I've had some pretty remarkable so-called "coincidences" in my life. About half of them I attribute to "Godwinks," those little clues in life that remind us not to rule out significance of the spiritual. But scientists, and I've known this for a long time, say coincidences are just that, coincidence. They are not "mystical but mathematical," chance following rules of probability.
Then psychologists join in and say humans tend to only pay attention to information that supports what they already believe. I agree with that up to a point. For instance, people who want to believe that in general a particular group is inferior or dangerous will ignore or rationalize away any evidence that contradicts that belief.
But what do scientists do with events and phenomena they can't explain? How do they explain people suddenly having insight into a situation they know nothing about? For instance, once I awakened from a dream in which I found a specific object that didn't belong to me but I needed to know about for my own safety. When I woke up, I left the bed and went straight to the place I'd seen in my dream and found the object.
A science-oriented friend of mine said, "That was your subconscious. You were aware of the object on some level and that's how you found it. He said this even though the object I found had been hidden inside a toilet tank, and I am one who rarely lifts the lid on a toilet tank. When I found the object that may have been only the second time in my life I'd ever seen the inside of a toilet tank. He, however, was determined to believe that there was nothing mystical about that moment. Was that a case of him ignoring information that challenged his ideology?
Or how is it that sometimes you have a very specific thought not to do a specific thing, and you listen to that thought, so you don't do whatever it is or go wherever you'd been headed. Then you find out later that the decision saved your life? If this happens to you more than once, it's hard to chalk it up to coincidence. (These expereinces probably don't count if you're a couch potato or afraid of most things.) Science, however, demands that you reject your own interpretation of your personal experiences and accept whatever it is science says is true at the moment.
Notice I say at the moment. All it takes is a study of how science has shaped racist propaganda and how scientists, after consuming the very propaganda science helped create, then go on to misinterpret the word around them and you'll see that science itself should also be given the side-eye sometimes.
Since scientists discuss the human tendency to cling to information that only supports what a human already believes, what beliefs do most scientists hold that influence how they interpret phenomena such as coincidence? I mean, they're human, too. What are the ideologies that propel scientists?
In general, I support science, proven facts, and numbers, but I do not automatically rule out "God" or the mystical. I make room in my life for the possibility of miracles. I have to because I am not a natural optimist. Life's difficulties have stripped me of idealism and my earlier leanings toward the romantic, I think.
And I don't care that some people I otherwise respect think that believing in the mystical and spiritual is for cowards who can't accept what athiests call "the fact that there is no God." It's impossible for a living person to know whether God exists, which is why belief in God requires faith. However, it's not unreasonable to say that old concepts of God, such as the image of a white man in a robe and long beard sitting somewhere in the sky is hard to swallow and highly improbable. On the other hand, theories in theoretical physics open the door to believing almost anything is possible in terms of alternate dimensions.
I recognize that it's a choice to believe in the spiritual just as it is a choice to accept a specific system of ethics, but as long as such beliefs are not putting me and my family's lives in jeopardy--for example causing me to refuse medical help or to not take action to solve problems or assume agency in my own life--how does it harm me?
Actually, when scientists and atheists ask us to reject belief in the unseen and ignore perceived patterns or that strange sense of presence we sometime feel (which can be explained by causes other than God), they are asking us to work against our own evolutionary survival instinct. That doesn't mean we should believe all kinds of superstition. It simply means that perhaps we should not, in our effort to prove how intellectually sophisticated we are, rule out the possibility that some aspects of the mystical may be valid. Until we fully understand everything about the human brain or disprove string theory with irrefutable evidence, those of us who prefer to believe in God are not as nutty as those who don't would have us think we are.
"Everyday I'm shuffling"? Could be, if you catch the right bug.
You've probably seen LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" music video, right? The premise of the video's story is a dancing epidemic has broken out in the world because people can't stop shuffling (dancing) to the song. The video begins with a black background and these words in red:
"On March 1, LMFAO's Redfoo and Sky Blu slipped into comas after excessive party rocking. The next morning their single "Party Rock Anthem" was released to the world. 28 Days Later"
I cracked up the first time I saw the music video. Referencing the horror of the 28 Days Later movie for a crazy concept like a dance epidemic seemed both clever and ridiculous to me. Also, Redfoo and Sky Blu strike me as funny in general.
As it turns out, a dance epidemic is not that far-fetched. According to today's Flashback Friday blog post at Discover Magazine's Seriously Science blog, in 1518 a dancing epidemic seized the the city of Strausbourg:
"'Some time in mid-July 1518 a lone woman stepped into one of its narrow streets and began a dancing vigil that was to last four or even 6 days in succession. Within a week another 34 had joined the dance. And by the end of August, one chronicler asserts, 400 people had experienced the madness, dancing wildly, uncontrollably around the city.” And this wasn’t a sedate affair; the dancers’ feet often ended up bruised and bloody. '" (Read more here.)
Doctors of the time attributed the dancing epidemic to everything from "hot blood" to an angry saint, and some people died.
This story is also chronicled in the history book A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518:
The true story of a wild dancing epidemic that brought death and fear to a 16th-century city, and the terrifying supernatural beliefs from which it arose. In July 1518 a terrifying and mysterious plague struck the medieval city of Strasbourg. Hundreds of men and women danced wildly, day after day, in the punishing summer heat. They did not want to dance, but could not stop. Throughout August and early September more and more were seized by the same terrible compulsion. By the time the epidemic subsided, heat and exhaustion had claimed an untold number of lives, leaving thousands bewildered and bereaved, and an enduring enigma for future generations. Drawing on fresh evidence, John Waller's account of the bizarre events of 1518 explains why Strasbourg's dancing plague took place. In doing so it leads us into a largely vanished world, evoking the sights, sounds, aromas, diseases and hardships, the fervent supernaturalism, and the desperate hedonism of the late medieval world. At the same time, the extraordinary story this book tells offers rich insights into how people behave when driven beyond the limits of endurance. Above all, this is an exploration into the strangest capabilities of the human mind and the extremes to which fear and irrationality can lead us.
I wonder did the producers of the "Party Rock Anthem" video know about this odd bit of history when planning the video. Hmm. I doubt they did.
Note: The "balter definition" picture comes from Divine Secrets of a Domestic Goddess's Facebook page.
Some students in a physics class in Chelyabinsk, Russia, thought war had broken out when this week's blasts from a meteor broke windows at their school. If such a cosmic event had happened here in the American South, I think our Fundamentalist Christians would have thought not war but the end of the world.
Read more at CNN where a "witness says flash shone 'like 10 suns,' felt shock wave pass through his body".
I have stopped paying attention to the schedule of heavenly phenomena because the few times I've gone out to see anything, I've seen nothing. The New Orleans sky remains clouded with city light pollution.
My cousin. L.C. of Texas (pre-Katrina of New Orleans), shared this funny story on Facebook about a true experience she had in Target. I think her story comments on a technological divide between generations:
The strangest thing happened to me this evening. . . . I went to Target to purchase a stationery set and had trouble finding any. So, I asked this twenty-something year-old for assistance. I described what I was looking for as a stationery or writing set, to write letters. She looked at me as if I were speaking Greek. The security guard along side her replied, "It's old school. You know these little colorful sheets of paper with pretty matching envelopes that are sold together in a set? People used them at one time to write letters." The young lady then replied, "Reeeally? Are you serious? I've never seen anything like that. OMG!" I walked the heck out of that store and went to Barnes & Nobles, where there was a SELECT few sets available. Are we that technology driven that we no longer consider writing a simple letter? This encounter makes me glad I turned down the GPS in my rental car to make use of a "paper" map. @-@
This story makes me think of all the things today's teens and twenty-somethings may have never heard of or seen that people over 35 have at least heard of someone using, carbon paper for instance (assuming they have not seen carbon checks). So many things have become obsolete in the last 20 years.
I'm in graduate school and most of my classmates are younger than my children. One of them, a young writer, questioned in class one day why typed manuscript pages are considered to be 250 words when that never works out for MS Word pages.
I said, "That's based on typewriters using the Courier font. If you double-space, have one-inch margins, and type in courier, a page will come out to 250 words."
Not only did she not believe me, she rolled her eyes as though I had said something obscene. The artsy types often don't like Courier, but seriously, she looked disgusted.
In any case, in the spirit of my cousin's no-stationery-for-you story, I am sharing this article from the New York Times, "The Fading Art of Letter Writing." I found it last year when I required my Freshman English students to include a letter with their final writing portfolios.
And while I'm at it, I should also say that bookstores may be on the way out as well, especially big chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, where my cousin took refuge.
When I first heard four hours ago that Steve Jobs died today, I couldn't take in the information. And I still can't take it in even though I knew about his battle against pancreatic cancer and his liver transplant. I figured when he resigned from Apple in August that his health was an issue. So, I'll just place a few links here.
I'm on Oprah's mailing list. There. I've confessed. I keep an eye on Oprah. Anyway, today, the subject line of one of her emails intrigued me: "Fat that makes you thin." So, I opened it. I think I was hoping to discover some new oil that tasted like butter but worked in the body like fiber. I can dream, can't I?
Instead, at Oprah.com, I found this tidbit:
Fat to Make You Thin After Johns Hopkins researchers genetically reprogrammed a small part of the DNA in the brains of rats, some of the animals' lumpy white fat transformed into brown fat, the type that actually burns calories. The scientists hypothesize that messages from the altered hypothalamus woke dormant brown-fat stem cells and prompted them to make new tissue. Afterward the mice gained little weight, even when fed fattening chow.
How Soon: The goal is to make these kinds of tweaks to human DNA within a decade.
As anyone who's read my BlogHer post, "The Cylons Cometh," may gather, I am leery of this coming age of changing the human body via high tech. I've read and seen too much science fiction about bad outcomes after scientists interfere in nature, I guess. However, what's scarier is that the bad outcomes are not all fiction, a fact which becomes clear when you look at the negative side effects that have sometimes resulted from scientific interference in the food industry.
And yet, I have told family and friends often that if science comes up with a way to change human DNA so that we don't gain weight so easily, I might be the first in line for that injection. I'm one of those people who can smell cake and gain weight.
Unfortunately, by the time science figures out how to turn bad, white, lumpy fat into the good brown stuff, I'll be too old to be a good candidate for genetic alteration. Sigh. Sucks for me, but it still may be good news for the folks under 30 right now.
The new world comes at us fast: Unhuman creatures, made to last. Pretty zombies of our minds— not of flesh, born of time— will count our days and nights as we inject nanobots to spite our blood. Desperate, we fight Death or God to overcome the soiled breath we have called life. Dust mocks us to the grave.
Is this our brave new world or the long song of decay, Yeats? No. It does not hold. The center still unfolds.
I got this in email yesterday, video at TED of Malcolm Gladwell in his talk, filmed at TED2004, in which he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of the books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.
LearnOutLoud.com has this accurate description of Gladwell's talk:
... he explores how the food industry went from looking for the perfect single spaghetti sauce recipe to a more diverse approach of creating a variety of spaghetti sauces to suit the desires of shoppers. He examines this trend through one of its main proponents Howard Moskowitz who used the field of psychophysics to create a variety of original sauces for Prego in the 1980s. Once this variability was proven to be successful it spread to the rest of the food industry, and Gladwell feels we are all happier for this increase in choices.
I think the crux of his message is about perception, how someone can open up an entire industry or maybe change the world because she/he looks at the world differently and ask better questions.
There's wisdom there. Asking the right questions, for instance, led NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon to discover the arsenic-chomping microbe GFAJ-1, altering conceptions of life as we know it. Textbooks may have to be rewritten.
Gladwell begins his story with Pepsi calling Muskowitz in to help the company improve its product by finding the "perfect" Pepsi flavor. Muskowitz tells them that what they want are "perfect Pepsis" (plural) not "one perfect Pepsi." According to Gladwell, Muskowitz "democratized taste."
The author also used a quote I appreciated: "To a worm stuck in horseradish, the whole world looks like horseradish," a saying attributed to a number of people but also considered to be a Yiddish proverb. The video was worth my time, and Gladwell is funny. Howard Muskowitz also co-authored the book Selling Blue Elephants.
Remember the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean nobody's following you"? Well, now, given the many security cameras in stores, RFID tags in clothing, trackers attached to shopping carts, the next time you get that creepy feeling that someone's watching, you'll probably be right.
What happens when a woman questions the status quo? Could it be that she can change the concept of life as we know it? It's possible.
Recent NASA news shook the web with the announcement that lead scientist and geomicrobilogist Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA’s Astrobiology Program has made a discovery that will cause textbooks to be rewritten. She found an organism at California's Mono Lake Research Area "that can utilize arsenic in place of phosphorus," reports Astrobiology Magazine and multiple other news sources.
I heard the news first in passing and confess that it didn't occur to me that the lead scientist was female, and that shows how my assumptions are still formed by the male-dominated science landscape of my youth.
It was NPR science expert Jon Hamilton answering his colleagues at "The Two Way" that made me realize a woman discovered GFAJ-1 (name given to new arsenic-chomping microbe).
"One of the truisms of science is that life isn't possible without six elements, one of which is phosphorus.
"But a young scientist at NASA wondered whether that truism was really true. She thought arsenic, which is chemically very similar to phosphorous, might work as a substitute.
"So she and other researchers began studying tiny organisms taken from the mud of Mono Lake in California. ...
And now we know she hit pay dirt.
On one level, her gender doesn't matter because a man, questioning one of science's assumptions, may have made the same discovery. On the next level, however, knowing that women sometimes seem invisible in the science and technologies communities, I think it's important to spotlight Wolfe-Simon's gender.
To clarify, her discovery is not a new life form as some news agencies and bloggers have reported. What's important is that GFAJ-1 can use something other than phosphorous to sustain itself and it incorporates that element, the toxin arsenic, into its DNA. Matthew Herper at Forbes says that "astrobiologists like the idea that life can be built with a completely different set of chemical building blocks because it means that life could then exist in all sorts of places that Earth-based living things would find intolerable," and the existence of GFAJ-1 qualifies as evidence of that.
However, he explains further that the microbe is probably doing something life on Earth did in its early stages, and so, "It’s not so much a new form of life as evidence that you can teach the old form of life new tricks." He says that Wolfe-Simon's paper at Science indicates she does not classify GFAJ-1 as a new life form, and he likes this view:
"Gerald Joyce, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, puts this really well in the New York Times, telling science reporter Dennis Overbye that these critters are stuck on the same tree of life as dinosaurs, plants, and yeast. “It’s a really nice story about [the] adaptability of our life form,” Joyce told Overbye. “It gives food for thought about what might be possible in another world.”"
You may also appreciate Jon Hamilton's full story on the discovery that ran on Morning Edition today.
As I finish this post, I notice that the first science reports popping up with this news were not written by women. What does that tell us?
From Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Book III, written in the 1700s. Gulliver is speaking of the science-obsessed Laputians, the people on the flying island called Laputa.
These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minutes peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. For if, in its perihelion, it should approach within a certain degree of the sun (as by their calculations they have reason to dread) it will receive a degree of heat ten thousand times more intense than that of red hot glowing iron, and in its absence from the sun, carry a blazing tail ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles long, through which, if the earth should pass at the distance of one hundred thousand miles from the nucleus, or main body of the comet, it must in its passage be set on fire, and reduced to ashes: that the sun, daily spending its rays without any nutriment to supply them, will at last be wholly consumed and annihilated; which must be attended with the destruction of this earth, and of all the planets that receive their light from it.
They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of these, and the like impending dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have any relish for the common pleasures and amusements of life. When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun’s health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet. This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear.
Do these people sound familiar? Can you apply these words to many of us today.
Drawing of Laputian with one eye turned inward and one upward comes from this PhotoBucket account.
Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.
One of the engineers in the MSNBC video talks about how dangerous human drivers are and how driverless vehicles might make the roads more safe. What do you think?
Astronomers, have discovered an Earth-like planet, according to Yahoo! News via the AP. It's called a "Goldilocks" as an allusion to "The Three Bear" story when Goldilocks talks about porridge being not too cold, not to hot but "just right."
I hope that human kind leaves this planet alone. This one is already stressed to the hilt from misuse. Why should another planet suffer?
Someone else considered that it would be just like us humans to want to start using up all our resources because we think we can go someplace else. I said, "Well, you know how people ran to the suburbs rather than face the problems in the cities they supposedly loved. ..."
Reading more of the article, I don't think we'll be able to raid that planet anytime soon or escape to it. The question is, will humans survive long enough on Earth to even consider inhabiting other planets?
Elsewhere, I considered Stephen Hawking's latest comments about intelligent design, his assertion that god didn't create the universe:
In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.
"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.
Do you agree, does the discovery of Earth-like planets mean there's no supreme being behind creation?
You may also read NASA's post about the Goldilocks planet.
I am trying to ignore all the doomsday scenarios arising as people project their fears onto the BP Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico. I prefer to keep a positive mindset, as reflected in one of my poems about the disaster. However, I do read about the fear such as those Gena Haskett explored in her post about doomers and the BP oil spill. Last night, I saw the following in my mail, a piece at Helium.com:
The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.
The writer has sources (you'll have to decide for yourself how credible they are), but seriously! What the hell does this guy expect anyone to do with this information?
The piece ends telling us that "Most experts in the know, however, agree that if the world-changing event does occur it will happen suddenly and within the next 6 months."
Uh-huh. If many experts are saying this, then why is it not more widely known? At this point, after waiting to find out each summer whether we'll have to evacuate for hurricanes and return to find homes underwater, any so-called news of our imminent destruction is par for the course.
Remember the old IBM commercial with Avery Brooks asking, "Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars."? And then he concludes, "You don't need flying cars" because you've got the Internet. Apparently the company Terrafugia disagrees, and so, it's offering a flying car for sale. According to the Huffington Post:
The company Terrafugia, based in Woburn, Mass., says it plans to deliver its car-plane, the Transition, to customers by the end of 2011. It recently cleared a major hurdle when the Federal Aviation Administration granted a special weight limit exemption to the Transition. ... the car-plane has wings that unfold for flying – a process the company says takes one minute – and fold back up for driving. ... The Transition is being marketed more as a plane that drives than a car that flies, although it is both.
You'll need a runway to get this sucker off the ground. Keep that in mind.
The HuffPo article puts the price at $194,00, more than a Hyundai. Computerworld says a two-seater will set you back about $148,000, and you'll need a sports pilot license to fly it.
After writing "The Cylons Cometh," which is about changes in science and technology over my lifetime, it seems right that I share this James Powderly video from The Creators Project. Powderly is "an engineer and designer who co-founder of Graffiti Research Lab, and most recently worked on the award-winning Eyewriter project."
In this video he talks about artist Toni Kwan, who's been paralyzed by ALS, being able to create art using a computer by moving their eyes. This is cool stuff, people.
I learned reading GreenLAgirl's post, "How to Snap Out of Gulf Oil Spill-Induced Depression" that BP has nixed using the oil booms made from human and animal hair collected by eager volunteers. It will use petroleum based synthetic boom instead, reported the Good blog on June 5.
I missed that news, and according to the DeepwaterHorizonResponse.com press release, this decision was made May 21. The release says field tests were conducted and the hair boom didn't work as well as the synthetic boom.
The Unified Area Command for the Deepwater Horizon/BP Response announces it will not use hair boom in its response efforts.
While this suggestion was submitted to BP as an alternative method for containing and recovering the oil spill, it was not deemed feasible after a technical evaluation.
In a February 2010 side-by-side field test conducted during an oil spill in Texas, commercial sorbent boom absorbed more oil and much less water than hair boom, making it the better operational choice.
“Our priority when cleaning up an oil spill is to find the most efficient and expedient way to remove the oil from the affected area while causing no additional damage. One problem with the hair boom is that it became water-logged and sank within a short period of time,” said Charlie Henry, NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator in Robert, La.
Commercial sorbent boom is readily available and scientifically designed and tested for oil containment and absorption on the water. Additionally, response teams are familiar with and properly trained to safely deploy, maintain, recover, and dispose commercial sorbent boom.
Individuals and organizations are asked to discontinue the collection of hair for the hair boom.
We appreciate the overwhelming response from the American and Canadian people who want to help in the response to this spill. Please continue to send suggestions for alternate cleanup solutions. All proposals are reviewed by technical experts for their feasibility and proof of application. Among those recommendations submitted was the successful subsea dispersion process that is now helping break up oil before it reaches the surface.
We encourage the public to continue volunteering to help with this response. People interested in volunteering can call 866-448-5816.
While I'm a little bummed because the hair collection was one of the few ways people could feel directly involved with helping to stop the oil from reaching beaches, wetlands, and more wildlife, which is why I wrote two posts about Matters of Trust collecting the hair stuffed oil boom, I realize if the hair boom did not work as well as the synthetic stuff, then it shouldn't be used. However, I'm not convinced oil booms of any kind will work well given the amount of oil that's under the surface in plumes.
Calculating the rise and fall of science fiction books, television shows, and movies, I've determined the obvious. Science fiction is no longer dismissed easily as distractions for geeky misfits or as fanciful tales for children, and that may be because the world's observed science fiction over the years become science fact.
So, here I am at 50, a Star-Trek-Twilight-Zone-Outer-Limits-Lost-in-Space-fed child of the 1960s. When I finished high school in the 70s, universities anxiously pitched computer science to graduates with the right test scores, hoping potentials could be drafted to the future. My generation may be part of the reason television's pushing out science fiction shows--the retired Lost; Fox's Fringe; CBS's FlashForward, which has been cancelled; and the return of V and Battlestar Galactica. The last on the list has given birth to a prequel, Caprica.
My generation grew up on television, pressed the on-buttons of the first personal computers, made playing video games the cool thing to do as we nursed our Pac-Man addictions, and passed our growing dependence on technology onto our children who flock to movie theaters jonesing for special effects and silver screen spectacles that make them believe not only can Superman fly, but so can they. And they dream it into their visual arts, dance, music, and want so much more.
My daughter, 29, is working on a novel about a female general in a matriarchal society, and I am working on a novel about humans in peril on another planet. She and I had a discussion a few months ago about technology. I said, "I look at the world and see gadgets that 30 years ago would have been called impossible.
We're seeing products and events today that were the stuff of science fiction in the fifties and sixties. I mean, I remember when the big deal was to have a car phone, a big clunky thing that cost too much and had to stay in the car. Here we are with cell phones almost anyone can purchase that are small enough to lose in a purse. Cell phones are like the size of Star Trek communicators.
She nodded. Living with me, she's watched me skip popular drama television to watch documentaries that plod along about evolution or mutation of the Y chromosome or the coming age of nanotechnology. She's joined her brother and me to watch films featuring Stephen Hawkings, not the popular stuff he's done lately, but the old stuff where a narrator's dry voice tells of black holes and Schrödinger's Cat and have interviewers with theoretical physicists who say Hawkings is not as bright as less popular physicists. She's been there when my son, now 19, has looked from the television to her to me to his own body and exclaimed, "OMG! We're a nerd herd."
Consequently, she was not surprised when I came home with a copy of the May 22-28 issue of The Economist with the cover "And Man Made Life: The first artificial organism and its consequences." Its editorial piece on that article is subtitled, "Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived."
TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.
Yes, my dear Virginia, humans are near designing artificial life on laptops from the comfort of their homes. As for the nightmare part, all I can say is think of the possibilities for larger creatures. Think of that movie Splice.
Science, Technology, and Bioethics
I talked to blogger Yvette Perry about this latest advance. In her own words, here's Yvette's background:
In my current job my research focus is research ethics, in particular how to educate and train graduate and undergraduate students in the responsible conduct of research. My educational background includes a graduate minor in Bioethics. In my PhD program I focused on the ethics of assisted reproductive technologies and adoption; my dissertation concerned the beliefs about genetics held by adoptive mothers.
Naturally, she's been keeping up with our brave march toward creating artificial life. Speaking specifically of the news in The Economist, I asked a few questions:
Nordette:What are the benefits to humans and what are the dangers of humanity's new frontier of creating life in the lab, even microbial life? What are the ethical concerns?
Yvette: Some of the articles about this do a pretty good job of summarizing some of the concerns. Life--as anyone who has seen Jurassic Park knows--always finds a way. This fact will complicate our ability to see into the future and be able to say what the consequences (intended and unintended) will be for synthetic life.
In talking about cases like this there is a danger of hyperbole--both in discussing the dangers and the benefits. A greater danger is that people who fall on both sides of that fence are not as scientifically literate as may be required for us to have fruitful conversations and debates on these topics.
Often popular media doesn't help matters. For example, I've read MSM reports that seem to give a picture of a couple of scientists whipping up a new life form. Kind of like Tony Stark in the new Iron Man movie creating a new element by himself in his basement lab out of some duct work--all in the space of a 2 or 3 minute music montage. In this case, though, the research team was huge (over 20 people are co-authors on the article), and they've been at work on this since Bill Clinton was in office. And the cost has been reported at something like $40 million dollars! In addition, a new "creature" was not created, as some people seem to have in their minds. Instead, a new genome was "built," it was inserted into the *cells* of an existing "creature" (Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria), and then the organism took directions from the new "instructions" and was able to successfully replicate.
All this is not to say that ethical worries are unwarranted. Just that a better-informed public might be better able to discuss them.
She's correct. The Economist editorial acknowledges:
... only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.
Science analysts attribute much of this rapid growth to computers, and the Internet, which lets us share more information quickly, and some researchers see the melding of human with computer as the logical next step.
Enter the Terminator or Neo, Our Savior
This kind of new era science--growing furniture to order, redesigning our genome to extend life, merging our brains with machines for enlightened brilliance--is also the stuff of a recent New York Times article, "Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday." It begins telling readers about the BrinBot, a rudimentary robot commanded by Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, that maneuvered through a room of students at Singularity University miles away from Brin himself. The robot "consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face."
... is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges. With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business and government, SU hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges. SU is based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.
It was founded, in part, by the brains behind Google. According to the NYT, the nine-day course where 40 people observed the BrinBot cost $15,000.
The people mentioned in the article are a who's who of high-tech, science, business, and even includes someone from the Department of Defense. One of the people mentioned often is Raymond Kurzwiel. As I read about him and his plan to live for 700 years and resurrect his father from the dead, I realized that I'd heard of him before. I recall he or something he did being featured on Oprah, and so I looked him up, googling his name with hers. He was featured once on Dr. Oz's radio show in 2008 and also in O Magazine under six beautiful minds, modern-day geniuses in 2007.
Singularity? You watch Star Trek; you know that word. As I read about Singularity University, I thought its goals encompass all aspects of the word's definitions. Its students are unique. Its professors speak of life extension, taking us to a point where life seems infinite and humans manipulate biology at will. At night, while the group drinks wine and snacks on popcorn, it discusses science projects only those with the intelligence of a gifted mathematician may grasp fully, such as the practical applications for determining what will happen when the derivative of humanity's journey as metaphor for a mathematical function becomes undefined, incomprehensible, which is sort of like the lab blowing up or our reaching the event horizon of a black hole. (Ow! That hurt my head.) Google founders, Google partners, people who've co-founded companies like PayPal and invest in Facebook have these conversations and take these classes. And I thought the old EPIC prognostication was spooky.
I read more and learned some of these people anticipate the demise of the rest of us, and the timeline for the Singularity's emergence is 20 years from now, around 2030, with a future of have and have-nots run by a superior intelligence, a human-machine hybrid. And I start to think these brainy people didn't get the Cylon memo from Battlestar Galactica survivors, and totally ignored what Sarah Connor had to say about SkyNet and the warnings from Neo and Morpheus in The Matrix. And those biologists working with them so did not read the "Patternist" series by Octavia Butler nor Mary Shelley's Frankenstein! Or maybe they did.
My mind floods with all the monster movies where the hero screams, "Noooooo!" at the Mad Scientist. They're trying to end the world, I think, but the adventurer in me thinks maybe not. Still, we've seen the movies, read the books. Do these trips into science ever end well?
I see benefits, but can't settle my disbeliever bone that rattles at the article's tidbits:
Devin Fidler, a former student, is in the midst of securing funding for a company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cement-like goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to low-income areas.
I sigh, "Well, that's good. Those eliminated laborers will need that low-income housing since they will have no jobs."
However, in their midst, they have an insurance man as well, "Guy Fraker, the director of trends and foresight at State Farm." He's interested in prevention, such as the possibility we can one day turn hurricanes away from cities. He's in the business of "cleaning up the mess of unintended consequences," he said. Given our present Gulf Coast BP oil disaster, I thought of externalities and what may die on the altar of human innovation.
Which brings me to the life work of Sonia Arrison, who the NYT tells us is a Singularity University founder and the "wife of one of Google's first employees." She's writing a book that, with the University's work, she hopes will prepare us--I mean the rest of you humans--for our inevitable leap in evolution.
I say the rest of you because unless her associate, Kurzweil, comes to visit me personally to redo my health regimen or upload my brain into a computer, and Jason Bobe then sends some of his friends to decode my genome and then hooks me up with folks at Amgen or some whiz kids in a lab redesigning genes "on the cheap," I don't anticipate being around here in 20 or more years, at least not in any shape that makes me a suitable guinea pig.
And yet, I recall a conversation with a domestic violence counselor in 2003. She told me to stop talking like I was going to die just because I'd received bad news about the state of my kidneys. I thought I was being practical to think in terms of not being around, which would lead me to plan for the inevitable and possibly leaving my children sooner than I hoped.
She said, "You have to be positive. I don't want to hear you talking in terms of not being around. For all you know, with all the advances in science, they could be growing kidneys in the lab by the time you need one."
It makes sense that she would think that way. We were in New Jersey, pharmaceutical alley, with biotech companies standing by. And while the bottom had fallen out of the dot com tech industry and Lucent had been wounded, the rise of technology and science bloomed, marking the air with its scent.
Rise of the Singularity People
I couldn't resist that subtitle, Rise of the Singularity People, because we have arrived at the place where science fiction seems wacky no more and ancient prophecies surface, making us pause. If you read the New York Time piece, you'll see that Singularity proponents are akin to religious zealots spreading their gospel. In fact, some of them, per the NYT article, even have what could be perceived by fundamentalist Christians as a threat to their existence in particular:
“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. (Richard A.) Clarke (a former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council and novelist) says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”
A decision point? The article steers away from the doom and gloom of cultural and religious warfare back to Kurzweil's positive vision of faster computers and greater minds helping us solve all the world's ills with science and technology.
It sounds like pipe dreams, but I remember reading about a time not to much before 1977, when I rejected a scholarship in computer science, that a man said "there was no reason for people to have computers in their homes," and an engineer challenged the value of micro chips. Skeptics on the cusps of new ages have always chuckled at the "dreaming idiots" in labs.
My father lives with me as well, an 89-year-old World War II veteran who shares stories about days gone by. As I watch this new day glimmer on the horizon, I recall a story he tells about his youth. I've got to record him soon telling how cars once had no glass windows but curtains, how you could dislocate your shoulder cranking one up, and without windshield wipers, drivers in his hometown of Vacherie, La., used to rub half an onion on the glass to deflect raindrops so they could see through rainfall. And he also tells this story:
I remember when we started hearing about automatic transmissions on cars. We said it would never happen. How can a car be as smart as a man and change gears by itself. That was something.
I talk to my children about this world and how the future of humanity seems to hang in the balance not by decisions from political leaders but by scientists and engineers working quietly in white coats or in jeans at laptop. We have discussed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or how some humans are willing to ignore the suffering of other humans for the sake of research, as in the case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which gave us the medical ethics doctrine of informed consent. Yvette said that we didn't learn as much as we should have from that case:
... especially when it comes to "vulnerable" research populations. For example, there are still issues even today with research being conducted on children (often Black and Hispanic) in foster care, and with research participants in developing nations.
I'm back to thinking of that conversation I had with my daughter. We talked about speculative fiction, and I said we may be seeing more books centered on magic and the supernatural because technology is advancing so quickly, there's hardly anything that can be written or put on the big screen that we haven't seen or don't suspect is just around the corner.
Watching a documentary once, I heard that rapid advances in technology became one of the challenges of the Star Trek franchise on TV. While it was once the pseudo-prophet of fantastic future, its writers found themselves hard-pressed to come up with anything hundred of years in the future that science didn't indicate was merely years away, downscaling of NASA programs notwithstanding. Consequently, I told her, we look to magic and the supernatural again to offer us the mysterious, the Harry Potters and Twilights.
"Yes," she agreed, "Mom, the more technology advances, the more it looks like magic too, and we have to dream beyond that."
This video shows Kurzweil explaining "the coming Singularity," both the upside and downside. According to the NYT article, some "Singularitarians aren’t all that fond" of the 62-year-old futurist. They think he's "hijacked the Singularity term." He also has a film, Transcendent Man, that delivers the message "Prepare to Evolve." Captain Kirk (William Shatner) follows him, and singer Stevie Wonder says Kurzweil has "a gift that he's been given and he uses it for the betterment of mankind." However, talk about strange bedfellows, Glenn Beck likes him too.
I might have missed this bit of news on physicist Stephen Hawking warning humans not to engage aliens if I didn't follow Star Trek's LeVar Burton. Earlier today on Twitter, he sent, "Hmm...! RT @jollyroger: Steven Hawking recommends humans should avoid talking to advanced alien species. http://bit.ly/dqnFUG."
Does this mean I need to follow JollyRoger as well, who I think is actually Tekzilla, or at least somebody promoting Tekzilla? After all @JollyRoger sent it first.
And OMG! Levar Burton is better looking now, at 53, than he was 30 years ago. Why don't I see any straight men in their 50s who look like this on the streets of New Orleans? Well, Burton is taken. So, moving on ...
Stephen Hawking
Yep, here is the beginning of the Hawking article in the UK Times.
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. (Read more)
Mediate posted on this as well, pulling this Hawkings quote:
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
And let's not forget Africa, bub.
So, he and astronomer Jill Tarter of SETI as well as other scientists, all believe we're not alone in the universe, but after that Tarter and Hawking's messages conflict. Tarter wants us humans to work together to find us some extraterrestrials. The sooner, the better. I don't know that Tarter wants us to over aliens sweet tea and cookies, but her talk about seeking out a alien meet-up was definitely less gloomy.
Hawking leans more toward our first contact being like the movie Independence Day or ABC's resurrection of V and its sinister aliens who want something from us we can't afford to give. Maybe they have that cookbook from the Twilight Zone, To Serve Man. Yes, Hawking thinks that if aliens ring Earth's doorbell they're going to come, take what they want, and leave us stripped of our goodies like a, um, ... you fill in the blank.
He'll be sharing more in a new show on the Discovery Channel, Into the Universe.
Stephen Hawking hosts an epic new kind of cosmology series, a Planet Earth of the heavens. It takes the world's most famous scientific mind and sets it free, powered by the limitless possibilities of computer animation. Hawking gives us the ultimate guide to the universe, a ripping yarn based on real science, spanning the whole of space and time — from the nature of the universe itself, to the chances of alien life, and the real possibility of time travel. (Discovery Channel's description)
Into the Universe premiered last night, April 25. I'll have to catch it on demand or in a rerun. It came on first at 9:00, and I can't missTremé on HBO. Seriously, Tremé is the first time I've seen a show about New Orleans done right.
Fortunately, episode one of this Discover series repeats tonight.
