Nature seems far more experimental at some level than we are used to. Consider for example Felis Catus (nee Felis Domesticus). They have only been hanging out with humans for ~10K years when they apparently self domesticated from Felis Libyca/Felis Sylvestris (it’s all about the mousies). There are SOME early traditional breeds of Asian cat e.g. Siamese cats (first mentioned 14th Century) and Japanese Bobtail (6th century prints) that have been around long times. Specific breeding other than perhaps for mousing ability, really only starts with cat shows the first in England being 1871. So 150 years of specific cat breeding. Currently TICA (one of several Cat fancy organizations) lists 73 breeds ( https://tica.org/ticas-breeds/browse-all-breeds/ ). The variance is not as great as say canines (that we’ve been hanging out with for 50K years and breeding selectively for over 15K years), but its starting to get some of the oddball shapes (e.g. Pixies or Munchkins) that resemble some of the dog breeds (Corgi/Dachshund) we are familiar with in their particulars. I suspect the evolutionary forces on our ancestors and their “kissing” (well this is a family blog so we’ll leave it at that 🙂 ) cousins were far greater than what we impose on show cats. I suspect that another factor that has significantly changed Anthropology (and the study of any set of animal clades) is the ability to map and recognize genes. This let us realize that H. Neanderthalis was the likely source of the M1CR gene that defines human redheads. Not sure if there is any trait that we directly trace to H. denisoviensis but maybe those genes are not quite so showy
Category: Science
Eloi to Silicon-Morlocks
I find archaic human paleoanthropology fascinating. The impact of better radioactive dating methods and now, DNA analysis has had a remarkable effect on the state of our knowledge. Previously poorly-dated specimens were used to justify very late dates for when Homo sapiens, his predecessor H. heidelbergensis and the even earlier H. errectus left Africa. More accurate information leaves it an open question whether sapiens evolved in Africa or Eurasia. And the presence of H. neanderthalensis and H. denisoviensis and possibly other sister species of H. sapiens scattered around in Eurasia makes the point even more acute that our species radiated and developed and then remixed inside of Eurasia. And the fact that all traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA are lacking completely in Africa only highlights the fact that Africa became a sort of isolated group of populations separate from the evolution that was taking place to the north.
What strikes me as very interesting is just how quickly humans change in reaction to their environment. Just look around at the appearance of modern humans the world round. Various types of Africans, Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Middle Easterners, South Asians, East Asians, the Australian aborigines and the New Guineans, the Native Americans, the South Sea Islanders and many other groups have differentiated from each other over the course of not millions of years but thousands. Our hair, eyes, skin, the shapes of our faces and many other traits have changed in order to adapt to our environments. Even something as fundamental as blood types are affected. We are an adaptable species. And I think that because of human squeamishness we have been less than logical with our designation of what is a species, subspecies or race when it comes to man.
After all, we’ve managed to crowd all of the “races” of man into one species without the thought of sub-specifying ourselves. But the Neanderthals and Denisovans (whom we know bred with humans) we kick into separate species altogether. That seems a bit much. I remember in old books we sometimes saw Homo sapiens neanderthalensis as a subspecies of ours. Surely our “kissing cousins” deserve at least that small a consideration for providing us with a few percentages of our genetic material (not to mention red hair!).
In general, I’m not willing to toss any of our closest relatives under the bus. H. heidelbergensis and H. errectus were present in Eurasia for a very long time along with these later editions and what seems reasonable is that the same kind of interbreeding and intergradations occurred at earlier times spawning other “species” of Homo that we either can’t distinguish or haven’t found yet. And whether these archaic humans met in the Mediterranean or the more northern regions the same kind of mixing and changing was going on.
So, man is ever-changing and since our brain is our defining facet it makes sense that changes in our brains is where we’ll see evolution hard at work. The only question is whether this evolution will be untrammeled or will it be directed. Artificial intelligence is the prize that technologists and industrialists tout as the future. Will our brains be replaced with silicon? Will we be turned into zoo animals that eventually will be euthanized when we’ve been rendered powerless?
I tend to think not. I’m betting on the hominins. For all our bad habits and shortcomings (and there are many) I think there is a greatness in our line. I think we can still find our purpose on this planet. And I don’t want to disown any of our kin here on Earth. We fight each other and hate each other for our differences and just because we want each other’s stuff. But that is part of being human. We still have time to figure out a way to get along regardless of all our differences. And as our brains get stronger so we will. We have some important fate ahead of us. And I doubt that it involves becoming Eloi to Silicon-Morlocks.
Sort of a Personal Butterfly Effect
When I was about ten, I got my hands on a box full of books that came from the library of a New Jersey Catholic High School in the Philadelphia area. It had a lot of stuff I wasn’t interested in but it did have a few items that I was. There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Screwtape Letters.” The first book whetted my appetite for fantasy and the latter was an oddity that combined a comedic take on the devil with theology that didn’t currently interest me.
But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy. It was called “Neighbors of the Earth.” It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine “Sky and Telescope” that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system. For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment. But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the “facts” I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories. The statement that, “the atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide” seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee. Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind. Then, the article, “Is There Vegetation on Mars?” provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.
But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles. An article called, “Internal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn” introduced me to the concept of “metallic solid hydrogen.” The idea that a gas could be turned into a solid metal was so exotic to my juvenile understanding of science that it probably sparked my first wishes to understand the mysteries of chemistry.
But looking at the book recently, I noticed that I never was very interested in the mysteries that surrounded the relatively recently discovered planet Pluto. Even back then, the fact that Pluto seemed much too small to account for the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune was very disturbing to the astronomical community. So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto’s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system. There was an “experiment” with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how “specular reflection” could make a larger object look much smaller. I’ll have to say it wasn’t very convincing. And this made me think of all the current theories using dark matter and dark energy that are being used to explain measurements that defy the current models of how the universe works. And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.
But it’s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings. Sort of a personal butterfly effect.
Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 07NOV2025 – FTL Drives
Well at least there is a theoretical model for an FTL drive the Alcubierre drive( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive ) proposed in 1994. At present it has so many reasons we can’t do it (several different flavors of unobtainium, VERY large energies that even Antimatter would struggle to provide, and a likelihood that you can’t really steer the darned thing once you start it) that it is practically unachievable. Depending how all this dark matter/dark energy stuff falls out (and that is beginning to look pretty dodgy) things may get far better or far worse.
That said an antimatter drive (even a pulse antimatter drive, essentially an Orion drive using small matter antimatter/matter explosions) would be a godsend for reaching Mars the Asteroids or any other celestial body outside the Earth/Moon pair. Currently a Hohmann Orbit (minimum energy) to Mars runs 8-9 months of time and the window is only open every two years (26 months I think). At .01 G (a centi-G engine) this takes 64-112 days i.e. 2-4 months and position only affects time. At .1g (a deci-G engine) this drops to 36-76 HOURS (i.e. 1-3 days). The first matches early trips from Europe to the New World (e.g. the Mayflower took 70 days) which were ultimately commercially viable and establishing colonies was possible. The second is like rail trips across the US at rail’s peak in the 40’s and 50’s. That totally changes the relationship between Earth and the colonies.
Ad Astra per Aspera!!!
Which Way; Out or In
So, yesterday I attached that discussion about how matter/anti-matter annihilation could theoretically act as an energy source with a high enough power density to allow for interplanetary space travel and possibly interstellar travel. Now something like this thought experiment is so nebulous in its details that even calling it a low probability outcome is being way too optimistic. The idea that a ship would contain some huge number of ultra tiny anti-matter snow balls in storage for perhaps decades of travel seems ludicrously improbable. Especially since any one anti-matter snow ball will immediately destroy the space craft if containment is breached for any of a million reasons.
And yet, in a way, the very difficulty of the process somehow makes me think that somewhere hidden in this improbability is an elegant solution to the problem that will be discovered when it becomes time for such a process to move us forward. It can’t and won’t happen now because we don’t need it now. Going to Mars or Ganymede isn’t currently something that humanity needs badly. We don’t even need a Moon base. But eventually all three of these celestial locations will become important to humanity. When or how these places will become critical is indeterminate. But just because we don’t know the when or the how makes no difference. We went to the Moon in 1969 because German missile technology and American technological curiosity collided during the Cold War and handed us space flight.
Something else will come along and we’ll stumble into the next piece of the puzzle while working on something completely different. And this pattern will repeat itself over the course of a decade or two and, then voila! A matter/anti-matter rocket will be tested in space. And then twenty years later it will become old-hat.
Does this mean that I believe that we can do anything? No. We’re not God or all powerful. Notice that I haven’t stated that faster than light travel (FTL) is possible. As far as I know humans lack the ability to reprogram the universe to increase the speed at which matter may travel to something faster than 186,000 miles per second and probably never will. But reaching a technical solution that allows us to get as close to that limit as possible is what we’ll do.
What I envision is a robot ship powered by matter/anti-matter annihilation. The first applications for this capability will be unmanned reconnaissance of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt. And this will be followed by manned missions. Eventually, there will be a robot mission to the nearest star. What we find there may decide the trajectory of our race into the unforeseeable future. If we stumble upon a planet with life already present then that planet will become the focus of the imagination of our world. And eventually we will send men there.
But if we search planet after planet and never find life of any kind that may cause mankind to turn inward and look for progress of a different kind. And maybe that is the higher wisdom.
Are Ya Daft Man, Yuh Canna Meex Matter and Anti-Matter Cold!
Apparently you can! As I finish out my forced confinement I leave this somewhat interesting discussion on how matter/anti-matter annihilation might actually allow deep space travel (theoretically). And despite what Scotty thinks, the anti-matter fuel is stored at 1 degree absolute! That’s pretty cold. Enjoy!
I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That
It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich. Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, “raining sekhmets and werewolves.” I had a late workday today so I’m relatively out of material for my post but it occurred to me that where AI really shows its usefulness is in answering specific technical questions on computer languages and programming.
For instance, I haven’t been using Excel much at all lately but I needed to put together a multi-sheet Excel workbook. I forgot some of the formulas I liked using to produce certain results and instead of searching around on YouTube for some Indian programmer to explain in extremely hard to understand English I asked Grok. And it printed out precisely clear, concise and accurate information on exactly what I was looking for. Well, in my book that’s a valuable tool. I didn’t ask it to make my spreadsheet for me because that wouldn’t help me remember the formulas. And if I made it write the spreadsheet it would definitely do it differently from how I would want it and then I’d need to tweak a bunch of stuff. Grok is like a notebook of all the hints and shortcuts for all of the things I want to do.
And now I hear that Grok will be Wikipedia too. Of course, it doesn’t literally have to be an enormous encyclopedia like Wikipedia. It’s just this endless cloud full of every single document in the world and an LLM to organize it as needed for whatever question is asked. From what I’ve already heard and seen it’s probably orders of magnitude better than the left-leaning bias built into Wikipedia. So, goodbye Wikipedia!
I think this guy Elon Musk is going in the right direction. Stop trying to gaslight us and tell us what’s good for us and instead provide valuable tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed by facts. I’m sure that AI will cause incredible change and a good amount of disruption in our world. But I’m also pretty sure that it will create enormous opportunities too. With the right sort of political and social management AI can be an extremely valuable tool. At least I find that to be the case. After all, when high level programs came along that could simulate a physical system like a pipe network, it didn’t put chemical and mechanical engineers out of business. It became a tool for making engineers more efficient. It allowed them to crank out much more work and more accurately. The same will happen for almost every application where having the accumulated knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips allows us to make better and faster decisions.
Of course, that is what is possible if those in charge use these tools for our advancement. If instead they attempt to form monopolies where machines replace humans in some kind of replay of the 2000’s where corporate America tried to replace American industry with cheap Chinese labor then we’ll be forced to do what Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000 when he slipped his gears. We’ll have to unplug him.
What More Could Hal-9000 Want from His Crew?
I was talking to a fellow I know the other day and we got around to, of course, artificial intelligence. And he mentioned a book, which is probably very popular, that stated that because of the capability of AI replacing almost all human work, the government will have to pay us for just sitting around. And I revolted at that idea.
Sure, maybe it’s cost effective and in line with how automation is replacing humans. But I saw it as an awful idea. Paying people to do nothing is truly a frightening fate. It brings to my mind the fictional Eloi from H.G. Well’s, “The Time Machine.” Useless people sitting around doing nothing while the real work is done by monsters (of whatever kind) is dystopian to an extent that I cannot believe sane people would accept.
Now, I don’t have all the answers. Obviously technical progress will occur. It’s inevitable. But progress cannot earn that name if it entails the destruction of human happiness. And living like some kind of lab animal with nothing useful to do all day cannot be called happiness. And so, I think we’ve reached a place in human technological ability where we have to start justifying what we create not just by how it increases productivity but also how it maximizes human happiness. And I don’t mean the kind of happiness associated with someone playing a video game. Human beings need to accomplish tasks. This goes for both work and personal activities. We like to work with our hands and our minds and we’re good at it (to greater and lesser extents depending on the individual). But you might say it would be impossible to both efficiently produce the goods and services that our society requires and also maximize the job satisfaction of people.
Well, no. After all the very machines that are supposedly smart enough to replace all of us are also smart enough to optimize algorithms based on human job satisfaction to design the processes and work assignments that would allow this type of job customization to exist. Industry can be forced to accommodate human beings into their processes. But in the future, it won’t be a voluntary acceptance. We will have to use government to force corporations to utilize humans instead of automation. This will involve using the tax code and other manipulations to incentivize this policy. And it will take time to force this mindset to permeate the workplace. But it will be possible to do. Because in a democracy we have the upper hand if we know how to use it. And there’s nothing antithetical to capitalism about this. As long as it’s a level playing field all the companies can compete to make a human-friendly environment and still make whatever profits they want. They just won’t be allowed to do it without human employees.
And what will happen is the companies who provide the most job satisfaction to their employees will preferentially get and retain the highest quality employees. What more could Hal-9000 want from his crew?
Drilling for Megawatts
Human beings depend on energy. It’s almost what makes us human. When we discovered fire, we became truly the masters of creation and the apex of the animal kingdom. You can imagine our cave dwelling ancestors wielding a flaming torch in the face of a cave bear or a saber-tooth tiger and living to tell the story.
So, what should be our attitude about the prospect of running out of energy? Well, windmills and solar panels don’t seem to be the future. Of course, if photovoltaic cells become more efficient and cost effective, maybe they will be a big part of the answer. But I tend to think there will be more cost-effective options. And this is long term. Short term we’ll probably be using uranium fission technology to produce power but sometime in the future we’ll run out of recoverable uranium and need to move on.
As I’ve reiterated endlessly, I think that geothermal energy will be a very important source of power in the future. The earth has an enormous heat source to be tapped into for our energy needs.
And now, finally, results are moving beyond the research and pilot plant stages:
“Leading Companies in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) or advanced variants like closed-loop or superhot rock geothermal, involve drilling wells several kilometers deep to access hot rock formations, fracturing them if needed, and circulating fluids to extract heat for electricity generation. These technologies aim to scale beyond traditional hydrothermal resources, enabling baseload, carbon-free power almost anywhere.
As of October 2025, commercialization is accelerating due to oil/gas-derived drilling innovations, major funding, and partnerships with tech giants like Google and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Based on recent developments, the companies closest to large-scale commercialization (defined here as multi-MW projects entering operation or construction by 2026–2028) are those with demonstrated pilots, secured financing, and firm power purchase agreements (PPAs). Below is a summary table of the top contenders, followed by details.
These companies stand out for their progress toward utility-scale electricity production (tens to hundreds of MW), distinguishing them from firms focused on shallow heating/cooling (e.g., Dandelion) or conventional geothermal (e.g., Ormat, Calpine). Progress is driven by DOE’s FORGE initiative and private investments exceeding $1B since 2020.
- Fervo Energy (USA): The frontrunner in EGS commercialization, Fervo adapts shale-fracking techniques for deep (up to 15,765 ft) horizontal wells in hot granite, achieving flow rates over 80 liters/second—surpassing commercial benchmarks. Its 2023 Nevada pilot (3.5 MW) powers Google’s data centers and demonstrated energy storage capabilities. The Cape Station project in Utah, fully funded at $206M in June 2025, targets 400 MW Phase I by 2026, with multi-GW expansion. This positions Fervo to supply 24/7 power to AI/data centers at costs competitive with coal.
- Eavor Technologies (Canada): Specializing in closed-loop systems that avoid hydraulic fracturing by using insulated U-shaped boreholes (up to 10 km deep), Eavor enables site-agnostic deployment. Its New Mexico demo reached 250°C at 18,000 ft in 2024, proving scalability. The Geretsried project (Germany) will deliver 65 MW baseload power by 2027, with heat co-production for district heating. Backed by $991M, Eavor has operational pilots in Alberta (2019) and Colorado (2023), making it a leader in Europe and North America.
- Quaise Energy (USA, MIT spinout): Focused on ultra-deep drilling (20 km) to access superhot rock (>500°C) for 10x higher energy output per well, Quaise uses gyrotron millimeter waves to vaporize rock, bypassing mechanical bits that fail in extreme heat. A 2025 demo drilled 387 ft at 16 ft/hour through basalt, the deepest with this method. Targeting steam extraction in 2026 and commercial ops in 2028, it plans to retrofit fossil plants globally, with $91M raised and DOE support. This could unlock 5,500 GW in the U.S. alone.
- GreenFire Energy (USA): Its GreenLoop closed-loop tech retrofits existing deep oil/gas/geothermal wells (3–5 km) without stimulation, reducing costs and risks. Partnerships with DoD (e.g., California naval base) and GeoZone aim for 200 MWe by 2027, leveraging idle infrastructure for quick deployment. Selected for DOE’s 2025 next-gen initiatives, it’s ideal for scaling in oil-rich basins like California’s Geysers field.
- Sage Geosystems (USA): Developing GGS, which stores excess renewable energy by pressurizing deep fractures (kilometers below surface) with water, then releasing for on-demand power—acting as a geothermal battery. A 2025 Meta contract for 150 MW highlights its commercial traction, with DoD pilots in Texas. Using proven fracking tech, Sage could integrate with wind/solar for hybrid grids by 2027.”
Now it goes without saying that geothermal energy is still in its infancy and no one knows what kinds of technical problems will surface (pun intended). But at the same time the problems will mostly involve well understood parameters like material of constructions to deal with the pressures, temperatures and corrosion problems inherent in circulating water and steam in a bore-hole. But these are not mysterious or insoluble problems. They are the bread and butter of material scientists and engineers. I am also interested to see that tech companies are financing some of these ventures in order to control their electric power supply in the face of power shortages and interruptions associated with the “green energy revolution” that many of us currently suffer under. Imagine that!
Reprieve, Reprieve. Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight, Mr. Snedrig
As I have whined interminably about, I am in the midst of a long, boring and exhausting project from which death would be a welcome release. But today I unexpectedly discovered that I have a two-day respite from this miserable existence. I have Friday and Saturday off. And just like that my heart is full of joy. I can sleep in tomorrow morning, maybe as late as 6:30 a.m.! “I’m as light as a feather! I’m as happy as an angel! I’m as merry as a schoolboy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”
Seriously, when some onerous burden is unexpectedly lifted off your shoulders, even if only for a little while, it changes your attitude. Because now the thing that you had seen as impossibly hard has been cut into a smaller piece. It can never now be what it was. It is diminished. Even if the diminution is minor, the psychological effect is great.
I will spend tomorrow weighing some decisions that I need to make. I have a lot of factors and unknowns that need to be considered and somehow weighed against each other. I have to perform the hardest of all tasks; think intelligently.
But all that is okay. This two day carve out of time is a perfect interval to look carefully at the problem and make some kind of decision. Maybe it won’t be definitive but at the very least I’ll be able to define the time parameters needed to answer all the questions. And to me that is an important milestone in any project.
I was watching a YouTube video from someone who argued that human colonization of other planets was highly improbably and interstellar colonization was completely impossible. For interplanetary human travel he pointed to the health problems associated with extended time in freefall and the damage to human health from radiation that permeates the environment beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. In addition to these problems, for the case of interstellar travel, he pointed to the issues that a twenty-thousand-year multi-generational space ship would create for the humans within. First off, he reiterated that all health issues would be magnified by several orders of magnitude over such an enormous length of time. But he also stressed that a flight of that duration would see a genetic selection among the crew for individuals with anti-social or even psychopathic tendencies. He predicted that well before arrival, the crew would have sunk into barbarism and cannibalism. Now that’s a scenario I can stand behind!
Anyway, it was very interesting, if a little bit depressing. One thing I learned is that mammals brought onto the International Space Station to test the effects of microgravity on reproduction had a 100% rate of birth defects due to developmental anomalies caused by the lack of gravity. Well, all this negativity sure puts a damper on a lot of my favorite science fiction stories from the golden age of science fiction. Where does that leave “Red Planet,” “Farmer in the Sky” and “The Rolling Stones?” Well, maybe we can find a workaround.