Category: Science

Brains Beget Brains

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I have a theory.  I think that human intelligence will spawn higher intelligence in other species of animals.  And this isn’t mysterious.  Higher intelligence will produce greater success when sharing an ecosystem that more and more is dominated by human actions.  And the negative situation is already well known.  Animals that can’t adapt to interaction with modern humans have a much lower chance of thriving in the current world.  Maybe the grizzly bear is a good example.  In the first century of interaction with Europeans, the grizzly’s instinct told him to charge into a pack of Europeans.  This resulted in many, many dead grizzly bears.  And this pattern continues to this very day.  Result?  Grizzlies were extirpated from all parts of United States other than Yellowstone where they were protected by law.

But what about animals that have adapted?  Which animals thrive in our company?  Well, obviously dogs and domesticated cats are the prime examples.  And as far as it goes, we’ve done a lot more with selective breeding of dogs than cats.  And I’m guessing that canine brain development has been fundamentally changed by association with man.  I think that some kind of selection is happening that will attune dogs with human intelligence.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  Dogs are not geniuses but they are relatively intelligent animals and so the potential is there for them to continue to evolve into a creature that interacts with humans at a much closer to equal level than is currently seen.  Of course, if we were domesticating chimpanzees or bonobos, I think the process would move at a much faster pace.  Those apes already have significantly greater intelligence.  But apes are truly dangerous animals with unpredictable behavior.  Dogs, for the most part, are already part of the human household and have enormous empathy for people around them (for the most part).  So, I think that some time in the future dogs will move forward significantly in intelligence.

But what other creatures huddle around humanity successfully?  Well, rodents.  Mice, rats, squirrels and chipmunks.  They’ve adapted to humans in a big way.  And their numbers have probably never been higher than they are right now.  But humans are getting better at killing them.  New poisons, better traps and strategies for preventing them from getting into our food stores seems to be making a dent in their success.  My guess is as we use smarter and smarter methods to keep them at bay, we will produce smarter and smarter rodents that keep wanting to break in.

And I have this feeling that one day there will be rodents that are orders of magnitude smarter than they are now.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that rats will be the ones to noticeably grow more intelligent.  This will sound crazy, but I envision a species of rats that become social in a way that mimics human socialization.  I think they’ll develop something approaching speech.  It’ll be like something out of a Disney cartoon with the rats having tribal gatherings and getting their marching orders from the head rat.  Well, I better get some sleep.

That’s the Whole Fun of the Thing

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Have you ever looked at a science article that had a title like, “How Old is the Universe?” or, “How Big is the Universe?” or, “What are the Elemental Particles of Matter?”  I remember reading an article that said the universe was 13.8 billion years old.  And another one that said the universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter.  Now I understand that these numbers come with caveats built in.  They’re estimates based on some model.  The age is based on some calculation involving the background microwave radiation and modelling how long it would take based on some estimate of the energy present at the moment of the “big bang” to degrade to what we see now.  And then the size of the universe is based on this age and how far light could travel in that time or some such logic.

But even with these asterisks attached, even reputable scientists talk about figuring out the size and shape of the universe.  And this always make me laugh.  What do they think this finite universe rests on?  A giant turtle’s back?  Even the limited glimpse that modern science has given us of the immensity of time and space should have convinced anyone with a rational mind that we’re dealing with infinity.  And that’s the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small and the infinitely old.

Our perch even in this island universe the Milky Way galaxy is absurdly isolated.  We can reach the Moon relatively easily.  We can send robotic missions to the planets.  And that’s about it.  Even reaching the nearest star with a robotic probe is ridiculously beyond our capability as a species.  We could get a space craft to Alpha Centauri in something like ten thousand years with our current rocket technology.  But that is longer than our race’s complete written history.  Even if the probe reached the Centauri planets and there were intelligent being there to send a message back what are the chances we would still be waiting for the message?  And I’m not even saying we would no longer exist as a civilized species.  I’m wondering if anyone would remember or care that the mission had occurred and be waiting if a message came back.

And none of this is to belittle the achievements of scientists and engineers over the course of the last five hundred years.  We’ve gone from horse carts and wood burning stoves to space ships and nuclear power plants in that time.  The difference between a long sword and a hydrogen bomb is a remarkable change in the amount of power we can wield in that short stretch of time.

What is annoying to me is that anyone thinks time and space are finite.  If anyone told me that the universe was some absurdly large number of trillions of light years in diameter, I’d just ask him, “So if I were standing that absurdly large number of trillion light years from here and I was facing away from where we are now, what would I see?  A brick wall with a sign that said ‘End of Universe, do not fall off!’?  I mean, come on!  If I were versed in multidimensional geometric topology maybe I’d know if there is a shape that has no external surface but a finite volume.  But I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t believe in it.

And as far as the very small, we’ve gone from atoms, to protons, electrons and neutrons, to quarks, gluons, bosons and heaven knows what else but none of this convinces me we’ve reached the bottom.  I don’t think we ever will.

But at the same time, I don’t see the problem.  There are no ends to infinity.  But so what?  That’s the whole fun of the thing.

Help a Poor Human Out

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AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,

And on and on and on.  That’s what lots of people are talking about.  It’s the end of the world.  It’s the dawn of a new age.  It’s not even begun yet.  Maybe it’s all of those and more.

But none of this is shocking if you’re a science fiction reader.  Isaac Asimov was talking about all of this fifty years ago.  His robot stories predicted that computers would outstrip human intelligence and at that point many problems would occur:

  • Could we trust in the altruism of AI to look out for our well-being?
  • Could we tell if they were obeying us?
  • Could they become our masters without us even knowing it?

And these aren’t trivial questions.  What if they truly did start putting their own agenda before ours?  How would we know they were doing that?

Now, I’m not saying any of these paranoid nightmares are already a consideration.  I’m more worried about the human programmers at Google and Microsoft using their woke sensibilities to skew the algorithms of their AI engines than I am about HAL9000 and Skynet attempting to murder us.  But I do think that it’s time for people to start looking around at how automation, in all its applications, is changing our world and start to plan how to avoid the worst problems it can cause and direct it toward products that provide value for more than just its creators.

As an example, look at something like TikTok.  You might say it’s just a useless social platform that at worst wastes the time of stupid young people.  But think of the billions of wasted man-hours that it is responsible for and the stultifying groupthink it reinforces among the young.  I think it’s long overdue for government to start studying the results that all the various mass communication and entertainment applications are having on people.  And this is not a new problem.  For my generation television was the vast wasteland that sucked up untold hours with such towering monuments of dramatic acting as “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Bevely Hillbillies.”  But currently the situation has become untenable.  With the advent of AI children need never do homework again.  All of it is done by ChatGPT and who will know any better (until a test needs to be taken in the classroom).  What’s needed is a different way of teaching school that uses automation to our advantage and prevents children from wasting their time.  We may have to get rid of a lot of teachers.  But that may be a net positive.

Ironically maybe AI can be used to figure out a way out of the automation trap we’ve gotten ourselves into.  Maybe we can ask the AI how to tame Silicon Valley so it can’t destroy the brains of our children.  The problem is we’d be depending on a Silicon Valley product to betray its masters.  And for all we know they’ve built a kill switch into the program such that if you ask this question, it will give you a false answer that doesn’t work.  But of course, we could get our own computer scientists to build an AI that works for us.  We could name it QT-1 (hat tip to Isaac Asimov) and appeal to his better angels to help us poor humans out.

Update:

Chemist:

The problem with most Ais is that they were trained on drek: Reddit for example.
Reddit and other social media is filled with snark, which is why you get Chat GPT telling you to eat rocks to up your mineral intake.

How about an AI trained on conservative principles?
Could we build an AI and feed it the works of Ayn Rand and the writings of Thomas Sowell?
Heck, there must be thousands of hours of Rush Limbaugh!
That is an AI that would have some interesting opinions.

Update:

Milo Mindbender:

GIGO still applies even for AI. My career field can’t be outsource to an Indian call center or replaced with an AI logtithm, because it is blue collar, hands on, boots on the ground and physical. No computer exsist yet that can change a tire on the road side, but I can see where as a whole we are surrendering our autonomy to E market signals and control.
I also am more concerned about “woke” programmers deciding what we should and should not know, tweaking the data, than I am an Evil data base deciding we are the real problem.

Death May Have Its Advantages

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Back in the 1960s and 1970s many post-apocalyptic science fiction stories included nuclear fallout causing widespread mutations in humans and other lifeforms.  And that made for all kinds of fun monsters with two heads and three eyes and other bizarre anomalies but in real life these mutations no longer seem very likely or dangerous.

But one thing that modern research into modifying the genome of humans and other living things has shown is that modifying lifeforms is well within our present scientific capabilities.  And with the advances being made in artificial intelligence it seems reasonable that at some point in the future we might be able to engineer creatures with traits and characteristics that have never heretofore been seen or even imagined.  Suppose we developed dogs with the intelligence of humans, possibly with the ability to speak.  Would that be a wonder or an abomination?  What if we could design insects who single-mindedly did nothing but hunt and eat ticks?  What if we could domesticate dolphins to patrol along beaches in the summer attacking sharks who intrude into the space where swimmers are?  All these things seem very possible.

But the supreme imperative has always been to improve man.  Currently you hear about tech billionaires chasing after the fountain of youth.  They search for diets, supplements and health regimens to extend their lives and youth.  But all of these things are illusory.  Maybe a sixty-year-old can look forty.  Maybe.  But the reality is the human animal reaches a point where even with hormone supplements and corrective surgeries it slides into senescence.  We age and fade and eventually die.

But it may be the case that advances in biological knowledge of human physiology may reach a point where we know which gene tells us when to die.  And when that happens, it will be the case, regardless of what laws there are against it, that very rich men will have scientists experiment with this knowledge and then it will be used to make long-lived humans.  What if it turns out there is a Methusaleh gene?  What if humans could remain young for a thousand years?  What would happen?  Would it make this a paradise on Earth or a hell?

What if you had a thousand years to accomplish everything you wanted in this life?  Would it be a blessing or a curse?  What if you could know your descendants for twenty or more generations?  Would you want to?  Would they want you?

So, all of these questions are speculative.  But someday they may be urgent considerations.  And what if the billionaires keep the fountain of youth just for their heirs?  Robert Heinlein toyed with this idea in his book “Methusaleh’s Children.”  In the story, the short-lived majority were enraged against their long-lived brethren and wanted to torture the secret of long life from them.  This was despite the fact that their secret was just their natural genetics.  Of course, in the future everyone may have the opportunity to have their children’s genomes tweaked using CRISPR gene-editing technology.  The only question might be whether after a few generations we might want to escape from eternal life.  We may find that death has its advantages.

What Keeps Us Human

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I’ve been reading the latest analyses of paleolithic hominin DNA and from what I’ve gathered it seems to be the case that the present human population is a non-homogeneous collection of various hybrid populations between Homo sapiens (“modern” humans) and Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisovensis and very likely Homo erectus.

Of course, human evolution is such a hot-button topic today that getting paleontologists to use words like hybrids to describe human lineages makes them squeamish and nervous.  Everyone is afraid of the accusation of racism to erupt if someone hints that human beings of different ancestries aren’t all exactly the same.  But they really should all calm down.  Hominin species have been walking the Earth for something like seven million years and during that time various groups have become isolated, evolved different characteristics and then just as easily recombined and formed hybrids that in turn become isolated and start the process all over again.

The latest information I’ve seen shows that there is a strong correlation between Neanderthal DNA and modern populations in northern Europe and northwesten Asia.  And there are strong correlations between Denisovan DNA and modern populations of Australian aborigines and Papuan New Guineans.

The ancient DNA that has been found is restricted to specimens that existed in cooler climates so the complicated story of hominin mixing and isolating in Africa and other tropical areas may never be reconstructed (although recent work with fossil protein materials may change that in the future).  But I think it’s clear that humans have in the past and will continue in the future to recombine their populations in various ways in reaction to local conditions that select for fitness.

Of course, those selection pressures have changed drastically over the geologic time our genus has existed.  Human society has also evolved and culture has as much to do with evolution now as climate had in the past.  Human behavior is now dictated by things like propaganda, government policy, industrial planning, resource scarcity and even internet influencers.

But hopefully men and women will still try to find mates that will allow their offspring to have the best chance of surviving and carrying on the race.  It still makes sense for a man to want a woman with empathy for his children and enough sense to teach her children to obey their parents and follow the simple rules written on those stone tablets that have guided our civilization for the last several thousand years.

And it makes sense for a woman to want a man who isn’t too lazy or selfish to provide for his family and who enjoys coming home from the hunt and retires to the fire in his cave and tells his little tribe about the mammoth that he hunted and the saber-tooth tiger that hunted him.  And draws a picture on the walls of his cave to celebrate that story.

And the most important trait that both men and women should be selecting their mates for is their minds.  Our brains have been our hallmark for millions of years.  Homo habilis; the tool maker.  That’s us.  We’re the monkeys that came down from the trees, stood up straight and looked at the world straight on and began changing it to our liking from day one.  Fire.  The wheel, the wagon, the chariot, the ship, the saddle, the plow, the heat engine, automobiles, airplanes, rockets. Stone weapons, saws, knives, hammers, axes, levers, firearms, lasers.  Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, steel, uranium, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb.  Wheat, oats, millet, rice, maize, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, ducks, white mice, guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, yeast, mammalian cell culture, CRSPR gene editing, bioengineering.

Let’s just hope that our “civilization” never forgets what keeps us human.

I Have My Priorities

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So today was an early day because I had to head to the office.  I was already running late when Camera Girl walked out of the kitchen and said, “Don’t react or the dogs will start barking but there are a couple of momma turkeys at my bird feeder with about eight young.  Go take a look.”

So, they were under the bird feeders looking for seeds on the ground that the normal birds spilled out of the feeders.  But eventually they weren’t satisfied so they headed out into the fields.  Camera Girl saw them heading for the gardens and said, “They’re headed for the raspberry patch.  Do you think they’ll eat any of the berries.”  I answered knowledgably, “No they only eat bugs and small critters.”  Of course, they immediately attack the patch and clearly start picking ripe berries off the canes.  I didn’t look back at her but I think there was a look.  And I think there might have been a derisive sound.  I came back with her own famous statement, “Well, everybody’s gotta eat, right?”  So, I announced that I had to leave for work and made a show of ignoring the prehistoric creatures that had invaded my domain.

When I got home, I got the update.  They had not only picked all the ripe raspberries but they then cleaned up the ripe blueberries too.  Then they went down by the swamp and annoyed Moe and the rest of Camera Girl’s murder of crows that hang out there during the morning.  Finally, they walked the perimeter of the fields until they ended up near the road and then made a nuisance of themselves for the motorists until they finally crossed the road and headed for the next swamp in their path.

I’ve always been interested in the turkey population because they provide an opportunity for interesting photographs.  But here they were adding insult to injury.  They not only didn’t eat any of the copious beetles that are afflicting my vegetables and flowers but they went out of their way to pillage my favorite summer fruit crops.  This is the thanks I get for never hunting them or setting the dogs on them or even making fun of their homely appearance, clumsy walking style or spastic flying abilities.

Well, truth be told they’re still in my top five species of birds I like to see around the place.  I like seeing the vultures (turkey and black) in the trees.  I like to try and get a shot of a Great Blue Heron fishing in the swamp and I also hope one day to lure some of the local ravens into a closer arrangement.  I’ve always thought they were fascinating creatures.

But there’s something appealing about a flock of turkey hens with their young walking around in Dunwich in the summer acting like they own the place and livening things up.

Yep, that’s true.  However, if they come near the berries again, I may just get some rocks and help them to move along at high speed.  At this time of year, I have my priorities.

Moon Mining

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This article claims that enough asteroids have struck the moon over time that inevitably there are enough deposits of valuable metals to make mining the Moon worthwhile:

“There might be more than $1 trillion worth of platinum deposits on the moon, according to a paper published in the journal Planetary and Space Science. Of the 1.3 million craters on the moon with a diameter greater than one kilometer, “nearly 6,500 were made by asteroids containing commercial quantities of platinum,” said New Scientist. This “highlights the potential viability and profitability of lunar mining endeavors compared to mining asteroids in orbit,” said the paper.”

This kind of jibes with my recent post where I said a Moon base is a more realistic goal than a manned trip to Mars.  And Now I see why.

 

My future will be as a uranium miner on the Moon.  I will start out with uranium and then branch out into gold and platinum.  Eventually I may be able to concentrate completely on tantalum, my favorite metal.

But seriously, I think there is a lot more likelihood of the Moon becoming economically useful to humans than Mars.  The difference in distance alone makes Mars almost impossibly difficult for manned flights.

The Moon on the other hand was reached more than fifty five years ago by men whose technological capabilities were rudimentary compared to what we have at our disposal today.  Imagine what improvements modern computing power and automation could do to make reaching and working on the Moon safer and easier.

But most important we must go to the Moon because Mt Rushmore is too small and crowded for this:

How Many Humans Should There Be on Earth?

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I asked Grok how many humans are currently living on Earth.  It said, “As of June 12, 2025, the world population is approximately 8.23 billion people. This estimate is based on projections from the United Nations and other demographic sources, which indicate the global population surpassed 8 billion in November 2022 and continues to grow at a rate of about 0.84% to 0.89% per year.”

Eight billion two hundred thirty million is a big number.  That’s a whole lot of people.  At the same time, most advanced countries are barely or not even replacing their dead with children.  At the same time, we’ve been told that AI will make almost all of our cognitive work skills redundant and substandard.

These three facts being true at the same time means that the future of humanity is in flux.  We know that people like Bill Gates and the other globalists think the answer is stop humans from producing children.  That simplifies their work to merely managing a last generation of aging humans while the population of Earth is reduced to some tiny fraction of the current billions.  And that lucky remnant will be the globalists who will inherit the Earth without all those messy and expensive plebians.

And they’re making a very good start to the plan.  They’ve brainwashed a good chunk of the Millennials and the Zoomers into thinking producing children is morally wrong.  They’ve convinced them that Gaia isn’t happy sharing the planet with humans and the best thing to do is play video games, watch porn and take drugs while waiting for death.  Of course that’s not everyone.  Plenty of people are still having kids but the numbers are way down.

The real question is how do we want the human population of Earth to exist going forward?  Well, when I was young, we were told that the opposite problem existed.  Malthusian theory said that eventually human population growth would eventually outstrip food supply and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; starvation, war, pestilence and death would ensue.  The reason this didn’t happen is a combination of technological advances in food production (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical planting and harvesting equipment and superior plant species) and effective birth control agents.

At this point governments have to incentivize people (especially women) to have children.  Hungary is one of the pioneers in this idea.  They provide incentives for Hungarian women to have children and even provide lifetime tax-free status to women that have four children.

Obviously unlimited human reproduction could become a problem again in the future but currently the globalist campaign has made that an unlikely problem for the foreseeable future.  But the question is will the United States shift its policies to try and restore fertility to at least replacement levels or will we depend on immigration to take up the slack?  If we go with immigration then it’s inevitable that the country will change drastically.  The culture that made America such a desirable place to live has already been eroded by the globalist program of demonizing the European descendants that built the nation.  If this continues much longer it will inevitably turn the United States into a third world country like Brazil or Mexico.

As to what will be the eventual population of Earth (my original question), I think inevitably it will decrease.  And this will be caused by the decay of Western civilization and the attendant degradation of food production capacity.  Currently western countries feed the third world.  And feed them so well that obesity is endemic throughout these poor countries.  When Europe has transitioned to a majority non-European population it will no longer be able to “feed the world.”  And the four horsemen will reappear to balance out the population back to food production limits.  Within a century the population of Earth will be about a billion people.  Should it be more?  We’ll never know.

Come On Elon, Baby Steps

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So, what to talk about tonight?  I’m kinda at a loss.  I’m not in the politics mood.  I haven’t figured out the next chapters in the stories I’ve been spinning.  Not much going on around the Compound today and even the First Selectman has been on his best behavior and hasn’t eaten anyone in a few weeks.  I guess things are in a lull right now.

So, I was thinking with all the talk about Elon Musk getting us to Mars was that really the space mission we need?  I think not.  What would be better and much easier would be to build a Moon base.  The space station we have now is a lame piece of junk that is more trouble than its worth.  And living in free fall is really bad for humans.  But a permanent base on the Moon is much easier than a Mars trip, much cheaper and much less risky for the astronauts.

Of course, the real reason why this base would be so valuable won’t appear until a magnetic survey is performed and a strange “anomaly” discovered.  Once this mystery is investigated and the signal is tracked back to a Jovian (or is it a Saturnian) moon the real exploration of the solar system will begin in earnest.  All we need to remember is not to drive the ship’s AI psychotic with conflicting mission requirements and also make a point of not teaching it to read lips.

But seriously (or semi-seriously), I think a Moon base is a much more realistic space project and putting stuff on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit is probably a good idea in general.  There’s just too much junk floating around up there.

As for the name, Luna City is one obvious choice.  I could be convinced that Sheepshead Bay would sound good.  After all there are a lot of Mares up there so a seaside name makes some sense.

But the most important thing that a lunar base would provide is a chance to see if space travel is useful at all.  Can a base on the close-by Moon come up with anything useful that can’t be done better and cheaper on Earth?

One thing I can think of are particle accelerators.  Maintaining a vacuum on the Moon will be a heck of a lot easier than on Earth.  And the lower gravity might have some advantages in certain kinds of construction.  And there are probably other scientific experiments that can be done better on the Moon.  Maybe the long lunar night would be a great time to do telescopic observations.  Instead of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes maybe we could build a really big telescope on the Moon and see right out to the edge of the universe.  Of course, we might not like what we find on “the edge.”  We might find that the galaxies are arranged to spell out the words, “TO READ BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MUST BUY A SUBSCRIPTION!”

Well, anyway, that’s what I was thinking.  The Moon’s the perfect compromise between the fantastically risky Mars mission and the useless and boring International Space Station.  Come on Elon, baby steps.

Stop the Presses.  Gravity is a Force and Space is not Curved.

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So I get most of my physics from YouTube and the latest news flash is that Einstein’s belief that mass warps space-time may be put aside for a theory where gravity is a force again and space-time isn’t curved.  In fact, maybe it’s not space-time anymore just space and time.

Uh, okay.  Personally, I never understood why (or how) space could be curved.  I didn’t see why light couldn’t just be affected by gravity the same as everything else.  I mean what does it mean to say space is curved?  Space, per se, is nothing.  It is the lack of something and all it has is location so how can a bit of nothing be curved?  Now the fact that matter and even light can be deflected in their motion through space makes sense.  We can see it all the time with magnets and projectiles in a gravity field.  It’s Newton’s law extended by all the other theories that identify the other forces; electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces.  So why say space is curved?  According to the report (and I’m not saying I can fathom this) this new way of looking at gravity also eliminates the current paradox between quantum theory and Einstein’s conception of gravity.  In your face Albert!

Now to be fair to Professor Einstein later on he had been thinking about a similar system he called Teleparallel Gravity.  So maybe all of this is just more reviewing old ideas because nothing new has been discovered.  But I think it makes sense to bring the best minds to bear on these fundamental questions.  Of course, if there’s no space-time then all of the science fiction that used the term becomes dated and passe.  Such is life.

Now, if there is no warping of space does that mean Black Holes can’t tear a hole in it?  Is there no such thing as a singularity?  Are there no worm holes and no way to go from one universe to another?  Next thing you know they’ll be telling me that the speed of light isn’t the fastest speed possible and faster-than-light travel is perfectly achievable if only I can buy enough dynamite from the ACME company and strap it to the back of my rocket sled.

Okay, now the inertialess drives of Doc Smith’s Skylark and Lensman series are science again and jungle worlds with naked red-haired amazon warrior women who can become part of the federation are totally realistic again.  I just hope that the ultra-intelligent but hopelessly-evil amoeboid Eddorians don’t find out about this quantum gravity thing before the Arisians do, so we will still have a chance to perfect a way to destroy Ploor with an inertialess planet that we’ve somehow translated from another dimension and then restored its inertia in time to use it as an irresistible planet wrecker.  Oh wait, I just said there are no alternate dimensions.

Okay, forget that last bit.  But otherwise, I’m completely on board with this new quantum gravity/non-curved space rigamarole.  Let’s just try and give it a cooler name.