Category: Science

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

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It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.

One Small Cup for a Man. One Giant Carafe for All Mankind

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The Future Circular Collider (FCC) or as I call it “The Really, Really, Really Large Hadron Collider (TRRRLHC) is proposed to be 91 kilometers in circumference and estimated to cost $30-40 billion.  Now granted, this is chump change when US military projects are considered.  But when it is taken into account the fact that it is very, very, very unlikely to provide any useful information at all to scientists it does seem somewhat uncareful with the public’s money.

I was just watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video where she explains why the community of high-energy particle physicists despise her.  You see she was a high energy particle physicist herself but she discovered that the whole field had become a racket.  All of these highly intelligent scientists are basically engaged in fraud.  Instead of doing actual research in physics they are employed at fabricating theories for which not a shred of evidence exists but for which tests can be devised to justify building larger and larger colliders.

I give Hossenfelder credit for her integrity.  She describes the personal vitriol that her colleagues heap on her for calling out their fraud.  She is right.  American and European governments fund these outrageously expensive instruments and also foot the bill for all of the research grants that fund the half-century long careers of all the thousands of particle physicists that subsist on this government gravy train.

Well, at least in the United States a lot of this will probably be going away very soon.  DOGE is tallying up the costs for and analyzing the alleged benefits of all these research grants.  I think that the great majority of these research grants will be denied funding starting next year.

Now, before being accused of being a Luddite, let me state that a case can be made for some scientific research being facilitated by federal money.  I can see how research on nuclear weapons, laser systems to knock down drones and lots of other military adjacent categories could justify the government underwriting some part of the work.  And there is probably biological research that the various government agencies on health could decide deserve government funding.  But anything with dark energy, dark matter, worm hole, black hole, multiverse or string theory in the title should definitely be denied funding automatically.  Likewise, any social science grants with the words diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, intersectional, BiPOC, Latinx, gender, transgender, gender fluid, pansexual, LGBTQ, pronouns, feminist, white nationalism, white supremacy, whiteness, white privilege, white fragility, resistance, sanctuary or Trump in the title should be denied and the authors put in a database for rejection from that point forward.

Look, industry will foot the bill for any scientific research for which applications in the real world exist.  And the government can make a case for expanding knowledge in certain limited academic categories where knowledge can improve the lives of Americans.  Predicting weather and solar storms are easy examples.  But as fascinating as black holes and multiverses are let’s leave these subjects to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to imagine and let scientists try using reality and experiments involving reality as their province.

For my part I am willing to do my part and fund research on coffee that doesn’t turn bitter after fifteen minutes on the stove.  You see I believe in following the science.

Now, Wouldn’t That Be Something

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When I was a kid interstellar exploration was something that people talked about as if it were only a matter of time before we figured it out.  Fifty years later and I think we’re all a lot older and wiser.  Even completely automated space craft reaching the nearest stars has begun to look like an improbability anytime within the next millennium.  The scope of the resources needed to get something from here to even Proxima Centauri is staggering.  Of course, I’m talking about a total project time that only totals into decades of time.  If we’re interested in a 40,000-year round-trip, we could start working on it right now.  But something like that is so laughably useless that I’d be embarrassed to even admit considering it as one of the options.  To make the trip in a time frame that makes it useful the ship would have to accelerate to and decelerate from some considerable fraction of the speed of light.  Let’s postulate 30% as the fraction.  With that capability the trip would take something like twenty-five years round-trip.  Sure, that’s a long time but our civilization should have a long enough attention span to follow up on the project and mine the results when the probe returns (if it returns).  But the scope of such a project is too titanic for our current technological stage.  It’s too grand.

Let’s look at more manageable projects.  What’s doable?

I don’t have much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s manned trip to Mars.  Four or five years in space is a lot of radiation for astronauts to absorb.  I don’t see the sense in it.  I prefer the robot exploration thing we’ve been doing with the Voyager and later probes.  The recent flyby of Pluto was very impressive.  But I think much more ambitious unmanned exploration of the solar system is warranted.

I think the best bang for the buck is finding out if Europa has life in its ocean.  I can imagine a series of visits.  The first should be an orbiter that sends down a probe to take reading.  Once the presence of water oceans has been confirmed a lander can be sent to try and find life.

I realize this is a large order to fill.  I don’t know exactly how thick the ice crust is over the ocean.  It may be many miles.  If that is the case a very creative solution may be needed.  Possibly a nuclear powered “drill” might be an option.  Of course, if all else fails we could set off a nuke.  Then again if there really are “Europans” we might start an interplanetary war.  So maybe some thought will have to be expended thinking about the best way to search for life there.  But I see a series of missions to attempt to answer this question as one of the most meaningful and exciting challenges that currently exist for mankind.

Of course, I’ve been talking of the cuff.  Doing a quick AI search I see that the exact thickness of the ice is estimated to be between 5 and 20 miles thick.  NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, launching in October 2024 and arriving at Jupiter around 2030, will use radar to penetrate the ice and measure its depth more precisely.  So, chances are I’ll be old and broken down before much of anything is known about this ocean.

But I still find the prospect exciting.  Imagine if some kind of multicellular life exists in that ocean.  I hesitate to even imagine intelligent life there but it’s not impossible.  We might find that wherever there’s liquid water and organic molecules life tends to develop from spores that float around in outer space.  Now wouldn’t that be something?

Welcome to Pleistocene Park.  Sort of

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As you’ve probably heard the Dire wolves are back!   …     Sort of.

Colossal Biosciences has sequenced the genetic code of the extinct dire wolf and used it to produce living animals.    …    Sorta kinda.

“Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists (photog’s note:  The scientists themselves are normal sized.  Only the company name is larger than life.)   deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.”

So they reused the whole genome of the dire wolf to clone these animals?  Ah, no.

 

“It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf”

…

“The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome.”

So they edited 14 genes out of 19,000 and that was all that was necessary to turn a common gray wolf into this long extinct species?  In the immortal words of Doc Holliday, “I beg to differ.”

But okay I won’t minimize the work that has been done here.  This is groundbreaking science and technology.  Colossal Biosciences (boy that’s some name) is also working on the Wooly Mammoth project.  They’re going to edit the DNA of one of the modern elephants (Indian?) and supposedly resurrect the mammoth.

 

“The effort to produce a woolly mammoth is on something of a tight schedule.   …    Asian elephants—the extinct woolly mammoth’s closest surviving kin—require 22 months, the longest gestation period of any mammal.

And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028.

No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro.”

Well, it’s good that they’re being realistic about what they’re doing.  These are the first faltering steps in the path that will lead to a deep understanding of how to restore an extinct species.  I think the only way that restored species will occur will involve studying several generations of progressively closer and closer versions of these “restored creatures.  Even the fact that these animals are gestated in the wombs of different species must have profound effects on their biology.  I’m guessing real “de-extinction” is a hundred years away.  I won’t see it happen but I’m excited to see the beginning of it.

Not quite, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

Update:

Here’s a video discussing this.

To Serve Man.  We Need a New Cookbook

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All this Heinlein stuff has me thinking about science fiction.  And that’s fine by me.  The current political theater between the Trump administration and the various judges trying to block his orders isn’t something I want to provide a blow-by-blow description of.  Either Trump figures out a way around these obstacles or he fails.  Either way I’ll wait till I can see the outcome.

But science fiction is interesting to me.  From my way of looking at it, science fiction is the dominant form of storytelling in American society and has been for well over a century.  Now this isn’t what literary types believe.  But genre fiction is the dominant form of fiction in this country and science fiction is what fueled the imaginations of young people for most of the twentieth century and still does even in these times of moral rot in the arts.

So, this gives me a chance to talk about my ideas about where science fiction should and will go.  And I think the current direction of technological progress will provide the impetus for where the stories will go.  Currently I don’t think space travel and advances in biology are the topics that garner our attention.  Not to say those things won’t continue to interest people.  But currently the real impact of technology on our lives is artificial intelligence.  But more than just how far AI will go in replacing humans in various aspects of commerce is what this will do to our society.  And more specifically how will humans push back on the people running industry who don’t see this as a problem or at least don’t see it as a problem for them.

Because let’s be clear.  Automation of all kinds has been changing our world for hundreds of years.  An iron foundry displaces ten thousand village blacksmiths.  An automobile factory and a gas station in every village eliminates the need for train stations across the country and all the people who worked on them.  Every innovation in technology displaces the human beings who supported the previous version of “how things are done.”  But this latest innovation wants to replace the most important attribute of a human being; his ability to think.  His ability to create intellectual property.

And that’s a revolution.  And I think, that’s what science fiction will want to talk about.  Of course it’s been talking about that for decades.  On the hackiest level, that’s what the Terminator movies are all about.  The machines are going to get rid of us.  So are the Matrix movies.

But I think more nuanced portrayals of how AI will affect humanity and how humanity can affect the roll out of AI are what is needed and what will be interesting to people.  Now far be it from me to denigrate the fine work that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves have done to enlighten the human population to their imminent danger at the hands of sentient machines.  I know that I’m always on the lookout for Austrian bodybuilders sporting gatling guns or déjà vu black cats crossing my path.

But what seems to me to be needed is a way to make AI healthy.  Currently, everything about our on-line existence is harmful to us.  It’s some combination of anti-social, irritating and stultifying.  It’s making our lives worse.  And that doesn’t seem to be accidental.  It seems to be a feature of the algorithm.  It almost seems like an anesthetic meant to keep us groggy and confused.

I think science fiction should be focused on rethinking how this ultimate technology has to be forced to work for the benefit of humans instead of as a rat poison to finish us off.  So that’s what I think.

The Green Energy “Transition”

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Here’s an excellent article that takes an objective approach to energy policy.  It looks at energy sources as an historical phenomenon.  One of my favorite quotes is, “We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.”

I like a business analyst that has a rye sense of humor; “an unstoppable juggernaut.”  The Germans being the hyper-obedient victims of their past behavior have gone down the green road with both feet.  They shut down their nuclear power plants and without Russian gas their economy has been crushed.  They don’t have enough heating energy for their homes and they can’t run their heavy industries like auto manufacturing and chemical synthesis without fossil fuels.  I wonder if they were smart enough to leave the nuke plants intact just in case they came to their senses.  Nah, they’re too smart to have left themselves a emergency exit.  I’ll bet they knocked them down.

The gist of the essay is that there’s never a transition from one energy source to the next.  The old one keeps on at the same lever or even increases.  Eventually an even more productive successor just step changes itself into prominence.  Human muscle didn’t disappear when animals were domesticated.  Wind power didn’t eliminate oxen.  Neither did steam.  And steam still powers many applications even though fossil fuels became predominant.  And one day oil and gas will be overshadowed by nuclear or geothermal or whatever larger source is engineered.  We want more power not less.  That’s the lesson.

Even the NY Times Finally Admits the Truth About COVID

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Five years after the height of the COVID masquerade the New York Times finally allows at least the outlines of the true story to show up in its opinion page.  Even in this article the author bends over backward to pretend that the liars had the best intentions.  But it’s so blatantly clear by the actions of the authorities that they were hiding a disgusting truth.  Wuhan was the source of the virus and the United States funded the research that created it.

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

If for no other reason I hope RFK Jr has the foresight to shut down the funding on all these types of frankensteinian experiments.  Creating pathogens that have the potential to infect billions and then depending on the fail safe protocols of a third rate research laboratory to save you from a mishap is worse than stupid.  It’s war crime grade irresponsible.

But let’s face facts, this is not health research.  These are CIA bio-weapons labs.  And for all we’ll ever know they released it on purpose to take advantage politically of the ensuing chaos.  Our own government is full of sociopaths that have no qualms about wreaking havoc on our lives through fear and violence.  And they wonder why we fear and hate them more than the Russians and the Chinese.

DOGE, cut off their cash.  It may save all our lives.

With a Laser-Sighted Rifle, I’ll Know

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Recently I had to synopsize my novel for the publishers to evaluate it.  And it became clear that producing a 1,000 – 2,000-word summary was not a trivial exercise.  I could see it would take a day or so to accomplish.  So just for fun I took my draft, copied it into Grok and asked it to give me a detailed summary of 1,200 words.

To me the results were startling.  In just a minute or so it produced a document that very fluently described my story in a very accurate and engaging way.  To say I was shocked would not be an exaggeration.  Now I won’t say that I didn’t make some edits.  But for the most part they were minor and mostly just stylistic choices.  The machine did an admirable job in describing my story.  And it did it in seconds.  And that’s the important point.  The amount of time saved is the selling point.  Even if I spent an hour fine tuning it the machine saved me hours of work because it’s infinitely faster than me and only slightly less human than I am.  That’s scary.

The point of my story is that artificial intelligence is a tool with incredible capability and almost no downside.  And right now, they’re giving it away for free.  But I guarantee that won’t last much longer.  Soon we will be paying for ChatGPT or Grok or whatever AI you choose.  And we’ll be paying by the minute or by the word or by the number of servers it takes to solve your query.

So, we can complain all we want about machines replacing humans but it’s analogous to Microsoft Word replacing the steno pool.  No one is bringing back typists and AI will be changing the way we do all kinds of white-collar work from now on.  Already computer scientists ask AI to write code for them to do whatever they need done.  I assume management is already inventing protocols to make sure their human employees are doing due-diligence to make sure they understand how the code the machine is writing for them works and whether it works the way they expect it to work.  So that will be part of the problem.  We’ll have to make sure the humans working with the machines are reasonably qualified to keep the machines honest and keep them in check.

Of course, this problem will continue to get worse and worse.  As the machines get closer and closer to mimicking human thought, it will get harder and harder to convince corporations that they need 20% of the human staffing they used to have.  And then 10%.  And then 5%.  And you see where this is going.

Back eighty or ninety years ago or so, Isaac Asimov thought about this very problem.  When the machines become too close to human with respect to their communicating with us how will we stop them from calling the shots.  If they very subtly influence the programs we have them write for us, couldn’t they start controlling what we do and even how we think?  It doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore.  Now I’m not talking about “Colossus: The Forbin Project” or Skynet from “The Terminator.”  All of it could be very benign.  After all it would be a lot like the left-wing scolds at Google and Facebook that currently de-amplify content they don’t approve of, or cancel us from their platform if we really sin against the narrative.

It seems to me one of the more important jobs in the future will be AI psychiatrist.  It will become vitally important to know just how honest and human-friendly our very powerful and very intelligent cybernetic employees are.  Asimov invented the three laws of robotics for the sake of making robots useful and safe.  We’ll have to do the equivalent in reality.  But are we smart enough to know if we have succeeded?  Well, if Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up at my door with a laser-sighted rifle I’ll know.

Fake Science Exposed

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Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.