service to become a pilot. My flight time has been spent in 9 different types of aircraft and I presently have two world records, one for the longest time spent with no sleep, greater than 12 days, that's talked about in my memoir, Letters to Evelyn, and my second is for the steepest, highest Sarajevo Approach with the lowest recovery in a T-34C. I flew from 6000 feet down to five feet above the treetops onto Eglin AFB at greater than a seventy degree nose down attitude. So, I enjoyed writing Letters to Evelyn because it allowed me to construct worlds with an impression, and give some of my ideas about what I believe is an ideal earth.

L. Jones, Readers' Favorite

From a young age, John Selman knew there was more to life than what his senses could see, touch and hear. Follow his amazing life experiences as he strives to follow in his father's footsteps into aviation whilst trying to find love and a sense of belonging. A heart-touching love story with intriguing threads of fantasy and science fiction woven throughout. John is witness to many extraterrestrial encounters and premonitions throughout his life, which makes him of considerable interest to those who meet him. Sometimes his gift is an advantage, giving him the upper hand, but other times it is a curse that causes him to feel like an outsider. As John's search for love continues, the story will take a surprising turn, mixing reality with science fiction and a biblical tale. When John eventually finds love, it is with someone he never imagined possible.

Letters to Evelyn by John Selman is an extraordinary book with a unique plot that captivated me from the first chapter. The author takes quite horrific and disturbing events and turns them into great learning experiences. The events in the book are depicted so well and I loved the references to real-life events, such as the Vietnam War and the World Trade Center. Each of the characters, even the minor ones, have been portrayed with care and consideration. I could visualize every one of them. I found Jona especially dark and disturbing. The dialogue was sharp, realistic and revealed the character's personality perfectly. The author's imagination is off the charts. I did not think a novel combining science fiction, romance, and biblical characters could be achieved, but the author has created a story that you will never forget. Letters To Evelyn will never lose your interest and never fail to deliver on tension, excitement and even hints of comedy.

The following is an interview about my Autobiography "Letters to Evelyn" with the Dorset Book Detective Blog

https://dorsetbookdetective.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/dorsetbookdetective/

Tell me about how you came to define your writing style. What drew you towards science fiction writing?

My writing style has a soft voice. It makes no sense for an author to sound inhuman or harsh.

I was drawn to science fiction when I was younger. My father was a jet pilot, so flying became one of the major themes I was interested in. Science fiction has a lot of flying, and I myself was a pilot, so science fiction became a natural fit for my work.

What is your career background and how do you draw on it in your writing?

My career background is my service as a pilot and a Division Officer aboard aircraft carriers. I easily built my memoir upon my background while I was writing it by recalling memories, and it became easier once the big unforgettable memories were recounted.

Where do you take your inspirations? Are there any rituals you do to get yourself in the mood for writing?

I have no rituals for writing except for my marker board now. I like the marker board because it allows for viral expression on a plain surface. I’m using it for my second novel in conjunction with folded paper used like an organizer to write down all my thoughts for the next novel.

What style of writing do you enjoy yourself? Are there any particular writers you admire?

As I said before, I prefer a soft style of writing. Honestly, my memories are so scary that my memoir had to have a soft voice or people wouldn’t read it. I’ve avoided writing about physical violence in this memoir because I’ve found much more interesting themes to write about.

I really enjoy Brian Stableford’s work on the Hooded Swan series. “Promised Land” is one title in that series which stands out. I also like reading Kurt Vonnegut and Arthur C. Clarke.

If you could collaborate with any person, living or dead, on a writing project, who would it be and why?

I would choose to collaborate with my great-great-great-grandfather, who I’m named after. He was a doctor in Iowa and eventually became President of the Iowa Senate, since he was such a friendly guy. If I could talk to him in real life, I would write volumes about his profession.

Are there any new books or writers that you are looking forward to later in the year?

“Winter’s Orbit” by Everina Maxwell looks tantalizing. “We are Satellites” by Sarah Pinsker also looks enticing. Lastly, “Hail Mary” by Andy Weir also looks successful. Stephen King never stops writing and I like most of his works.

Anything you’d like to add?

I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my ankles for allowing me the opportunity to share my career with you and your audience. It isn’t every day that I get to talk about myself in front of people.

Hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-Mr-John-Selman/dp/1737095238/

eBook (now on sale for $2.99):

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman-ebook/dp/B0931R2YQ2/

Paperback:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman/dp/173709522X/

Reedsy Listing

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/letters-to-evelyn-john-selman#preview

3 Five Star Reviews 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/letters-to-evelyn

Press Release for my memoir ! 🤩

Naval Veteran John Selman Releases Memoir Combining His Naval Service with Other Worldly Experiences

“Letters to Evelyn” is a love story that is part memoir, part science fiction fantasy

PORTLAND, Maine – August 31, 2021 – U.S. Navy veteran John Selman has released his first memoir, “Letters to Evelyn.” The memoir recounts Selman’s experiences as a Navy pilot and Division Officer in Pensacola, Florida; Corpus Christi, Texas; and San Diego, California. But ultimately, “Letters to Evelyn” is a love story.

In the memoir, aspiring pilot Selman’s life begins to spin out of control after an assassination attempt on his life with a potent dose of narcotics. Selman begins to experience hallucinations that seem to reveal his connection to an alien life form, God and Evelyn, a mysterious woman.

After the Navy, Selman attends college for engineering and meets Evelyn Tuskegee. “Letters to Evelyn” is an attempt to earn the attention of the mysterious woman, but a high-ranking Naval officer is determined not to let that happen. The memoir also recounts a conversation held aboard the USS Enterprise in July 2000 that may have been the beginning of COVID-19.

With a beautiful weaving of memoir, fantasy and science fiction, “Letters to Evelyn” offers a partial solution to the grand unifying theory of everything, which Selman discovers as he attempts to follow in his father’s footsteps as a pilot while at the same time trying to find love and the place where he belongs.

“’Letters to Evelyn’ was a way for me to find a structure of morals that can give people easy and many obvious ethical virtues to live by,” Selman said. “I see so many things wrong with a negative outlook on life. I thought giving away my dreams may help people find a better way. We have so much but so little.”

Selman was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in Brunswick, Maine. He graduated first in NROTC at the University of Maine with a B.A. in German. He has flown nine different types of aircraft and holds two world records. The first is for the longest time spent without sleep, which Selman did for more than 12 days. The experience is recounted in “Letters to Evelyn.” The second world record is for the steepest, highest Sarajevo Approach with the lowest recovery in a T-34C.

“Letters to Evelyn” has three five-star reviews on Reader’s Favorite. One reviewer, L. Jones, said, “’Letters to Evelyn’ by John Selman is an extraordinary book with a unique plot that captivated me from the first chapter. The author takes quite horrific and disturbing events and turns them into great learning experiences. The events in the book are depicted so well, and I loved the references to real-life events, such as the Vietnam War and the World Trade Center. Each of the characters, even the minor ones, has been portrayed with care and consideration. ‘Letters to Evelyn’ will never lose your interest and never fail to deliver on tension, excitement and even hints of comedy.”

“Letters to Evelyn” is available on Amazon as a paperback and eBook, on Reedsy and Google Play Books. Selman’s memoir was also recently accepted by Voyage Media producer Ryan Heppe for production into a film. Heppe previously worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in “Collateral Damage” and “Hart's War,” respectively.

###

eBook (now on sale for $2.99):

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman-ebook/dp/B0931R2YQ2/

Hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-Mr-John-Selman/dp/1737095238/

Paperback:

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Evelyn-John-Selman/dp/173709522X/

Reedsy Listing

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/letters-to-evelyn-john-selman#preview

3 Five Star Readers' Favorite Reviews 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/letters-to-evelyn

Find John on Reedsy

https://reedsy.com/discovery/user/johnselman/library

Find John on Twitter

https://twitter.com/AuthorSelman?s=09

[justforbooks]

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy.

As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound bus ride in America – the answer to a conundrum in quantum electrodynamics that had stumped giants of physics such as Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe. As an author, guru and apostle for science, Dyson also cheerfully proposed that humans might genetically engineer trees that could grow on comets, to provide new habitats for genetically altered humans.

He had already proposed the ultimate solution to the energy crisis: a sufficiently advanced civilisation would, he argued, crunch up all the unused planets and asteroids to form a giant shell around its parent star, to reflect and exploit its radiation. Science fiction writers were delighted. The first suggestion became known as the Dyson tree. The second is called the Dyson sphere.

He was born in Crowthorne, Berkshire. His father, George Dyson, was a musician and composer, and his mother, Mildred Atkey, a lawyer. The young Dyson reported that his happiest ever school holiday – from Winchester college – was spent working his way, from 6am to 10pm, through 700 problems in Piaggio’s Differential Equations. “I intended to speak the language of Einstein,” he said in his 1979 memoir Disturbing the Universe. “I was in love with mathematics and nothing else mattered.”

He graduated from Cambridge and in 1943 became a civilian scientist with RAF Bomber Command, which experienced hideous losses with each raid over Germany. Dyson and his colleagues suggested that the Lancaster bomber’s gun turrets slowed the plane, increased its burden and made it more vulnerable to German fighters: without the turrets, it might gain an extra 50mph and be much more manoeuvrable.

He was ignored. Bomber Command, he was later to write, “might have been invented by a mad scientist as an example to exhibit as clearly as possible the evil aspects of science and technology: the Lancaster, in itself a magnificent flying machine, made into a death trap for the boys who flew it. A huge organisation dedicated to the purpose of burning cities and killing people, and doing it badly.”

The young Dyson was already convinced of some moral purpose to the universe and remained a non-denominational Christian all his life.

After the second world war he went to Cornell University in New York state to begin research in physics under Bethe, one of the team at Los Alamos that fashioned the atomic bomb.

By 1947, the challenge was one of pure science: to forge an accurate theory that described how atoms and electrons behaved when they absorbed or emitted light. The broad basis of what was called quantum electrodynamics had been proposed by the British scientist Paul Dirac and other giants of physics. The next step was to calculate the precise behaviour inside an atom. Using different approaches, both Julian Schwinger and Feynman delivered convincing solutions, but their answers did not quite square with each other.

It was while crossing Nebraska by bus, reading James Joyce and the biography of Pandit Nehru, that the young Dyson saw how to resolve the work of the two men and help win them the 1965 Nobel prize: “It came bursting into my consciousness, like an explosion,” Dyson wrote. “I had no pencil and paper, but everything was so clear I did not need to write it down.”

A few days later he moved – for almost all of the rest of his life – to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, home of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. “It was exactly a year since I had left England to learn physics from the Americans. And now here I was a year later, walking down the road to the institute on a fine September morning, to teach the great Oppenheimer how to do physics. The whole situation seemed too absurd to be credible,” Dyson wrote later.

He went on to deliver a series of papers that resolved the problems of quantum electrodynamics. He did not share in Feynman’s and Schwinger’s Nobel prize. He did not complain. “I was not inventing new physics,” he said. “I merely clarified what was already there so that others could see the larger picture.”

Dyson tackled complex problems in theoretical physics and mathematics – there is a mathematical tool called the Dyson series, and another called Dyson’s transform – and enjoyed the affection and respect of scientists everywhere. He took US citizenship, and worked on Project Orion, one of America’s oddest and most ambitious space ventures.

Orion was to be an enormous spacecraft, with a crew of 200 scientists and engineers, driven by nuclear weapons: warheads would be ejected one after another from the spaceship and detonated. This repeated pulse of blasts would generate speeds so colossal that the spacecraft could reach Mars in two weeks, and get to Saturn, explore the planet’s moons, and get back to Earth again within seven months. Modern spacecraft launched by chemical rockets can take 12 months to reach Mars, and more than seven years to reach Saturn.

The Orion project faltered under the burden of technical problems, and then was abandoned in 1965 after the partial test ban treaty that outlawed nuclear explosions in space.

Dyson was a widely read man with a gift for memorable remarks and a great talent for presenting – with calm logic and bright language – ideas for which the term “outside the envelope” could only be the most feeble understatement.

In 1960, in a paper for the journal Science, he argued that a technologically advanced civilisation would sooner or later surround its home star with reflective material to make full use of all its radiation. The extraterrestrials could do this by pulverising a planet the size of Jupiter, and spreading its fabric in a thin shell around their star, at twice the distance of the Earth from the sun. Although the starlight would be masked, the shell or sphere would inevitably warm up. So people seeking extraterrestrial intelligence should first look for a very large infrared glow somewhere in the galaxy.

In 1972 – a year before the first serious experiments in manipulating DNA – Dyson outlined, in a Birkbeck College lecture, in London, his vision of biological engineering. He predicted that scavenging microbes could be altered to harvest minerals, neutralise toxins and to clean up plastic litter and hazardous radioactive materials.

He then proposed that comets – lumps of ice and organic chemicals that periodically orbit the sun – could serve as nurseries for genetically altered trees that could grow, in the absence of gravity, to heights of hundreds of miles, and release oxygen from their roots to sustain human life. “Seen from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an immense growth of stems and foliage. When man comes to live on the comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of his ancestors,” he told a delighted audience.

He went on to predict robot explorers that could replicate themselves, and plants that would make seeds and propagate across the galaxy. Plants could grow their own greenhouses, he argued, just as turtles could grow shells and polar bears grow fur. His audience may not have believed a word, but they listened intently.

Dyson had a gift for the memorable line and a disarming honesty that admitted the possibility of error. It was, he would say, better to be wrong than to be vague, and much more fun to be contradicted than to be ignored. Dyson was by instinct and reason a pacifist, but he understood the fascination with nuclear weaponry.

He enjoyed unorthodox propositions and contrarian arguments; he maintained a certain scepticism about climate change (“the fuss about global warming is greatly exaggerated”) and he argued that a commercial free-for-all was more likely to deliver the right design for spacecraft than a government-directed effort.

He had little patience with those physicists who argued that the world was the consequence of blind chance. “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe must in some sense have known we were coming,” he once said.

His Cambridge mentor, the mathematician GH Hardy, had told him: “Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.” After Disturbing the Universe, Dyson wrote a number of compelling books, including Infinite in All Directions (1988) and Imagined Worlds (1997). In 2000, he was awarded the Templeton prize – worth more than the Nobel – given annually for progress towards discoveries about spiritual realities.

He was a frequent essayist and to the end a contributor to the New York Review of Books. But he continued to think as a scientist and in 2012 entered the field of mathematical biology with a published paper on game theory in human cooperation and Darwinian evolution.

Dyson is survived by his second wife, Imme (nee Jung), whom he married in 1958, and their four daughters, Dorothy, Emily, Mia and Rebecca; by a son, George, and daughter, Esther, from his first marriage, to Verena Huber, which ended in divorce; and by a stepdaughter, Katarina, and 16 grandchildren.

• Freeman John Dyson, mathematician and physicist, born 15 December 1923; died 28 February 2020

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[myserendipities]

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy. As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound bus ride in America – the answer to a conundrum in quantum electrodynamics that had stumped giants of physics such as Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe. As an author, guru and apostle for science, Dyson also cheerfully proposed that humans might genetically engineer trees that could grow on comets, to provide new habitats for genetically altered humans. He had already proposed the ultimate solution to the energy crisis: a sufficiently advanced civilisation would, he argued, crunch up all the unused planets and asteroids to form a giant shell around its parent star, to reflect and exploit its radiation. Science fiction writers were delighted. The first suggestion became known as the Dyson tree. The second is called the Dyson sphere. In 1960, in a paper for the journal Science, he argued that a technologically advanced civilisation would sooner or later surround its home star with reflective material to make full use of all its radiation. The extraterrestrials could do this by pulverising a planet the size of Jupiter, and spreading its fabric in a thin shell around their star, at twice the distance of the Earth from the sun. Although the starlight would be masked, the shell or sphere would inevitably warm up. So people seeking extraterrestrial intelligence should first look for a very large infra-red glow somewhere in the galaxy. In 1972 – a year before the first serious experiments in manipulating DNA – Dyson outlined, in a Birkbeck College lecture, in London, his vision of biological engineering. He predicted that scavenging microbes could be altered to harvest minerals, neutralise toxins and to clean up plastic litter and hazardous radioactive materials. He then proposed that comets – lumps of ice and organic chemicals that periodically orbit the sun – could serve as nurseries for genetically altered trees that could grow, in the absence of gravity, to heights of hundreds of miles, and release oxygen from their roots to sustain human life. “Seen from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an immense growth of stems and foliage. When man comes to live on the comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of his ancestors,” he told a delighted audience. He went on to predict robot explorers that could replicate themselves, and plants that would make seeds and propagate across the galaxy. Plants could grow their own greenhouses, he argued, just as turtles could grow shells and polar bears grow fur. His audience may not have believed a word, but they listened intently. Dyson had a gift for the memorable line and a disarming honesty that admitted the possibility of error. It was, he would say, better to be wrong than to be vague, and much more fun to be contradicted than to be ignored. Dyson was by instinct and reason a pacificist, but he understood the fascination with nuclear weaponry. He enjoyed unorthodox propositions and contrarian arguments; he maintained a certain scepticism about climate change (“the fuss about global warming is greatly exaggerated”) and he argued that a commercial free-for-all was more likely to deliver the right design for spacecraft than a government-directed effort. He had little patience with those physicists who argued that the world was the consequence of blind chance. “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe must in some sense have known we were coming,” he once said. Freeman John Dyson, mathematician and physicist, born 15 December 1923; died 28 February 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/01/freeman-dyson-obituary

[diabeticmemoirs]

Fuck Trump...what about the Aliens?

There can be an unimaginable disparity between fear and reality. Which, of course, makes sense because a healthy sense of fear is what keeps us alive most of the time. Even adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers weigh all of the risks before jumping out of a plane, off a cliff, or down a mountain. I know because I’m one of them. The point is to get a rush...not die. But I’m getting off point.

Fear can be so powerful for some that a tiny spider, with absolutely no capacity to harm a person, can still freeze them in their tracks. It’s an absurd reaction — my sister once left a wolf spider trapped under a water glass with my name exclaimed and double underlined on a note of paper, telling me to take it outside because she knew that I didn’t like to kill them — but it happens. And a lot of the time strong emotions, like fear, can overpower our common sense. It’s instinctive, animalistic. It stems from our temporal lobe — a lower, less logical part of the brain. And as of right now, nearly 1.84 million Americans are afraid of one thing in particular...our president. 

At least that’s what an average of the last eight polls tells us. He has a 56 percent disapproval rating. It makes sense. In the two years he’s had as president so far he’s managed to; add corporate tax cuts that’ll probably increase our national debt by 1.5 trillion dollars over the ten years after signing it, he’s started a tariff war with China that’ll probably cost the U.S. another $2 trillion in trade, and he pushed forward the Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines while declaring climate change to be a myth perpetrated by China...which is a wilder conspiracy than faking the moon landing, and it’s what our PRESIDENT believes. He put over 800 thousand people out of work with the longest government shutdown in history, tore immigrant families apart at U.S. borders, and openly admitted — on tape — to forcibly kissing and groping women...which. no matter how you look at it, is sexual assault. 

Donald J. Trump is a shitty person, hands down. But shitty people tend to make for good television...well, at least dramatic television (media, news, angsty teen podcast), and the unending, random nonsense that keeps coming out of his mouth is keeping food on the table for many a struggling comedian. Our fear is that his lack of experience and tendency to throw tantrums and pick fights with other nuclear powers is going to start World War 3, but what’s the reality?

The reality is that America has had terrible presidents before. We’re going to survive...probably. And maybe, like any other toddler, if we stop showing him so much attention, he might mellow out. Allowing us to get back to worrying about things that matter like curing disease, general education, or feeding the world’s population. There are so many more pertinent things to be focused on than the latest racist tweet from our commander in chief. Like the new sixth branch of the military that he promised.

That’s right, I’m talking about the only thing that Mr. President has ever gotten me excited about — a Space Force. Whether you believe in them or not, aliens have been trending more and more over the years, and Donald has demanded that we start colonizing the stars, or at least the planet Mars by the year 2025. Something like 75 percent of the American public says they believe that some form of extraterrestrial life exists — 54 percent say that that life is intelligent. Most notably the smartest of us, people like Stephen Hawking, have said that mathematically there’s no way that extraterrestrials don’t exist (there’s an equation and everything). Also, those few of us who have actually ventured into space, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have openly spoken about the fact that they witnessed alien structures and spacecraft on the moon. 

Shows like the History Channel’s long running Ancient Aliens and new drama series Project Blue Book have made the concept of extraterrestrial visitation more widely accepted. Even to the point that classes in alien diplomacy are being taught in universities around the world — which is wild. It’s almost as though the general public is being prepared for it to actually happen. And that’s probably for the best because in my own opinion, it seems that reality has a tendency to emulate science fiction.

I mean just look at the most recent discoveries in science. Alternate dimensions, quantum physics, sunken cities that were once mythological, traversable wormholes. Yes, you read it right, I said ‘traversable wormholes,’ but first you might need a quick lesson in quantum mechanics.

Most people have heard of Schrodinger’s cat...or at least they’ve heard of the multi-verse theory that sprouted from it. The basic idea is simple. In one universe the cat is alive and in the other universe the cat is dead. At least that’s the way it would be after someone looked in the box. Before opening the box to confirm what happened to our feline friend, however, the cat is both dead and alive. This is where people start to get confused. That’s because most don’t know that this was just a thought experiment...and that it was supposed to be a joke.

Some dudes, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, over in Copenhagen during the late 1920′s, came up with a theory about the behavior of matter at the quantum level (quantum just means ‘really small’ like electrons and other subatomic particles). They said that until that matter is ‘observed’ or ‘measured,’ it exists in multiple states. For instance, electrons have a “spin” and position at any given moment in time. According to the Copenhagen theory, as long as the electron hasn’t been observed or measured, it can be spinning in multiple directions at the same time. Which is insane! At least that’s what Schrodinger was telling Einstein in his letters at the time. 

His thought experiment took a cat and put it into a steel box (assume it could still breath) with a piece of radioactive material that has a 50 percent chance of emitting a particle that will register on a geiger counter. If it does, then a hammer will smash a bottle of poison, killing the cat. So there was equal chance that the cat would be either dead or alive once someone opened the box. According to Bohr and Heisenberg, and their Copenhagen theory, before the box was opened, the cat would be dead and alive just like those electrons could spin this way and that way all at the same time. Schrodinger said that was absurd. But guess what...Bohr and Heisenberg were right.

 That’s actually what quantum particles do. They also do this cool thing called “quantum tunneling.” Just imagine bouncing a ball against a wall and suddenly it just disappears and reappears on the other side of the wall. What about quantum entanglement? Well China just beamed some entangled photons up to a satellite sooo...and M-theory (the most widely accepted combination of string theory) says that the only way to mathematically reconcile the effects of gravity on quantum particles is if there are, in fact, 10 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time totaling 11 not 4. Are you seeing what I meant by reality emulating science fiction?

So how does this relate to traversable wormholes? Well without going into the math (me and numbers don’t always get along), and to try and put it simply, think of every measurement of a quantum particle as “information.” Quantum mechanics says that information can’t just be destroyed in the event horizon of a black hole. So one of the likely scenarios is that every black hole is, in fact, a wormhole with an exit. The only problem is that these wormholes are super unstable and would most likely collapse before any matter could get to the other side. Oh wait, no, string theory fixes that too. 

Ok...sure...it’s still mostly theory, but so was quantum mechanics almost 100 years ago. The math works. We’re at the beginning of the second space age. Mars One is planning to colonize the planet by 2023. More people than ever are accepting the notion that we aren’t alone in the universe. Quantum technologies are on the verge of being born. Our population is growing exponentially and honestly...if we don’t figure a way to get off this rock soon...it’s likely that the planet Earth won’t maintain us. 

So I say once again...Fuck Trump...and where’s my hover-board?

[thetechmedia1]

Scientists excited of possible extraterrestrial life on Venus after discovering Phosphine gas in atmosphere

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While we have all been single-mindedly dreaming of setting up a human colony on Mars, a much nearer neighbor has suddenly sprung up with some interesting discovery, possibly pointing towards presence of some of form of life. In what could be perhaps be the biggest advancement humanity has made in the pursuit of discovering extraterrestrial life- scientists have discovered phosphine gas on Venus, an indicator of some sort of life form.

Now, to the average reader who does not know much about chemistry, that does not really mean anything. In fact, we have planets that are referred to as ‘Gas giants,’ so why is this one gas on the hottest planet in the solar system being considered as a breakthrough? Well, this is because according to our understanding of life forms, phosphine is a sure indicator of life, and is only present when life forms are present.

Now, the above sentence has two key parts. First, the ‘sure indicator’ part, which means that the presence of phosphine can’t be a false positive, i.e., if there’s phosphine, there’s life. Sounds exciting right? Well, the second part, ‘according to our understanding,’ would dial it down a little bit, since all the data and theories we have regarding phosphine are formed from our understanding of life on Earth, and seeing how that isn’t really a wide research group, chances are we could be wrong. Scientists have discovered that phosphine is only produced by anaerobic life forms, but that might just be a wrong hypothesis.

If I had to place a bet, I’d go with the scientists who say that this might not amount to anything. However, that does not mean that there’s not a chance. In fact, this is the best chance we have had since we began venturing into the open space.

This is good news, especially because Venus, while often referred to as Earth’s twin, is one of the most uninhabitable planets in our solar system, and life there could mean that life is abundant in the universe. However, it will not be easy to verify this claim, as much like quantum physics, observation might lead to destruction.

This is because so far, it seems like life there, if any, is not very developed. Thus, by observing it, we might disturb and end any civilizations that would have come into existence on the planet.

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