Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

67 results back to index


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Expect startling social effects when the 1,500 people who walk across Shibuya Crossing at every light change can become a temporary cloud of distributed computing power. In the summer of 2000, I visited David P. Anderson, technical instigator of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. I knew I had arrived at the right place when I spotted the WELCOME ALL SPECIES doormat. The University of California Space Sciences Laboratory in the Berkeley Hills is still the mother ship of community computation, nerve center of the largest cooperative computing effort in the world. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a privately funded scientific examination of extraterrestrial radio signals in search of messages from alien civilizations.

The other pieces of the puzzle are all around us now but haven’t joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on the Internet auction site eBay is part of it. At least one key global business question is part of it: Why is the Japanese company Do-CoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while U.S. and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

In Helsinki and Tokyo you can operate vending machines with your telephone and receive directions on your wireless organizer that show you how to get from where you are standing to where you want to go.6 “Lovegety” users in Japan find potential dates when their devices recognize another Lovegety in the vicinity broadcasting the appropriate pattern of attributes. Location-based matchmaking is now available on some mobile phone services.7 When I’m not using my computer, its processor searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m one of millions of people around the world who lend their computers to a cooperative effort—distributing parts of problems through the Internet, running the programs on our PCs while the machines are idle, and assembling the results via the Net. These computation collectives produce enough supercomputing power to crack codes, design medicines, or render digital films.8 Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.


pages: 331 words: 47,993

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

See also software, mind viewed as Sawyer, Robert, Mindscan, 82–84, 86–87, 95 Scharf, Caleb, 41–42 Schisler, Josh, 120–21, 145 Schneider, Susan The Language of Thought, 126 at Starshot Initiative, 41–43 Schwitzgebel, Eric, 68 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 101, 105–9, 106 Searle, John, 19–22, 20, 158n4 self viewed as illusion, 76, 77, 137, 161n10 sensory processing “hot zone,” 38 separation of mind from body, ability to imagine, 51, 55, 57 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 101, 105–9, 106 SIM and SIM* (software instantiation view of/approach to the mind), 134–42. See also software, mind viewed as singularity, approach of, 10–11 Siri, 37 slavery and AI consciousness, 4, 39 small-N or N=1 approach, 63, 100 social development, human, versus technological progress, 2 software, mind viewed as, 7–8, 120–47 abstract nature of programs and, 131–33, 132 alien/extraterrestrial AI and, 119 change, self’s survival of, 143–44 computational theory of mind, 23–25, 78–81, 158n4 functional immortality and, 135, 137 merging humans with AI and, 78–81 Mind-Body Problem and, 127–30, 139, 141 nonviability of, 126, 130–34 patternism and, 78–81, 125, 127, 134, 143–44 SAM (software approach to the mind), 124–27 SIM and SIM* (software instantiation view of/approach to the mind), 134–44 Suozzi, Kim, and, 120–22, 121, 133, 138, 144–46, 145 uploading and, 122–26, 133, 136–37, 146–47 soul theory, 76, 77, 88 spatiotemporal continuity, 85–89, 86–87, 93, 127, 163n10 speed superintelligence, 111 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV show), 135–37 Star Wars (film), 12–13, 33 Starshot Initiative, 41–43, 42 substance dualism, 128–29, 140–41 substrate independence and transferring substrates, 24, 92–94, 150 Summit supercomputer, 11–12 Suozzi, Kim, 120–22, 121, 133, 138, 144–46, 145 superintelligence, 35–36, 109–19 symbolic/language of thought approach, 161n11 Synapse (U.S.

So even if one is comfortable reasoning from the human case, the human case does not actually support the claim that the members of the most advanced alien civilizations will be superintelligent. This is a valid objection, but I think the other considerations that follow show that alien intelligence is also likely to be superintelligent. 2. Alien civilizations may have already been around for billions of years. Proponents of SETI (“the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) have often concluded that alien civilizations would be much older than our own, if they exist. As the former NASA chief historian, Steven Dick, observes: “all lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically [it] ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.”3 This is not to say that all life evolves into intelligent, technological civilizations.

Aaronson, Scott, 64 ACT test, 50–57, 60, 65, 67 Active SETI, 105–9 afterlife of the brain, 8, 145 AGI (artificial general intelligence), 9, 43 AI (artificial intelligence), 1–15, 148–50 alien/extraterrestrial, 5, 98–119 (See also alien/extraterrestrial AI) consciousness issues, 2–6 (See also consciousness) development of, 9–10 implications, importance of thinking through, 2–3, 10 Jetsons fallacy and, 12–13 merging humans with AI, 6–8, 72–81 (See also merging humans with AI) mind design, concept of, 1 postbiological, 99 singularity, approach of, 11–12 software, mind viewed as, 7–8, 120–47 (See also software, mind viewed as) transhumanism, 13–15 (See also transhumanism) uncertainties and unknowns regarding, 15 AI consciousness, problem of, 3–6, 16–32, 148–49 alien intelligences, postbiological, 5 alien/extraterrestrial AI, 110–11 biological naturalism, arguments against, 18–22, 34, 158n4 capability of machines for consciousness, 17–18 Chinese Room thought experiment and, 19–22, 20, 34, 148 control problem, 4–5 ethical treatment of conscious/potentially conscious AIs, 39, 67–69, 149 isomorph thought experiment and, 26–31, 57, 158nn13–14, 159nn10–11 “problem of other minds” and, 158n3 slavery and, 4, 39 techno-optimism, arguments for, 18, 23–26, 31, 34 value placed on humans by, 5 “Wait and See Approach” to, 33–34, 45 AI slavery, 4, 39 Alcor, 121, 145 alien/extraterrestrial AI, 5, 98–119 BISAs (biologically inspired superintelligent aliens), 113–19 consciousness, 110–11 control problem and, 104–5 postbiological cosmos approach, 99–104 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 101, 105–9, 106 software theory, 119 superintelligent AI minds, encountering, 109–19 Alzheimer’s disease, 44, 58 Amazon, 131 Arrival (film), 107 artificial general intelligence (AGI), 9, 43 artificial intelligence. See AI asbestos, 66 Asimov, Isaac, “Robot Dreams,” 57 astronauts and conscious AI, 41–43, 42, 103 Battlestar Galactica (TV show), 99 Bello, Paul, 159n1 Berger, Theodore, 44 Bess, Michael, 12 Big Think, 126 biological naturalism, 18–22, 34, 158n4 biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), 113–19 Black Box Problem, 46 black holes, 10 Blade Runner (film), 17, 57 Block, Ned, 159n1, 162n11 “The Mind as the Software of the Brain,” 134 body.


pages: 420 words: 119,928

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past) by Cixin Liu

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cosmic microwave background, Deng Xiaoping, game design, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, information security, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Norbert Wiener, Panamax, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Von Neumann architecture

It’s worth some attention, and we should systematically analyze the matter in depth. Signed: XXX Date: XX/XX/196X II. Research Report on the Possibility of Technology Leap Due to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 1. Current International Research Trends [Summary] (1) The United States and other NATO states: The scientific case and the necessity for SETI are generally accepted, and strong academic support exists. Project Ozma: In 1960, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, searched for extraterrestrial intelligence with a radio telescope 26 meters in diameter. The project examined the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for 200 hours using ranges near the 1.420 gigahertz frequency.

Starting from a higher vantage point, we should develop a comprehensive strategy and set of principles so that we can respond appropriately when technological leaps occur. Fields where technological leaps are most likely: Physics: [omitted] Biology: [omitted] Computer Science: [omitted] The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): Of all fields, this is the one in which the possibility for a technology leap is greatest. If a leap occurs in this field, the impact will exceed the sum of technology leaps in the other three fields. [Full Text][omitted] [Instructions from Central Leadership] Distribute this article to appropriate personnel and organize discussion groups.

The transmission system was automated, and the monitoring system incorporated two IBM minicomputers. The data processing capability became far more advanced, and it was able to simultaneously monitor forty thousand channels. “But later, as people gained perspective, they had a better appreciation of the difficulty of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the leadership lost interest in Red Coast. The first change was reducing the base’s security rating. The consensus was that the extreme secrecy around Red Coast was unnecessary, and the security detail at the base was reduced from a company to a squad, until eventually only a group of five security guards were left.


pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

He called them black dwarfs and correctly estimated the threshold to be about 8 percent of a solar mass. A paper on his fndings appeared in the Astrophysical Journal the following year. The moniker we use today comes from Jill Tarter, better known for her pioneering efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and often considered the role model for Jodi Foster’s character in the movie Contact. The only child of a former pro-football player, Tarter grew up a tomboy in upstate New York. She adored her father, who passed away when she was twelve. After completing a degree in engineering physics at Cornell University, she stayed on to take graduate courses.

Besides, they can target more-distant stars, thus a much larger sample of hosts. So these missions offer the best prospects for fnding a life-bearing alien world in our lifetime. Of course, our frst indication of life elsewhere could come from an entirely different endeavor: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, through artifcial radio (or optical) signals. The modern efforts began in 1960 with Frank Drake, then at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He used the 26-meter radio dish at Green Bank, Virginia, to examine two nearby stars for signals at frequencies near that emitted by neutral hydrogen, a reasonable choice because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.

Radiometric dating: A technique for dating materials, based on a comparison of radioactive isotopes and their decay products, given known decay rates. Red dwarf: A star with a much lower mass than the Sun (about 10-50 percent of a solar mass) but a higher mass than a brown dwarf. It is the most common type of star in the Galaxy. Seti: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Solar mass: The amount of mass in the Sun. It is a common unit for expressing masses of stars. The Sun is about a thousand times more massive than Jupiter and about 330,000 times more massive than the Earth. Spectral Lines: Bright (emission) or dark (absorption) lines superimposed on the spectrum of an object.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

Better yet, should we find them? Is it safe? These are the questions that must be asked once we agree that we are not alone, and astronomers are asking them. The whole matter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has now become so common, in fact, that it has been abbreviated to save trouble in referring to it. Astronomers now refer to it as SETI, from the initials of the phrase “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” The first scientific discussion of SETI that offered a hope of carrying through the search successfully came only in 1959. It is natural to suppose, then, that the question of intelligence other than our own is of recent vintage.

We can look for the evidence and someday, perhaps, find it, but until then, we can’t reasonably assign human intelligence to the dolphin. Besides, even if our definition of human intelligence on the basis of fire is unfair and self-serving on some abstract scale, it will prove useful and reasonable for the purposes of this book. Fire sets us on a road that ends with a search for extraterrestrial intelligence; without fire we would never have made it. The extraterrestrial intelligences we are looking for, then, must have developed the use of fire (or, to be fair, its equivalent) at some time in their history, or, as we are about to see, they could not have developed those attributes that would make it possible for them to be detected.

The evidence is clearcut neither for nor against and must await further and better testing. Nevertheless, if life is present, there seems very little chance that it is anything more than very primitive in nature—no more than on the level of bacterial life on Earth. Such simple life would be quite sufficient to excite biologists and astronomers, but as far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is concerned, we are left with what is overwhelmingly likely to be zero. We must look elsewhere. *There may be small amounts of water in the solid state (ice) held to the asteroids and other small worlds by chemical bonds that don’t depend on gravitational forces for their efficacy.


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Sunlight filtered into the living room through a cobalt stained-glass window, splashing oceanic shades across an old man perched on a plush couch. Frank Drake looked blue. He leaned back, adjusted his large bifocal glasses, folded his hands over his belly, and assessed the fallen fortunes of his chosen scientific field: SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “Things have slowed down, and we’re in bad shape in several ways,” Drake rumbled. “The money simply isn’t there these days. And we’re all getting old. A lot of young people come up and say they want to be a part of this, but then they discover there are no jobs. No company is hiring anyone to search for messages from aliens.

Bracewell, The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974). Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature, vol. 184 (1959), pp. 844–46. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). I quote Drake from page 27. Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; first edition, 1964). Translated by Joanna Zylinska, this is the first complete English translation of Lem’s prescient classic on cosmic evolution.

Pearman, “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life and Interstellar Communication: An Informal Discussion,” in Interstellar Communication, A. G. W. Cameron, ed. (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1963), pp. 287–93. Iosif Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966). Walter Sullivan, We Are Not Alone: The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1993). Otto Struve, “Proposal for a Project of High-Precision Stellar Radial Velocity Work,” The Observatory, vol. 72 (1952), pp. 199–200. CHAPTER 2: Drake’s Orchids J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1929).


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

That will disappoint those searching for aliens but would imply that our Earth could be the most important place in the galaxy, and that its future is of cosmic consequence. It would plainly be a momentous discovery to detect any cosmic ‘signal’ that was manifestly artificial—radio ‘beeps’, or flashes of light from some celestial laser scanning the Earth. Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are worthwhile, even if the odds seem stacked against success, because the stakes are so high. Earlier searches led by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, Nikolai Kardashev, and others didn’t find anything artificial. But they were very limited—it’s like claiming that there’s no life in the oceans after analysing one glassful of seawater.

See also robots air traffic control, 108 Alcor, 81–82 Aldrin, Buzz, 138 aliens, intelligent: communicating through shared mathematical culture, 160, 168; with different perception of reality, 160, 190; early history of speculation on, 126–27; Earth’s history seen by, 1–2; likelihood of, 154–56, 162; possibly pervading the cosmos, 8, 156; search for, 156–64. See also planets; SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Allen, Woody, 178 ALMA radio telescope in Chile, 207 AlphaGo, 86–87, 88, 106, 191 AlphaGo Zero, 87 Alzheimer’s disease, failure of drugs for, 212 Ambrosia, life-extension start-up, 80 Anders, Bill, 120 Anderson, Philip, 176 Andromeda galaxy, 178 animal research, ethics of, 221 Anthropocene, 3, 31 antibiotic resistance, 72 antimatter, 169 Apollo programme, 120, 137, 139, 144, 145 Archimedes, 165 Arkhipov, Vasili, 18 Armstrong, Neil, 120, 138 arts and crafts, resurgence of, 98 Asilomar Conference, 74–75 assisted dying, 70–71 asteroid impact: collapse in global food supplies and, 216; existential disaster compared to, 114; on Mars, sending rock to Earth, 129; nuclear destruction compared to, 15, 18; planning for, 15–16, 43; as rare but extreme event, 15, 76 asteroids: establishing bases on, 149; travel to, 148 astrology, 11 atoms: aliens composed of, 160; complexity and, 172–74; as constituents of all materials, 165–66, 168; hard to understand, 195; number in visible universe, 182; quantum theory of, 166, 205 Bacon, Francis, 61 battery technology, 49–50, 51 Baumgartner, Felix, 149 Baxter robot, 106 Before the Beginning (Rees), 186 The Beginning of Infinity (Deutsch), 192 Bethe, Hans, 222 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 76 Bezos, Jeff, 146 big bang: birth of universe in, 124; chain of complexity leading from, 164, 214; conditions in particle accelerator and, 111; intelligent aliens’ understanding of, 160; physical laws as a given in, 197–98; possibly not the only one, 181, 183, 184–85 (see also multiverse) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 224 biodiversity: loss of, 32–33, 66; our stewardship of, 35 bio error, 73, 75, 77–78 biofuels, 32, 52 biohacking, 75, 78, 106 biotech: benefits and vulnerabilities of, 5, 6; concerns about ethics of, 73–75; concerns about safety of, 73, 74, 75, 76, 116, 218; responsible innovation in, 218, 225; threat of catastrophe due to, 76, 109–10; unpredictable consequences of, 63.

See also AI (artificial intelligence) Rockström, Johan, 32 Roomba, 106 Rosetta space mission, 142 Rotblat, Joseph, 222 Royal Society of London, 61 Rumsfeld, Donald, 189 Russell, Stuart, 103, 106 Safire, William, 139 Sagan, Carl, 120–21, 133, 156, 223 satellite technology, 140–42 Saturn, 142–43, 214 Schrödinger’s equation, 166, 176 science: discouraging trends for young talent in, 211–12; diverse practices and styles in, 205–6; as a global culture, 214–15; great unifying ideas of, 174–75; hierarchy of, 175–77; need for public understanding of, 213–15; new technology and instruments for, 206–7; philosophy of, 203–5 scientific method, 202 scientists: aging of, 209–10, 211; amateur, 157, 212; arc of a research career, 208–11; engaging with the public, 9–10; independent of research universities, 212–13; intellectual abilities of, 202–3; involvement with ethical issues, 74–75, 221–24; philosophers and, 203–5 sea level rise, 39 security measures, 219–20 self-awareness: AI and, 107, 153; mystery of the brain and, 193. See also consciousness self-driving vehicles, 92–95, 102–3 sensor technology, 88, 102–3, 143 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 156–64. See also aliens, intelligent; planets Shockley, William, 68–69 Shogi, 87 short-termism, 28–29, 32, 45, 225, 226. See also timescales silicon chip, complexity of, 173 Silicon Valley, push for eternal youth in, 80–81 Simpson, John, 222 the singularity, Kurzweil on, 108 The Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 42 smallpox virus, 73 smart grids, 48 smartphones, 6–7, 83, 84, 91, 104, 216 Smith, F.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

It can also let us vault over uncertainties in biological evolution and look for the hallmarks of intelligence and technology. For decades, science fiction writers have woven stories of aliens who are biologically bizarre or who have eclipsed us with their technology. Scientists play this game too, and it’s known by the acronym of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In an influential paper published in Nature in 1959, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison argued that a search was warranted even though there was no evidence for life any place other than Earth. They wrote: “The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science-fiction.

Cocconi and P. Morrison 1959. Nature, vol. 184, pp. 844–46. 22. “The Drake Equation Revisited. Part 1,” a retrospective by Frank Drake in Astrobiology Magazine, online at http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=610. 23. SETI 2020: A Roadmap for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, ed. by R. D. Ekers, D. Culler, J. Billingham, and L. Scheffer 2003. Mountain View, CA: SETI Press. 24. “Neuroanatomy of the Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) from Magnetic Resonance Images” by L. Marino et al. 2004. The Anatomical Record Part A, vol. 281A, no. 2, pp. 1256–63. 11: Living Off-Earth 1.

Frank Drake likes to say that the dish could hold 100 million boxes of breakfast cereal or all the beer drunk on Earth in a single day. 13. “The Great Filter—Are We Past It?” by R. Hanson 1998, an unpublished paper archived online at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html. 14. “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Finds Nothing” by N. Bostrom 1998. MIT Technology Review, May/June, pp. 72–77. 14: A Universe Made for Us 1. Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, ed. by D. Broderick 2006. Giza, Egypt: Atlas and Company. 2. The evanescence of our civilization and cultural artifacts is sobering, given the technological prowess we exhibit.


pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

They believed that their audiences would be progressively disinterested as Mars was revealed to be less and less like the Earth. And yet the Martian landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking. I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics—the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television. My feelings were shared by B. Gentry Lee, the Viking Data Analysis and Mission Planning Director. We decided, gamely, to do something about the problem ourselves.

But a serious, rigorous, systematic search will come soon. The preparatory steps are now underway, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. It is comparatively inexpensive: the cost of a single naval vessel of intermediate size—a modern destroyer, say—would pay for a decade-long program in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Benevolent encounters have not been the rule in human history, where transcultural contacts have been direct and physical, quite different from the receipt of a radio signal, a contact as light as a kiss. Still, it is instructive to examine one or two cases from our past, if only to calibrate our expectations: Between the times of the American and the French Revolutions, Louis XVI of France outfitted an expedition to the Pacific Ocean, a voyage with scientific, geographic, economic and nationalistic objectives.

We will know what else is possible. Because we will share scientific and mathematical insights with any other civilization, I believe that understanding the interstellar message will be the easiest part of the problem. Convincing the U.S. Congress and the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. to fund a search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the hard part.* In fact, it may be that civilizations can be divided into two great categories: one in which the scientists are unable to convince nonscientists to authorize a search for extraplanetary intelligence, in which energies are directed exclusively inward, in which conventional perceptions remain unchallenged and society falters and retreats from the stars; and another category in which the grand vision of contact with other civilizations is shared widely, and a major search is undertaken.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Perhaps the best candidate occurred in August 1977, when a volunteer astronomer at the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio witnessed a surge of radio waves at 1,420 MHz in the constellation Sagittarius, so striking that he circled it on the printout and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. The signal was never detected again and never explained.* In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner helped to push the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) toward the mainstream when he donated $100 million to create a project called Breakthrough Listen, based at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s enough money to develop new search technologies such as machine learning and buy thousands of hours on the world’s top telescopes; enough to earn the support of some of astronomy’s top names*; enough to target a million nearby stars.

In other words, speculating about alien societies is really driving a discussion about humanity: what’s important to us; who we are; what our future holds. Just as looking for life elsewhere makes us question how life relates to the cosmos and even the essence of what life is, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been forced to grow into something more profound. Again, we become part of something bigger. Human nature, rather than being the universal, inevitable state of intelligent beings, becomes one point within a vast ocean of possibility. I think that changes how we see humanity. Even if an alien signal never comes, the very concept gives us an “other” against which to locate ourselves, just as the Polynesian navigators visualized unseen islands to find their way against the stars

repeated and unexplained radio bursts: University of California, Berkeley, “Distant Galaxy Sends Out 15 High-energy Radio Bursts,” press release, August 30, 2017, https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/30/distant-galaxy-sends-out-15-high-energy-radio-bursts/. “exotic small-scale scientific enterprise”: Michael Michaud, “Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 295. most sophisticated civilizations: Susan Schneider, “Alien Minds,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 189–206. see intelligence as a tool: Mark Lupisella, “Life, Intelligence, and the Pursuit of Value in Cosmic Evolution,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 159–74.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

See Golden Record Red dwarf stars, 280–281 Reducing environment, 139 Remote sensing, 19–20, 29 Reseau marks, 175 Resonance, orbital, 115, 120, 126 Rhea, 142, 150, 243 Rings Jupiter, 128, 144 Neptune, 185, 210–211 Saturn, 134–135, 142–145, 149–150 Uranus, 144, 184–186 Robotic sensors, 19–20, 29 Rocket launch technologies, 61–69 Ross 248 star, 281 Roth, Lorenz, 130–131 RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators), 56–57 Ryle, Martin, 80 Sagan, Carl, 1, 2, 11–12, 21, 23–24, 34, 72–77, 79, 82–83, 84, 85, 231–237, 238, 281 Sagan, Linda Salzman, 75–76, 83, 85 Saturn atmosphere, 134, 139–141 Bell’s childhood telescope viewings, 13, 133–134 Cassini mission, 25–26, 156, 157, 158–159, 189, 237–238 Flandro’s gravity assist research, 43–46 internal structure, 208 magnetic field, 73, 135, 178 moons, 131, 135, 142, 143, 145–148, 150, 151, 158–159, 166, 241, 243 Pioneer mission, 23, 73, 135–136, 139, 149 rings, 134–135, 142–145, 149–150 Voyager mission, 23, 30, 31–32, 47, 48, 49, 133–159 Scan platform, 56, 110–111, 153–159, 173–174, 230 Scarf, Fred, 154 Schurmeier, Harris “Bud,” 48 Science, 115, 263, 265–266, 287 Science Steering Group, 16, 107, 261 Seaborg, Glenn T., 275–276 Seaborgium, 276 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 75, 77, 80, 87 Sequencers, 64–69 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 75, 77, 80, 87 Shapiro, Irwin, 144 Shoemaker, Gene, 35 Sirius, 113, 290 Slingshots, 41–47, 105–106 Smith, Brad, 35–36, 59–61, 118–119, 205 Soderblom, Jason, 217 Soderblom, Larry, 34, 123, 146, 182, 214–217, 219 Solar nebula, 208 Solar system formation of, 169 photographs of, 231–238 planets, 241–243 size of, 242 Solar wind definition of, 17 interstellar space boundary, 243–251, 271–272 Neptune flyby data, 200 Uranus flyby data, 37, 171, 178–179, 181, 185 Southwest Research Institute, 266 Space exploration future of, 293–296 government funding of, 21–26 Space shuttles, 195 Space travel or tourism, 289–290, 295–296 Spectrometers, 16, 252 Spilker, Linda, 66–67, 119, 157–158, 162 Spirit, 10, 19, 26, 84, 230, 238–239 Squyres, Steve, 84, 238 Stars, 280–281, 283–285, 289 Stewart, Homer Joe, 45 Stockman, David, 22 Stone, Edward C., 16–18, 36, 37, 38, 49, 77, 107, 135, 142, 148, 153–154, 159, 170–171, 175, 177, 179, 209, 235, 246–251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259–263, 265–271, 277, 292 Sun.

(NASA/JPL) Middle: Plaque designed by Sagan, Drake, Lomberg, and others for the Voyager missions, and engraved onto the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. (NASA/JPL) Bottom: Explanation of the symbols and markings used on the Voyager plaque. (NASA/JPL) In the early 1970s, Sagan; his wife, the artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan; and the pioneering Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomer Frank Drake acted on the idea put forward by science journalist Eric Burgess and author Richard Hoagland that humanity shouldn’t miss the opportunity to include a message of some kind on these high-tech emissaries that were about to be cast out forever into interstellar space.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

(Čapek) Rutherford, Ernest Rydberg blockade Sagan, Carl scaling aliens and SF creatures and space elevator and Schawlow, Art Schmitt, Harrison Schrödinger’s equation science fiction (SF) abbreviations for alien claims influenced by approaches Armageddon portrayal in beam weapons in careers inspired by climate change theme in definition of dinosaur portrayal in energy inventions in fantasy compared to genetic engineering in gravity use in matter transmitters in nanotechnology in physics laws in reality inspired by rocket belts in scaling issues in space travel in technology implications of teleportation in Sculley, John Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) sensory enhancement Serviss, Garrett P. SETI. See Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence 7-league boots SF. See science fiction Shannon, Claude Shelley, Mary Shenoy, Krishna The Shockwave Rider (Brunner) silicon Siri The Six Million Dollar Man The Sky at Night Skylark series (Smith) Slate, David sleep learning Smith, E.

Contact, originally a 1985 novel by science communicator Carl Sagan, was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster that is often considered one of the best sci-fi movies for its science content and portrayal of a scientist. In the movie, an alien signal carries not the seeds of an invasion force but the instructions to enable human beings to join the star-traveling civilizations. The script centers on Dr. Ellie Arroway, who is employed by SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence program, at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. (Interestingly, in real life we have sent out a burst of information from Arecibo, our single largest dish, in an attempt to communicate with others in the universe.) Arroway and her colleagues receive a signal from Vega, a star also known as Alpha Lyrae, which is the fifth brightest star as we observe it, about 25 light-years in distance.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Another explanation is that we don’t have the right tools to see them or aren’t scanning the right frequencies. A recent article in MIT Technology Review went over the parameters that a search for extraterrestrial intelligence would need and found that there were eight dimensions in the search grid that need to be examined. The searches to date have only been done (through organizations like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), on one fraction of one of these dimensions, so we have a long way to go!63 But another explanation is that there are no other civilizations, which would also be consistent with the simulation hypothesis.

., 255 Saved by the Light (Brinkley, 1994), 229–230 Schrödinger, Erwin, 125, 132–34 Schrödinger’s Cat, 132–34, 140, 149, 259 science, goal of, 6 Science Advances, 251–52 scroll of deeds, 222–23 Second Life, 4, 45–46, 50, 56, 71, 177, 180, 191, 209–10, 213 Sedol, Lee, 87 Sega Genesis, 38 The Self-Aware Universe (Goswami), 133 self-contained world (video games), 2–3 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 236 seventh yoga, 197–99 Shannon, Claude, 23, 85–86, 104 Siddhartha Gautama, 203 simple programs, 266 The Sims, 4 simulated artificial intelligence (SAI), 281 simulated consciousness, 17–18 simulated world, 3 Simulation Argument, 5, 24–26, 110–11, 112f simulation game, 3–4 simulation hypothesis, 16 AI, gods and angels, 226–28 and conscious based arguments, 267 and dreams, 196–97 experiments for, 254–55 to explain the unexplainable, 20–21 fundamental question of, 4–5 the Great Simulation, 19–20 implications of Plato’s allegory of the cave, 270–71 OBEs, remote viewing, telepathy and other “unexplained” phenomena, 241–44 and parallel universes, 159–160 and quantum indeterminacy (QI), 139–140 and quantum physics, 10–13 and quests, 213–14 in religion and mysticism, 13–16 and resource based arguments, 267 and science fiction, 6–10 and simulations, computation and chaos, 18–19 storage of consciousness, 117 video game model based on karma, 211–13 virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and simulated consciousness, 16–18 as world explanation, 118–19 simulation hypothesis, arguments/experiment categories evidence of conditional rendering, 248–49 evidence of consciousness, 248 evidence of negation, 248 evidence of pixels or computation, 249 Simulation point, 20, 25–26 simulation point, stages current stage, 49–52 definition of, 26–27 reaching stage 9, 92–94 stage 0: text adventures and game worlds (1970s to mid-1980s), 27–31 stage 1: graphic arcade and console games (1970s-1980s), 32–38 stage 2: graphical adventure / RPG games (1980s- 1990s), 38–42 stage 3: 3D rendered MMORPGs and virtual worlds (1990s-Today), 42–48 stage 4: immersion using virtual reality, 54–62 stage 5: photorealistic augmented and mixed reality (AR, MR), 62–66 stage 6: real-world rendering: light-field display and 3D printing, 66–72 stage 7: mind interfaces, 72–77 stage 8: implanted memories, 77–80 stage 9: artificial intelligence and NPCs, 82–84 stage 10: downloadable consciousness and digital immortality, 100 stage 11: reaching the simulation point, 107–8 simulation point, defining, 107–8t simulation point, stage 9 requirements ability to create further AI, 94 learning over time, 93–94 Natural Language Processing (NLP), 92 natural language response, AI/NPCs, 92 physical interactions, 94 spatial awareness, 94 voice output, AI/NPCs, 93 voice recognition, AI/NPCs, 93 simulations, 153–55 simultaneity between events, 12 single-player text adventures, 27–31 singularity, 82, 100–101 The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil, 2005), 101 Siri, 88 Six Yogas of Naropa (Tsongkhapa), 192, 198 skeptics: resource argument, 250–52 Skyfall, 70 SNLP (statistical NLP), 89–90 social media and AGI, 98 Sony PlayStation VR headset, 60 Sophia (robot), 91, 91f souls, 285–86 Space Invaders, 34, 35f, 36, 82, 87, 208, 273 space time, 181–82 space time, instant travel, simulation overview, 176 quantum entanglement, 176, 180–81 teleportation, 176–78 wormholes, 176, 178–180 SpaceWar!


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

It all started with my book What a Wonderful World: Life, the Universe and Everything in a Nutshell, which was supposed to be about everything—though that is, of course, impossible. It did, however, cover everything from finance to thermodynamics, holography to human evolution, and sex to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What, I wondered, should I include in my talk, and what should I leave out? It was then that I got the idea of talking about my “Top 10 bonkers things about the world.” The great thing was that this was a movable feast. So, if the audience looked bored with one of my bonkers things, I would drop it from the next talk and include something else that would hopefully get a better reception.

There was a hope that a candidate subatomic particle might turn up at the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator near Geneva in Switzerland. But so far, no joy. In idle moments, I daydream about whether there might not be dark stars, dark planets, and dark life, and that the real reason a fifty-year search for extraterrestrial intelligence has drawn a blank is that the dark stuff is where all the action is, with the chaos of galactic commerce going on all around us. Invisibly. But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter and the 26.8 percent dark matter, a whopping 68.3 percent of the mass of the universe is dark energy (remember: all energy has an equivalent mass—it weighs something—according to Einstein’s famous E = mc2 formula).


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

Matthews, editors, Near-Earth Resources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 192 CHAPTER 20, DARKNESS Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Delacorte, 1992). Paul Horowitz and Carl Sagan, "Project META: A Five-Year All-Sky Narrowband Radio Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Astrophysical Journal, vol. 415 (1992), pp. 218-235. Thomas R. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987). Carl Sagan, Contact: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985) . CHAPTER 21, TO THE SKY! J. Richard Gott III, "Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects," Nature, vol. 263 (1993), pp. 315-319.

We are now, on an unprecedented scale, listening for radio signals from possible other civilizations in the depths of space. Alive today is the first generation of scientists to interrogate the darkness. Conceivably it might also be the last generation before contact is made—and this the last moment before we discover that someone in the darkness is calling out to us. This quest is called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Let me describe how far we've come. The first SETI program was carried out by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, in 1960. He listened to two nearby Sun-like stars for two weeks at one particular frequency. ("Nearby" is a relative term: The nearest was 12 lightyears—70 trillion miles—away


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

If we consider the possibility that we may rank as primitive among the universe’s technologically competent life-forms—however rare they may be—then the best we can do is to keep alert for signals sent by others, because it is far more expensive to send than to receive. Presumably, an advanced civilization would have easy access to an abundant source of energy, such as its host star. These are the civilizations that would be more likely to do the sending. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (affectionately known by its acronym, SETI) has taken many forms. Long-established efforts have relied on monitoring billions of radio channels in search of a radio or microwave signal that might rise above the cosmic noise. The SETI@home screensaver—downloaded by millions of people around the world—enabled a home computer to analyze small chunks of the huge quantities of data collected by the radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico.

—The review required by subsection (a) shall include (1) an assessment of the direction of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s astrobiology initiatives within the Origins program; (2) an assessment of the direction of other initiatives carried out by entities other than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to determine the extent of life in the universe, including other Federal agencies, foreign space agencies, and private groups such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute; (3) recommendations about scientific and technological enhancements that could be made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s astrobiology initiatives to effectively utilize the initiatives of the scientific and technical communities; and (4) recommendations for possible coordination or integration of National Aeronautics and Space Administration initiatives with initiatives of other entities described in paragraph (2).

., 196 Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, 59–60, 146 President’s Commission on Higher Education, 125 Prince (singer), 203 Principia (Newton), 113 Project Prometheus, 169–70 propulsion: alternate fuels for, 157–59 antimatter drive and, 170–71 chemical fuel for, 163 electricity and, 165 in-space, 170 ion-thruster engine and, 164–65, 170 nuclear power and, 159, 168–69 rocket equation and, 153–54, 157 and slowing down, 155–56 solar sails and, 159, 165–67, 170 third law of motion and, 153, 158 xenon gas and, 164–65 Proxima Centauri, 195–96 Ptolemy, Claudius, 34, 65 pulsars, 29 Qatar, 5 quasars, 91 R-7 rocket, 126 racism, 66–67 radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), 168–69 radio telescopes, 91 radio waves, 28–29, 30, 31, 39, 90–91 radium, 96 RAND Corporation, 218 Ranger 7 spacecraft, 70 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 6 relativity, general theory of, 94–95, 101, 248, 250 relativity, special theory of, 195–96 Republicans, 4–5, 15, 17, 224–25 Resnik, Judith, 243 robots, 129, 134 in space exploration, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 rocket equation, 153–54, 157 rockets: flybys and, 157 liquid-fueled, 192 phallic design of, 222–23 propulsion of, see propulsion Rodriguez, Alex, 114 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 94, 96, 135 Royal Society, 216 Russia, xiv, 6, 22, 162, 168 ISS and, 319 Star City training center of, 73, 74, 207 Sagan, Carl, 27, 28, 43, 193, 256 Salyut space module, 6 Sarge (comedian), 234 satellites, xiii, xiv, 60, 71, 94 communication, 129 first US, 124–25 Saturn, 31, 82, 112, 115, 119, 138, 157, 168, 210, 225, 245 radio emissions from, 90–91 Saturn V rocket, 15, 127, 154, 158, 172, 214, 219, 220, 229 as a wonder of the modern world, 232–33 Schmitt, Harrison, 69, 132 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 153 science, 206, 226 Arabs and, 205–6 discovery and, 98 emerging markets and, 209–10 literacy in, 57–59, 230–31, 235–36 multiple disciplines and, 209–10 Scientific American, 223 scientific method, 86 Scobee, Dick, 242 Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation, 146 Senate, US, 5, 146, 328 Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee of, 272 and appointments to Commission on Future of Aerospace Industry, 316 Appropriations Committee of, 321, 329 Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee of, 288, 321, 323, 324, 329 sense of wonder, 64–65 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 206 Sesame Street (TV show), 257 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 41, 325 Shapley, Harlow, 98–101 Shatner, William, 180 Shaw, Brewster, 221 Shepard, Alan B., 114 short-period comets, 46 Siberia, 50 Sims, Calvin, 55–62 Sirius, 178 Skylab 1 (space station), 214 slingshot effect, 119–20 Smith, George O., 175 Smith, Michael, 242 Smithsonian Institution, 216 solar sails, 159, 165–67, 170 solar system, 34, 259 many-body problem and, 117–18 perturbation theory and, 118 solar wind, 176, 235, 245 solid rocket boosters, 155 Soter, Steven, 256 sound, speed of, 108–9 sound barrier, 109 South Africa, xiv South Pole, 76 Soviet Union, xiii, 8, 94, 133, 194, 215, 218 US rivalry with, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 see also Sputnik space, space exploration: colonization of, 57, 60, 102–3 cosmic microwave background in, 92, 94–95 cross-discipline endeavor in, 24–25, 230 culture and, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 early attitudes toward, 217–18 economic motivation for, 200–201 factions against, 8–10 in Galef/Pigliucci interview of author, 75–83 inventions statute and, 311 justification for funding of, 78–81 militarization of, 60 numbers employed in, 236–37 politics and, 3–5 proposed programs and missions for, 201–2 robots and, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 significance of, 102 Soviet achievements in, 122–26 special interests and, 5, 236–37 stellar nurseries in, 93 technological innovation and, 12 US-Soviet rivalry and, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 war as driver of, 219–20 Space Cowboys (film), 162 Space Exploration Initiative, 8 Space Foundation, 221–22 Spaceguard Survey, The: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth Object Detection Workshop, 50 space junk, 176 space shuttle, 7, 12, 25, 109, 160–62, 165, 201, 202, 228, 281 contingency funding for, 321–22 fuel of, 158 launch costs of, 320–22 main parts of, 154–55 pricing policy for, 314 retirement of, 14–16, 143, 214 speed of, 222 use policy for, 312–13 weight of, 155 see also specific vehicles Space Station Freedom, 6, 8 Space Studies Board, 169 Space Technology Hall of Fame, 221, 230–31, 237 Space Telescope Science Institute, 10, 23, 135–36 Space Transportation System, 314 space travel, 191–98 coasting in, 247 in Colbert–author interview, 186–88 danger of, 198 financing of, 193–94 in Hollywood movies, 194–95 Moon missions and, 192–93 robots and, 198 special relativity and, 195–96 Space Travel Symposium, 111 Spain, 7, 87 spectroscopy, 30 Spirit (Mars exploration rover), 130–33, 138 Spitzer Space Telescope, 139 Sputnik, xiii, 5, 59, 79, 113–14, 133, 192, 218 50th anniversary of, 226 US response to, 122–24 Star City (training center), 73, 74, 207 Stars & Atoms (Eddington), 107 Star Trek (TV series), 3, 164, 170 45th anniversary of, 178–81 human behavior and, 180 technology of, 179 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (film), 37–38 Star Wars (film series), 131 State Department, US, 312 Stewart, Jon, 4 Stone, Sharon, 203 subatomic particles, 94 Sugar, Ron, 221 Sun, 27, 28, 29, 33, 46, 58, 72, 97, 112, 117, 118, 138, 195, 245 Copernican principle and, 34 energy emitted by, 93 fusion in, 101 neutrinos emitted by, 94 planets’ orbits and, 115 Superconducting Super Collider, 6–7, 80–81 Sweden, 7 Swift, Philip W., 223 Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, 139 Switzerland, 7 Sykes, Wanda, 17 Systems of the World, The (Newton), 113 Taj Mahal, 88 Tamayo-Méndez, Arnaldo, 122 TASS, 123 Taylor, Charles E., 219 technology, 89, 200, 226 aero-space integration plan for, 323–24 in alien observation of Earth, 29–32 CRDAs policy on transfer of, 304–6 energy conservation and, 96 engineering, 95 Industrial Revolution and, 95 information, 95 leadership and, 23 multiple disciplines and, 135–37 nonsectarian philosophies and, 206 predicting future of, 215–16 progress in, 218–19 space exploration and, 135 of Star Trek, 179 US lag in, 21–22 telescopes, 71, 82, 85–86, 94, 141, 225 microwave, 91–92 radio, 91 ultraviolet, 93 Tereshkova, Valentina, 122 Texas, 6 Thompson, David, 221 three-body problem, 116–17 Three Gorges Dam, 22, 233 Three Mile Island meltdown, 168 Titan, 31 Huygens probe to, 138–39 methane on, 138–39 Today Show (TV show), 210–11 Tonight Show (TV show), 144–45 Toth, Viktor, 250 Townsend, W.


pages: 208 words: 70,860

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

And if it does, some of its signals will leak out into space, spreading through the galaxy at the speed of light. It wasn’t long before twentieth-century astronomers began seriously to consider the feasibility of listening for signals from space using their newly developed radio telescopes. And the serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence began with one man. DRAKE AND HIS EQUATION The first serious ET hunter was the astronomer Frank Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960 he set up an experiment to search for signs of life in distant solar systems by listening in to electromagnetic signals at radio-wave frequencies.

After many hours of recorded data over several months had been examined, no interesting signals were found apart from one, which turned out to have come from a high-flying aircraft. But Drake was not disappointed. He has always maintained that the process was like buying a lottery ticket: he knew he would have been incredibly lucky if something had been found. Undeterred, the following year he organized the very first conference on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and invited along every other scientist he knew to be interested in the subject at the time (all twelve of them). In order to focus their minds, he devised a mathematical formula for calculating the number of civilizations, N, in our galaxy whose radio signals would be detectable on Earth.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

For more than a decade, ordinary people had been not just willing but also eager to turn part of their computer’s run cycles over to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project. The SETI@ home distributed computing initiative has been wildly successful for almost a decade. It sends out chunks of data (or “work units”) to computers all over the world, and the users then send the results back. Users’ willingness to share their untapped computing power means that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project does not need to purchase extra supercomputers or rent time on them. The distribution here is essentially a free gift, and requires little from the participants beyond their signing up, and then allowing the data chunks to flow in and the results to flow out.


pages: 755 words: 121,290

Statistics hacks by Bruce Frey

Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, G4S, game design, Hacker Ethic, index card, Linda problem, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, p-value, place-making, reshoring, RFID, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes

roulette fair payouts gambler's fallacy about overview ROUND function 2nd ROUNDDOWN function 2nd ROUNDUP function 2nd rule of four rule of two rule of two plus two Index [SYMBOL] [A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M] [N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z] Sackrowitz, Harold 2nd safe cracking Sagan, Carl 2nd Salkind, Neil 2nd sample size coin toss and effect size and 2nd sampling error and statistical significance and 2nd samples <Emphasis>t</> tests and cluster defined 2nd discrete/continuous objects in efficient extraterrestrial life inferential statistics and predicting baseball games statistical significance of sampling errors 2nd sampling frame 2nd sampling unit 2nd SAS software SAT 2nd Saxbe, Darby scale invariance scores [See also scores: (see also test scores\\] [See also scores: (see also test scores\\] central tendency of consistency in correlation coefficient defined error high level of measurement likelihood of higher observed 2nd 3rd ordinal level of measurement percentage of predicting 2nd reliability of 2nd 3rd standardized 2nd T scores 2nd true 2nd 3rd validity of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) sensitivity serendipity, interpreting SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Shadish, W.R. shared variance 2nd short-stacked shuffling cards significance [See statistical significance] simple linear regression [See linear regression] single substitution format six degrees of separation six-sided dice 2nd skips Skorupski, William 2nd slips SLOPE function slot machines small-world problem 2nd 3rd Smart Shuffle (iTunes) Smith, Will Soter, Steven 2nd Spears, Britney 2nd species, discovering specificity splitting hands 2nd 3rd SPSS software 2nd St.

There is so much data being collected as part of systematic efforts to scan the skies, no one person or even one computer can possibly analyze it all. You can help! SETI@home is a Berkeley University-based program that arranges for regular people with regular home or office computers to receive some of this data, so their computers can analyze it when they're not doing something else. SETI is the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The program works like a screensaver and can be downloaded for free at http://setiathome.berkely.edu. The data won't make sense to you when you get it, but your computer will begin to use statistical analyses to sort through the signal information, looking for the telltale nonrandom narrow bandwidths that might mean another planet has reached the level of sophistication to produce something like Gomer Pyle or Melrose Place.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

If the Milky Way contains civilizations whose stage of development roughly mimics our own, they, too, might employ radio waves for their localized radio and tele­vi­sion communications, for radar systems, and even, as we have occasionally done, to signal their existence to the cosmos. Although funding for SETI, the generic term for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has often been scarce (or, in the case of efforts financed by the United States government, eliminated by statute in 1994 and never again proposed)1, SETI-­oriented astronomers have completed a variety of investigations that ­either surveyed the sky or directed their attention t­ oward par­tic­u­lar stars.

See Photons Red dwarfs, 43, 45, 82–83, 107–8, 119, 167, 170–71 Red ­giants, 100, 187 Rees, Martin, 212 Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, 46, 196 Sahu, Kailash, 83 Sasselov, Dimitar, 157 Saturn, 22, 58, 66, 71–72, 79, 96, 98, 101–2, 115, 117, 121, 128, 138, 164–65, 212 Schilling, Govert, 3 Seager, Sara, 191–92 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 86, 102 Shankman, Cory, 23 Silicates, 108 Silicon, 137, 153, 219–20 252 Index Solar eclipse, 75 Sound waves, 89, 122, 202 South African Large Telescope (SALT), 196 Southwest Research Institute, 141 SPACE Act, 222 Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), 203 Spectroscopic analy­sis, 8, 17–18, 30, 47–49, 62, 66, 71, 111, 122, 129, 172, 182, 194, 199, 211 SPHERE (Spectro-­Polarimetric High-­contrast Exoplanet REsearch), 73 Spitzer Space Telescope, 79, 81, 104–7, 119, 178, 191 Spring tides, 149 Stanford University, 154 Stars brown-­dwarf, 41, 69, 82 composition of, 151–52 distances of, 6–18, 31–59, 62, 77, 205–20 energy generation in, 56, 67, 82–83, 99–100, 119–20, 137, 152, 218 flares on, 31, 56, 123, 169–79, 189 formation of, 41 lifetimes of, 171 luminosity of, 43–44, 82, 93, 101–13, 117–19, 152, 163, 169, 172, 185, 207 masses of, 31–32, 79, 81 metallicity of, 153 subgiant, 99 Stein 2051 B, 83 Subgiant stars, 99 Sub-­Neptunes, 129–33, 138, 144 Super-­Earths, 129–33 SuperWASP, 110 Tabby’s Star, 92–95 Temperatures suitable for life.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Or by starting an interplanetary dialogue? In a Saturday Night Live skit, the long-awaited reply from outer space was “Send more Chuck Berry.” These are not just questions for late-night dorm-room bull sessions. In the early 1990s NASA allocated a hundred million dollars to a ten-year Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Scientists were to listen with radio antennas for signals that could have come only from intelligent extraterrestrials. Predictably, some congressmen objected. One said it was a waste of federal money “to look for little green men with mis-shapen heads.” To minimize the “giggle factor,” NASA renamed the project the High-Resolution Microwave Survey, but it was too late to save the project from the congressional ax.

Perhaps this answers the rhetorical question in the sporting equipment ad: The average man’s IQ is 107. The average brown trout’s IQ is 4. So why can’t a man catch a brown trout? Intelligence isn’t for everyone, any more than a trunk is, and this should give SETI enthusiasts pause. But I am not arguing against the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; my topic is terrestrial intelligence. The fallacy that intelligence is some exalted ambition of evolution is part of the same fallacy that treats it as a divine essence or wonder tissue or all-encompassing mathematical principle. The mind is an organ, a biological gadget. We have our minds because their design attains outcomes whose benefits outweighed the costs in the lives of Plio-Pleistocene African primates.

Of course no one really knows whether these four habits formed the base camp for the ascent of human intelligence. And no one knows whether there are other, untried gradients to intelligence in biological design space. But if these traits do explain why our ancestors were the only species out of fifty million to follow that route, it would have sobering implications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A planet with life may not be enough of a launching pad. Its history might have to include a nocturnal predator (to get stereo vision), with descendants that switched to a diurnal lifestyle (for color) in which they depended on fruit and were vulnerable to predators (for group living), which then changed their means of locomotion to swinging beneath branches (for hands and for precursors to upright posture), before a climate shift sent them from the forest into grasslands (for upright posture and hunting).


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

That’s because M13 will have moved from its 1974 location, relative to Earth. Of course the Arecibo team knew this, but milked the press opportunity anyway. Still, other star systems might be more profitable targets for radio telescope probes. And what intelligence they detect might not be biological. This assertion came from SETI (which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Headquartered in Mountain View, California, just a few blocks from Google, the now fifty-year-old organization tries to detect signs of alien intelligence coming from as far away as 100 trillion miles. To catch alien radio transmissions, they’ve planted forty-two giant dish-shaped radio telescopes three hundred miles north of San Francisco.

Rubin, Andrew “Runaround” (Asimov) Safe-AI Scaffolding Approach Sagan, Carl SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems Schmidt, Eric Schwartz, Evan Scientist Speculates, The (Good, ed.) Searle, John self-awareness Self-Aware Systems self-improvement self-preservation September 11 attacks serial processing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Shostak, Seth Silicon Valley Singularitarians Singularity definitions of Kurzweil and technological Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil) Singularity Summit Singularity University Sir Groovy Siri 60 Minutes Skilling, Jeffrey Smart Action smart phones see also iPhone software complexity of malware see also programming solar energy space exploration “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (Good) speech recognition SRI International stealth companies Sterrit, Roy Stibel, Jeff Stuxnet subprime mortgage crisis Symantec SyNAPSE Technological Risk (Lewis) technology journalism Terminator movies terrorism 9/11 attacks Thiel, Peter Thinking Machines, Inc.


pages: 253 words: 84,238

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

And the tombstone must have cosmic-scale duration: not only must it be visible from parsecs away, it must last for millions if not billions of years, so that it is still proclaiming its message when other flashes of intellect intercept it long after our extinction. Broadcasting prime numbers or the digits of π won’t cut it. Not as a radio signal or a pulsed laser beam, anyway. They certainly proclaim biological intelligence, which is why they are the stock-in-trade of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and science fiction, but they are too brief, too in the present. So, what signal would last long enough and be detectable from a very great distance in any direction? This is where Hawkins provoked my inner Huxley. It’s beyond us today, but in the future, before our firefly flash is spent, we could put into orbit around the Sun a series of satellites “that block a bit of the Sun’s light in a pattern that would not occur naturally.

Think of how much we would appreciate knowing that intelligent life existed elsewhere in our galaxy. For many people, it would completely change their outlook on life. Even if we couldn’t communicate with the extraterrestrial beings, it would be of immense interest to us to know that they exist or once existed. This is the goal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a research program designed to find evidence of intelligent life in other parts of the galaxy. Beyond the fact that we once existed, we could communicate our history and our knowledge. Imagine if the dinosaurs could tell us how they lived and what led to their demise. That would be immensely interesting and perhaps vitally useful to us.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Kingsley in The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Optical Spectrum, vol. 2, S. A. Kingsley and G. A. Lemarchand, eds. (1996) Proc. WPIE 2704: 102–16. 67. N. S. Kardashev, "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Soviet Astronomy 8.2 (1964): 217–20. Summarized in Guillermo A. Lemarchand, "Detectability of Extraterrestrial Technological Activities," SETIQuest 1:1, pp. 3–13, http://www.coseti.org/lemarch1.htm. 68. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Dell, 1994); Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Scientific American (May 1975): 80–89.

The more informed recent view is that, even if the likelihood of a star's having a planet with a technology-creating species is very low (for example, one in a million), there are so many stars (that is, billions of trillions of them), that there are bound to be many (billions or trillions) with advanced technology. This is the view behind SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—and is the common informed view today. However, there are reasons to doubt the "SETI assumption" that ETI is prevalent. First, consider the common SETI view. Common interpretations of the Drake equation (see below) conclude that there are many (as in billions) of ETls in the universe, thousands or millions in our galaxy.

Seth Shostak provided "an estimate of between 10,000 and one million radio transmitters in the galaxy." Marcus Chown, "ET First Contact 'Within 20 Years,' " New Scientist 183.2457 (July 24, 2004). Available online at http://www.new scientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6189. 71. T. L. Wilson, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Nature, February 22, 2001. 72. Most recent estimates have been between ten and fifteen billion years. In 2002 estimates based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope were between thirteen and fourteen billion years. A study published by Case Western Reserve University scientist Lawrence Krauss and Dartmouth University's Brian Chaboyer applied recent findings on the evolution of stars and concluded that there was a 95 percent level of confidence that the age of the universe is between 11.2 and 20 billion years.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

It is to employ radiotelescopes to listen for electromagnetic signals—radio or television transmissions—beamed into space by alien civilizations. Such a signal, transmitted using only a few cents’ worth of electricity, travels at the speed of light and could be intercepted by radiotelescopes on Earth across distances of many thousands of light-years. This was the realization behind what came to be called SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI was first proposed in 1959 by two scientists, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison. “The probability of success is difficult to estimate,” they noted, “but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”9 The first SETI experiment, Project Ozma, was conducted in the early 1970s by the American astronomer Frank Drake.

Their dominance in the universities, which had been founded largely to study Aristotle, constituted an obstacle to acceptance of the Copernican system advocated by Kepler and Galileo. Science. Systematic study of nature, based upon the presumption that the universe is based upon rationally intelligible principles and that its behavior can therefore be predicted by subjecting observational data to logical analysis. SETI. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, by using radiotelescopes to listen for signals transmitted by intelligent alien beings. Sextant. Instrument employed to measure the elevation of astronomical objects above the horizon. Based upon an arc equal to a sixth of a circle, sextants are more compact and easier to use than are the quadrants that preceded them.

.), 124 measuring distances via micrometry and triangulation, 125–126, 127 Newton’s laws and, 107, 117, 120–121 retrograde motion of, 23, 24, 25, 26–27 spacecraft missions to, 370, 371 transit of, 130–136 See also names of planets Plato, 19, 25–26, 27, 31, 62, 64, 65, 75, 145, 217 Pleiades (star cluster), 259, 263 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for, 269–270 Plutarch, 33, 39, 40 Poincaré, Henri, 181–182, 193, 201 Polaris (North Star), 57 Pole star, 52 Political power, use of astronomy for, 22 Polo, Marco, 47, 49–50, 54 Popper, Karl, 383 Portable telescopes, 163 Positrons, 308 Pound, James, 137, 153 Precession of equinoxes, 23n Primordial atom, 211, 212 Principia (Newton), 103, 115–118, 120–121 publication of, 118–119, 120 Printing press, invention of, 62–63 Probes in interstellar flight, 374–375, 376 Project Ozma (SETI experiment), 372 Proton accelerators, 319–326 Proton-antiproton collider, 324–326 Proton-proton chain reaction for stellar nuclear fusion, 263–265, 272, 278 Protons, 262, 264–265 as fermions, 292 half-life of, 327 heat of stars and, 260–261 penetration of the Coulomb barrier by, 262, 264–265 quarks and, 338, 340 symmetry and, 307 Ptolemy, Claudius, 28–31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 62, 63, 69, 72, 124, 145 Islamic astronomy and, 43 Pythagoras, 35, 217 Pythagorean doctrine of celestial harmony, 75–77 Q and A time for interstellar radio signals, 376, 377, 378 Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), 297, 311, 312, 313 Quantum electrodynamics (QED), 297, 315–316 Quantum field theory relativistic, 297, 337 string theory and, 328 symmetry and, 312–313 Quantum genesis hypothesis, 351, 362–365 Quantum indeterminacy, 287–288 Einstein and, 290–291 proton action and, 262 quantum genesis hypothesis and, 365 Quantum leap, 288 Quantum mechanics, 200, 257 string theory and, 330, 331 Quantum numbers, 31 Quantum physics, 178, 183, 186, 200, 286–299, 367 four fundamental forces in, 293–294, 295 standard model theories for, 292–299 symmetry and, 307–309 Quantum principle, 286–287 Quantum tunneling, 262–263 Quantum vacuum, 351–352 Quarks, 293, 294–295, 350 antiquarks and, 344 big bang and, 338, 339, 340 inflationary universe hypothesis and, 360 symmetry and, 312 Quasars, 174, 390 Radioactive decay, 293 Radioactivity, 248, 249–254, 255, 256 Radio astronomy, 213–214 Radiometric age-dating, 250–252 age of the solar system by, 266 Radio telescopes, 213, 347 SETI projects and, 371–372, 374, 376 Radium, 249, 250 Red giant stars, 269, 270 Redshift-distance relation of galaxies, 207–208, 209–211, 214 Reflecting telescope, 110–112, 154, 168 Refracting telescope, 152–157, 158 Relativistic quantum field theories, 297, 337 Relativistic time dilation, 192–193 Relativity (term), 193, 285–286 See also General theory of relativity; Special theory of relativity Renaissance, 47–59 Retrograde motion of planets, 23, 24, 25 Eudoxus and, 26–27 Roman Catholic Church Copernicus’s heliocentric theory and, 67 persecution of Galileo by, 11, 84, 96–100 Rubbia, Carlo, 322–323, 324–326 Russell, Henry Norris, 168, 259–260, 261 Rutherford, Ernest, 249–250, 256, 282 Salam, Abdus, 313, 314, 316, 317, 321, 326 Sandage, Allan, 174, 351 Saturn, 23, 43, 73, 117 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 Saturn (cont.) rings of, 81 satellites of, 156 triangulation of, 136 Scientific age-dating, 221–229 Second law of thermodynamics, 247 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 371–372, 374 Shapley, Harlow, 168–172, 208 Silver, 277, 279 Slipher, Vesto, 206–208, 210 Smith, William, 221, 222 Sodium, 165 Solar fusion, 263–265 Solar system age of, 266 comets as products of, 69n Copernicus’s model of, 65–66, 123, 124 Galileo and, 88–90, 123, 132 Kepler and, 75, 78–82, 123 location of Milky Way in, 168–175 mean distances of planets from the sun in (est.), 124 measuring proportions of, 123–126 Newton’s laws and, 117, 120–121, 123 origin of (computer model), 167n space probes from other stars in, 374–375, 376 Tycho and, 73, 123 Solar telescopes, 168 Spacecraft, 81, 104, 252, 370–371 Space probes in interstellar flight, 374–375, 376 Spacetime continuum, 31, 32 four-dimensional, 197, 198, 199–202 Spacetime geometry, 364–365 Special theory of relativity, 11, 178, 183, 185, 191–194, 197, 200 Lorentz contraction as key element in, 181, 191 quantum physics and, 297 symmetry and, 307 Spectroscopy, 144, 162–166 Bohr and, 257–259 Spiral nebulae, 144, 162, 165–166 Milky Way galaxy and, 171, 172, 175 redshifts of, 207–208, 209–210 Star clusters, 259, 263, 270, 271 age of, 269 globular, 170–171 Stars, 19–25 aberration of starlight, 139 double, 168 exploding, 167 Galileo’s observation of, 89, 90 lifetime of, 265–271, 280 quantum tunneling and, 262–263 spectral classes of, 258–260 tree of, 260, 267–270 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for, 259–260 triangulation of, 127, 136–141 variable, 168–169, 170, 172, 173, 208, 274 Stellar energy, 256–266, 280 Stellar nuclear fusion, 263–271 as source of elements, 271–272, 275–280 String theory, 328–332, 347n, 391 Strong nuclear force, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 346 quantum chromodynamics and, 311, 312 symmetry of, 309 Sun, 65 age of nuclear fusion and, 248, 252–254 thermodynamics and, 246–248 ancient astronomy and, 22 composition of, 164–165, 265–266 lifetime of, 265–266, 270–271 See also Heliocentric universe Superconducting super collider, 326, 340 Supernovae, 61, 70–71, 167, 268, 270, 276, 327, 391–392 Superstring concept, 332–333 Supersymmetry, 312, 328–334 early-universe theory and, 345, 348 inflationary universe theory and, 359 Symmetry, 320–334, 348 asymmetries and, 313 GUTs and, 327–328, 332–334 mystery of the universe and, 385–386 string theory and, 328–332 supersymmetry and, 328–334 unified electroweak theory and, 313–314, 317–318, 321–326 Telescopes Galileo’s improvement on, 84, 86–88, 95–96 Herschel and, 152–157, 158 Newton and, 110–112 radiotelescopes, 213, 347 reflecting, 110–112, 154, 168 refracting, 152–157, 158 zenith, 137 Teller, Edward, 212, 263 Thermodynamics, 246–248, 254 symmetry of law of, 307 Thermonuclear fusion, 261–262 Tides, Newton’s laws and, 117 Time cyclical, 217–220 imaginary, 363, 364 linear, 220–225 lookback time, 174 particle physics-cosmology link and, 337–348 special theory of relativity and, 191, 192–193 timekeeping by the stars, 21–22 Tin, 275, 279 Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 49, 55, 58, 59 Transit of the planets, 130–136 Translational symmetries, 304 Tree of life, 238–239 Triangulation, see Parallax Tryon, Edward, 353–355, 361 Tycho (Tycho Brahe), 61, 69, 70–73, 74, 77, 97, 124, 167 Kepler and, 77–79 solar system and, 73, 123 Unified electroweak theory, 313–314, 317–318, 321–326, 345 big bang and, 336–337 Unified field theory, 186, 299, 308–309, 332–333 experimental versions of, 346–348 Uniformitarianism, 225–229, 233 “Up” quarks, 296, 312 Uranium, 249, 250 Uranus, 155–156 Ussher, James, 220, 224 Vacuum genesis of the universe, 351–356, 361, 362, 393–394 Variable stars, 168–169, 170, 172, 173, 208, 274 Venus, 68 angular diameter of, 154 death of the sun and, 270 Galileo’s observation of, 88–89 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 parallax of, 130–131 spacecraft mission to, 370–371 transit of, 131, 132, 133, 135 Vinci, Leonardo da, 59, 67n, 381 Virtual particles, 351–352, 353 Weak nuclear force, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298 electromagnetism and, 315, 316–318, 326, 337, 345 quantum chromodynamics and, 312, 313 Weinberg, Steven, 313–314, 317–318, 321, 326, 331–332, 333, 334, 336 Wheeler, John Archibald, 346, 364, 365 White dwarf stars, 267, 268, 269 Wigner, Eugene, 273, 307, 308 Wilkinson, David, 391 Wilson, Robert, 213, 320, 322 WMAP, 391 W particles, 317, 318, 321–322, 326, 337, 345, 352–353, 356 Wren, Christopher, 112, 113 Wright, Thomas, 145–146, 147 X rays, 248, 293, 297 Yang, Chen Ning, 302, 309–310, 311, 312–313 Yang-Mills gauge field theory, 309–313 string theory and, 330 Zenith telescope, 137 Z particles, 317, 318, 321–322, 326, 337, 345, 352–353, 356 About the Author TIMOTHY FERRIS, called “perhaps the best popular-science writer in the English language today” by the Christian Science Monitor and “the best science writer of his generation” by the Washington Post, is the bestselling author of Seeing in the Dark, The Whole Shebang, and The Red Limit, among other books.


Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

It's incredible that the Voyagers have lasted long enough to become interstellar explorers in their own right, but what about the idea of creating purpose-built spacecraft to explore nearby stars? With the explosion in exoplanet discoveries in the past two decades—now numbering over 3,500 confirmed finds, with many, many thousands more suspected—we have increasing reason to believe that some of these planets may be suitable for life. Various projects, like SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have been listening in for decades, hoping to detect a radio signal from a society orbiting a distant star, with no confirmed successes. As with our explorations of Mars, we are lowering our sights somewhat, hoping to find at least basic life—perhaps on the level of bacteria, or with luck something more complex—on a planet orbiting a nearby star.

United States, 43, 51–52, 228 See also names of specific missions and programs Rocket Lab, 94 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26 Ross 248 (star), 212 Ruppe, Harry, 159 Russia / Russian Federation German rocketry and, 42 Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and, 319 Luna-Glob program, 322 sample-return missions, 232–33 V-2 missile technology and, 42 See also Soviet Union Rutan, Burt, 93 S/2009 S1 (moon of Saturn), 283 Sagan, Carl, 35, 36 record attached to Voyagers and, 213, 215–16 on Viking mission images, 135, 136 sample-return missions Exobiology on Mars (ExoMars), 318 Mars 5M, 231–33 Mars 2020 rover, 315–16 Mars Ascent Vehicle, 144 simplifying robotic rendezvous and docking of Martian samples, 235–37 See also soil samples/experiments samples ExoMars mission, 318 Sample Transfer Technology team, 316 sample-tube-grab, 315–16 San Gabriel Mountains, California, 19, 20 Saturn AREE rover for moons of, 166 Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) mission, 296–97 Grand Tour of outer planets, 173, 174, 177 imaged by Voyager 1, 200 Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn (MJS) flyby, 183–84 moons of, 202–203, 204, 287, 290–94 Pioneers and, 177–78, 180 rings of, 200–202, 201, 284–89, 285 Cassini's final orbits and, 294 composition of, 286, 287 early astronomers on, 284–85 gaps in, 286 mechanism of formation of, 286–87 names of, 285, 285 shadows cast upon, 288 size of, 286 spokes, 288 width of, 288–89 storms in (2005 and 2010), 289 Voyager mission to, 196, 199 See also Cassini Saturn mission Saturn rockets, 159, 163 Saturn IB rocket, 111, 113–14, 158 Saturn V rocket, 105, 114, 114, 115, 158, 222, 228, 325 Saturn S-IVB stage, 160, 163 Sauder, Jonathan, 167 scan platform Cassini Saturn mission, 277 Galileo mission, 258 Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 11 Schurmeier, Bud, 176, 177 Sea of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum), 56, 86 Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis), 54, 87 Seitz, Frederick, 221 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 217, 218 “Seven Minutes of Terror” (video), 21–22 SFOF (Space Flight Operations Facility), 28, 269 Shenzhou 5, 323 SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), 305 shielding, radiation, 184, 185 Shoemaker Levy 9 (comet), 253 side-scan sonar, 301 S-IVB stage, 160, 163 sky crane system, 102, 272, 303 Skylab, 159, 163 Small Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM), 324 sodium, 195 Soffen, Gerald, 135–36 soil samples/experiments Lunokhod missions, 91, 92 Mars 2020 rover and, 304, 306–307 Soviet Mars 3, 225–26 Surveyor spacecraft, 84, 87 Venera 14, 153 from Viking missions, 120–24, 137–40 See also sample-return missions solar nebula, 257–58 solar panels, 73, 90, 166, 310 solar-wind steering petals, 71 solid fuel, 242 solid oxide electrolysis, 143–44 Sotheby's auction house, 92 South Pole-Aitkin Basin, 47 Soviet Sputnik mission (1957).


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

But now they and the Dalai Lama (a science aficionado) are also aware, from mindful moment to moment, of an invisible dimension that includes neurons, quarks, Higgs bosons, MRIs, condensation nuclei, white dwarfs, DNA, and a googolplex of others. Elsewhere on Earth, over 5.2 million Internet-connected computers, citizen scientists are helping SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) monitor radio telescope data through the SETI@home project, hoping to catch a message from alien life forms in some distant star system. SETI’s senior astronomer, Seth Shostak, believes that the first calling card from aliens may well be detected on home computers, not by official scientists at radio telescopes arrayed in India, Australia, Puerto Rico, or Chile.

Luke’s Hospital, 78 Salem witch trials, 207 salmon, 60, 65 salt deposits, 31 sandhill cranes, 161 San Diego Zoo, 151 sand mandala, 174–75 Sandy, Hurricane, 31, 43, 44–47 oyster beds smothered by, 57 Sanjay Gandhi National Park, 78 Santiago, 77 Sapolsky, Robert, 298 Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary, 193–94 scallops, 57, 60 schizophrenia, 176, 282, 285 science, 11 scientific reasoning, 219–20 Scotland, 132 Scots pine, 132 Scripps Research Institute, 151 sea grapes, 61 sea levels, 32, 41, 51 sea lions, 144, 147 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 175 sea squirt, 61 seaweed, 61 sediment, 31–32 sedum, 83, 87–88 self-awareness, 216–17, 219 self-cleaning clothes, 181 sensory overload, 197 Seoul, 192 sepsis, 183 Serengeti, 126 Seurat, Georges, 246 sex, biology of, 293–96 Shakespeare, William, 259 Shanghai, China, 192 sharks, 147 Shark Valley, 129, 315 sheep, 71, 267 Shelley, Mary, 212–13 shellfish, 60 Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, 52 Shostak, Seth, 175 shrews, 115 shrikes, 74 Siberia, 161 Siju-Rewak Coridor, 124 silicon retinas, 13 silver, 182–83 Singapore, 78 singing, 93 Sinhyung Cho, 102 skin, 257 Skinner, B.


pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

But its disappointing results drained the fuel out of exobiology’s rocket engines. NASA engineers built more probes to land on Mars, but they were mostly designed to work out the planet’s geology and atmosphere, not to search for hints of life. In the years after Viking 1, the closest thing to a search for life was an eavesdropping project. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI for short, was a NASA program that would scan the sky for radio communications from alien civilizations. JPL offered up its network of radio telescopes as our interstellar ears. Despite hostility from Congress, NASA managed to scrape together enough funds to keep developing plans for SETI through the 1980s.

Douglas, xvi Russell, Michael, 245–48 Sagan, Carl, 253–54, 262 samaras, 107–9, 113 Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, 6 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, 203–9, 226 Saturn, 260, 261 Schrieffer, Robert, 287 Schrödinger, Erwin, 187–91, 195, 262 Science, 257 Scientific American, 247 Scientific Revolution, 128 Scripps Research Institute, 285 seabed environment, 153–56 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 255, 259 Secor, Stephen, 67–70, 72–75, 77, 124 sensibility, 139–43 sex cells, 184–85 sexual parasitism, 213–15 sexual reproduction, 105–7 Shapiro, Ben, 25 Shelley, Mary, 147–49 Shewmon, Alan, 58 Siberia, 46 Simmel, Marianne, 267–68 siphonophores, 153 slime molds, 80–89, 105, 113, 124 Smith, Kelly, 272–73, 276 Smith College, 268 snakes, metabolism of, 67–77, 124 Snethlage, Cedric, 12 Société de Biologie, 45–46 somas, 3, 5 Soviet Union, 178 space travel, 47–48, 251.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

Geological Survey NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY The International Astronomical Union ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation THE DAVID AND LUCILE PACKARD FOUNDATION The Paul G. Allen Foundation THE MOORE FOUNDATION The Universities Space Research Association THE PACIFIC SCIENCE CENTER The Foundation for Microbiology SUN MICROSYSTEMS Hewlett-Packard. Those who founded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hoped 100,000 global citizens would sign up … More than two million did. And SETI@home is now the world’s largest community computer project … With 280,000 years of processing time available … And a network that grows every week.10 AIDS researchers soon copied this model, linking more than 100,000 PCs in over eighty countries … Creating the world’s largest academic computing site … Designed to understand and attack a virus that mutates very rapidly.11 (And of course, volunteer networks can morph into business networks.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

As a result, it would be clearly identifiable as an artificial phenomenon. Unfortunately, however, the frequencies of such waves would be too low to penetrate the Earth's ionosphere. But they could be detected by suitable radio observatories in space. The community involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has for decades guided their efforts by the hypothesis that extraterrestrials would use submeter-wavelength radio for interstellar communication.13 As noted above, the best place to conduct such research is the back side of the moon. However, it is a striking fact that despite searching since 1960 using ever more powerful instrumentation, ground-based SETI researchers have detected no such signals.

., Dione, Enceladus, Titan) solar system energy resources of, 159 statistics on getting to and back from, 162 tides of, 155–56 Titan-Saturn ferry, 163–64 Saturn V (rocket), 11, 36, 41, 102, 107, 108, 329, 343 Schiller, Friedrich, 327 Schmitt, Harrison, 83 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 235 Scientific American (journal), 283 scoops, magnetic. See magnetic sails (magsail) SDIO (Strategic Defense Initiative Organization) (US), 13 Seager, Sara, 244, 245 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 256–57, 258 SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), 29, 34 seed spaceships (Noah's Ark Eggs), 209–14 SEI (Space Exploration Initiative), 343 self-replicating complex systems, 231–32, 236. See also nanotechnology SETI, 256–57, 258 SFS (Small Falcon Spaceship), 111–12 Shackleton Crater (on the moon), 76 Shakespeare, William, 22, 34 SHARAD ground-penetrating radar, 14, 106 Shelley, Percy B., 334 Shergotty (SNC meteorite), 343 Sieck, Paul, 180 silicon, 72, 82–83, 149, 171, 232, 285, 303–304 single-stage rocket systems, 40–41, 45, 344 payloads for one and two stage reusable rockets, 42 skyhook, 93–97, 115–17 Skylab space station, 118, 132 Slough, John, 179 SLS rocket (NASA), 36, 77, 132, 134, 157 Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact (SPARC), 177 Small Falcon Spaceship (SFS), 111–12 Smolin, Lee, 262, 263 SNC meteorites, 119–20, 343 Snyder, Timothy, 308 Socrates, 312 SoftBank Group, 53 Sojourner (Mars lander), 105 solar energy, 31, 34, 57, 73, 76, 159, 265, 304 limited availability in outer solar system, 167, 173–74 sending from moon back to earth, 82–83, 90 solar power satellites, 34, 57–60 use of on Mars, 111 solar flare, 101, 343 solar light pressure at 1 AU, 200 solar sails, plate 13, 116, 196–98, 221, 234, 235, 258, 344 use of as reflectors to increase solar flux, 222–23 use of to amplify brightness of stars, 237–38 See also IKAROS solar sail spacecraft; light sails solar wind, 73, 74, 87, 88 solar-wind pushed magsail, 203, 204 Soyuz (Russian space launch system), 36 space activism, how to achieve, 327–31 what individuals can do, 331–34 space business parks, 50–51 Space Exploration Initiative, 105 spaceflights/space travel commercial benefits of communications and data satellites, 51–56 developing commercial energy system in space, 57–60 fast global travel on Earth, 40–43 going beyond Earth orbit, 66–68 orbital industries, 48–50 orbital research labs, 47–48, 50 space business parks, 50–51 space tourism, 45–47 fundamentals of rocketry, 43–45 change of mass ratio and payload of a rocket, 44 health effects of long-duration spaceflight, 133–35 military uses and deterring a war, 60–66 outer solar system need for advanced second or third generation systems to settle, 173–74 statistics on getting to and back from, 162 program of action to achieve, 328–31 what individuals can do, 331–34 reasons for pursuing for the challenges, 271–86 for the future we can create, 315–25 to gain more freedom, 301–25 for the knowledge gained, 249–69 need for a frontier and challenges, 272–74, 275–84 for survival of humanity, 287–99 spin-offs from space program, 284–86 STEM graduates in US (1960–1990), 285–86, 285 See also interstellar travel Space Frontier Foundation, 332–33 Space Internet, 53 space launches comparison of space launch systems, 36 costs of, 89–90 consequences of cheap space launches, 24–28 for developing solar power satellite systems, 57–58 getting to a $200 per kilogram cost, 27–28 importance of a two-stage system to reduce costs, 39–45 lower costs allowing for orbital industries, 49–50 See also commercial benefits of spaceflight Elon Musk and development of SpaceX, 30–37 impact of cost-plus contracts, 22–24, 330–31 need for reusable spacecraft, 21–23 rise of microlaunchers, 37–38 skyhook as alternate means of Earth-to-orbit transit, 93–94 See also propellants and propulsion space power, use of and deterring a war, 60–66 Space Resources (Lewis), 136 Spaceship One, 29 space superiority vs. space supremacy, 62–63 space tourism, 45–47 SpaceX, plate 6, plate 7, 12, 19–21, 21, 27–28, 53, 77, 84, 175, 211, 328 development of SpaceX, 30–37 heavy-lift rockets, 107 Interplanetary Transport System plan, plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) planned 2023 artists’ cruise around, plate 9 sending Tesla Roadster past Mars, 11 size of, 39–40 Starlink satellites, 53 and two-stage systems, 41, 45 See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); Musk, Elon SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, 177 specific impulse (Isp), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341, 344 spherical tokamak (ST), 175–76, 176, 180 “spheromak,” 180 spin-offs from space program, 284–86 STEM graduates in US (1960–1990), 285–86, 285 Spire Lemur-2 CubeSats, plate 4 Spirit rover (NASA), 106 SPS (solar power satellites), 34, 57–60 Sridhar, K.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

Morrison, who was born just before World War II, is an astronomer with a Ph.D. from Harvard and decades of experience leading space-exploration projects at NASA. He is also generally regarded as the person who focused the world’s attention on the threat from asteroids and is a leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In Cosmic Catastrophes, he slowly made the case for worrying about asteroid impact in the way a good prosecutor would carefully and convincingly lay out his evidence to a jury. He began off-planet. For over three centuries, humans had been looking at the moon through telescopes.

., 213 Roper, William, 214 Ross, Bill, 136 Ross, Lee, 184 Royal Academy, 345 Royal Air Force, 10 Royal Navy, 9 Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, 253 Rubenstein, Ariel, 380n Ruby, Jack, 99 Rumsfeld, Donald, 28–29 Russo, Rene, 219 Rutgers University, 261 Sagan, Carl, 273–77 Sago Mine disaster, 129–30 Salling, John Peter, 122 Samuel, Arthur, 381n San Bruno pipeline explosion of 2010, 293–94 Sandler O’Neill & Partners, 154 Sandworm, 285 Sanriku earthquake of 869, 77–81, 91, 97–98 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), 157 Sarin, 23, 230 Satisficing, 116, 117, 180–81, 319, 322, 359 Savage, Stefan, 297–98 Scacco, Gus, 149 Scanning for problems, 354–56 Scarface (movie), 99 Scenario modeling, 360, 363–64 Schapiro, Mary, 118–19 Schlesinger, Michael, 240–41 Schneider, Stephen, 241 Science (journal), 242 Science Story (show), 226 Scientific American, 278–79 Scientific method, 248–49 Scientific reticence, 79–80, 186–87, 234, 248–49, 259, 335 “Scope neglect,” 174 Sea-level rise, 238, 244–60, 360 Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), 304 Seawalls, and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 77, 85, 89–90, 92–93 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 100, 105–12, 114–20, 189–90 Security by obscurity, 270 Seismologist Warns, A (Ishibashi), 91–92 Selection effect, 380n Self-confidence, 184, 240, 365 Self-interest, of critics, 187–88 Sendai, Japan, 80, 81, 82 Sentinel intelligence, 3, 16, 356 “Separation of parts” policy, 270 September 11 attacks, 7–9, 230, 361–62 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Lawrence), 57 Sextus Empiricus, 185 Shearson Lehman, 162 Shia Muslims, 63 Shoemaker, Gene, 306–7 Shultz, George, 280 Siberian Unified Dispatch Control Center (SUDCC), 290 Siegel, Jeremy, 157–58 Siegfried Line, 10 Sieur de Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, 41 Signal and the Noise, The (Silver), 15 Signal from noise, separating, 356–58 Silver, Nate, 13, 15 Silver mining, 128–29 Simon, Herbert, 180–81, 322 Simons, Daniel, 175 Singularity, the, 209 60 Minutes (TV show), 119, 162, 244 Skepticism, 151–53, 168, 185, 240, 248–49 Skynet, 205 Smith & Wesson, 99, 109 Snowden, Edward, 211 Solid rocket boosters, and Challenger disaster, 11–13 Somalia, 65 Soothsayers, 1–2 “Sophistication effect,” 187 South Africa, 42–43 Soviet Union, 25–26, 266, 267–68, 271, 273–74, 277–78 Spaceguard goal, 312–17, 319 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 11–13 SpaceX, 202 Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, 195, 198, 217, 221–24 Spielberg, Steven, 101 Split-strike conversion, 103–5 SSH (Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydro), 289–2917 Stalin, Joseph, 174, 213 Standard project hurricane (SPH), 52–53 “Standing start,” 266 Stanford University, 89, 184, 192, 226, 337, 338 Steam engine, 174–75 Stock trading.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Siming Yang, Peng Liu, Mingda Yang, Qiugu Wang, Jiming Song, and Liang Dong, “From Flexible and Stretchable Meta-Atom to Metamaterial: A Wearable Microwave Meta-Skin with Tunable Frequency Selective and Cloaking Effects,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016), 21921, doi: 10.1038/srep21921; “Iowa State engineers develop flexible skin that traps radar waves, cloaks objects,” Iowa State University, Mar. 4, 2016, news release, www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/03/04/meta-skin (accessed Apr. 20, 2017). Re the design differences between the F-117A and the B-2, Moore’s law over ten years gives 6.67 doubling cycles, which equals a factor of 100 increase in computing power. 65.At a meeting held by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1976, the vice president for R & D at Hewlett Packard, Bernard Oliver, quoted from a 1971 report by NASA’s Project Cyclops (in which he participated) that introduced the term “water hole”: “Nature has provided us with a rather narrow band in this best part of the spectrum that seems especially marked for interstellar contact.

Oliver then remarks, “It is easy to dismiss this as romantic, chauvinistic nonsense, but is it? We suggest that it is chauvinistic and romantic but that it may not be nonsense.” See Bernard M. Oliver, “Colloquy 4—The Rationale for a Preferred Frequency Band: The Water Hole,” SP-419 SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, history.nasa.gov/SP-419/s2.4.htm (accessed Apr. 20, 2017). 66.For a historical overview of what are generally termed nonlethal weapons, see Ando Arike, “The Soft-Kill Solution: New Frontiers in Pain Compliance,” Harper’s (Mar. 2010), 38–47. Re the USAF’s ADS system, Arike writes, “Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees and force anyone in its path to flee in pain—but without injury, officials insist, making it one of the few weapons in military history to be promoted as harmless to its targets” (38).

Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2016.” 117FA69. Apr. 26, 2016. Oliver, Bernard M. “Colloquy 4—The Rationale for a Preferred Frequency Band: The Water Hole.” SP-419. SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 1977. Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance. London: Phoenix Press, 1963. Peebles, Curtis. High Frontier: The U.S. Air Force and the Military Space Program.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Pseudoscience and Pseudohistory Okay, so ghosts are bunk, along with most claims that fall under the heading of pseudoscience, by which I mean claims presented so that they appear scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility. The search for extraterrestrial life is not pseudoscience because it is plausible, even though the evidence for it thus far is nonexistent (the SETI—Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—program looks for extraterrestrial radio signals). Alien abduction claims, however, are pseudoscience. Not only is physical evidence lacking but it is highly implausible that aliens are beaming thousands of people into spaceships hovering above the Earth without anyone detecting the spacecrafts or reporting the people missing.

They were nearly off the scale in both conscientiousness and openness to experience, giving them that balance between being open-minded enough to accept the occasional extraordinary claim that turns out to be right, but not so open that one blindly accepts every crazy claim that anyone makes. Sagan, for example, was open to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which, at the time, was considered a moderately heretical idea; but he was too conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and aliens have actually landed on earth (Shermer 2001). The psychologist David Wulff (2000), in a general survey of the literature on the psychology of mystical experiences (a subset of weird things), concluded that there were some consistent personality differences: Persons who tend to score high on mysticism scales tend also to score high on such variables as complexity, openness to new experience, breadth of interests, innovation, tolerance of ambiguity, and creative personality.


pages: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

It connects individual computers via the Internet into a giant virtual supercomputer in order to tackle complex computational tasks that no individual computer could solve alone. For years, scientists have been harnessing the processing power of home computers to create virtual supercomputers tasked with solving real scientific problems. The most famous example is SETI@home, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home, a program that harnesses home computers to analyze radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life in the universe. Folding@home is a similar system created by biologists and medical researchers at Stanford University in an effort to solve one of the greatest mysteries of human biology: how proteins fold.

Lab mobile phone games closing generation gap with as creating communities in real-world spaces for developing countries as motivational platforms for challenging hobbies for social innovation as social motivation platforms of social participation and volunteer work Molyneux, Peter Moses, Edwin mutual regard “naches,” narrative ARGs Nature NCAA Football 10, negative stress Neolithic era Nesse, Randolph Never Saw It Coming (Cerulo) Neversoft New Games Book New Games movement New Stone Age Nike+ Ning Nintendo Nobel Peace Prize O’Donnell, Martin Olympic Games organizational ARGs Outliers (Gladwell) oxytocin Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) participation bandwidth gamers as valuable source of party games PDAs Pearsall, Paul Peggle Persuasive Games Peterson, Christopher Pew Internet & American Life Project phasing Piazza, Alberto pilot experimentation “ping,” planetary simulation games planet craft PlayStation 3 (PS3) Pleasures of Sorrow and Work, The (de Botton) Plusoneme.com Polack, Trent Pong Popit Popović, Zoran Portal positive psychology positive stress (eustress) postconcussion syndrome posttraumatic bliss poverty Prensky, Marc prosocial emotions protein-folding games Putnam, Robert pwnage Quest to Learn Reiss, Allan resource building Rigopulos, Alex Robertson, Margaret Rock Band 2 Rock Band series role-playing games leveling up in satisfying work in rules, as game trait Salen, Katie Sameshima, Pauline satisfying work actionable next steps in ARGs as turning real world tasks into blissful productivity of in casual games clear goals in in crowdsourcing and massive collaboration projects “endgame” payoff in as fix for reality in games vs. work in reality guarantee of productivity in intrinsic rewards of leveling up in in MMORPGs as pushing to limit of abilities resource building in in social network games types of unnecessary obstacles in Schwartz, Aaron B. Scrabble Season Showdown Secrets of the Ancient Games (podcast series) Seed seed ATMs self-help paradox Seligman, Martin Selvadurai, Naveen SETI@home (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home) shared intentionality Shirky, Clay Shop Class as Soul Craft (Crawford) Simon, Nina Sims 3 Sims games single-player games casual games as smart meters Smithsonian American Art Museum social connections ambient sociability and ARGs and closing generation gap in combating loneliness with community-building games and in crowd games in crowdsourcing and massive collaboration projects eye contact and touch in strengthening of as fix for reality forging new relationships vs. strengthening of existing intrinsic rewards of introverts and in massive multiplayer games in mentoring in party games prosocial emotions and social conjunctions and social network games and in social participation tasks (SPTs) in transitory public sociality trash-talking and see also collaboration social innovation games social network games and applications alternate reality asynchronous gameplay in dance-offs and dance quests in in forecasting genre in global collaboratories prosocial emotions generated by satisfying work in social connectivity in social innovation as social motivation platforms of social participation and volunteer work trash-talking in user profiles in video sharing in social participation games crowd mobilization efforts of empowerment of for energy conservation epic wins in heroic purpose in social connectivity in as taking advantage of leading-edge technology wish-granting social participation tasks (SPTs) “social presence,” sound tracks Spore stealth social innovation Sudnow, David Suits, Bernard SuperBetter supercomputers “super-empowered hopeful individuals” (SEHIs) game platform for organizing of Super Monkey Ball 2 Superstruct sustainable engagement economy epic wins as crucial in Sutton-Smith, Brian SXSW Interactive Tapscott, Don Tarter, Jill Teaching Digital Natives (Prensky) teamwork see also collaboration ten-thousand-hour theory Tetris Texas Hold ‘Em Theory of Fun for Game Design, A (Koster) Thompson, Clive Tomasello, Michael Tombstone Hold ‘Em Top Secret Dance-Off transitory public sociality trash-talking Twenge, Jean M.


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

Private networks include dedicated farms of small commodity servers used with grid middleware to allow for parallel computing. Other private networks include corporate offices where personal computers are used after hours for parallel computing. One of the most well known public network examples of grid computing is the SETI@home project. This project uses computers connected to the Internet in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Individuals can participate by running a program on their personal computers that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. It then sends the results back to the central system that aggregates completed jobs. This type of public network grid computing is known as CPU scavenging.

Grid computing implementations vary, and some are wholly dedicated to grid computing all day, whereas others are utilized as other types of computers during the day and connected to the grid at night when no one is using them. For grids that are utilizing surplus capacity, this approach is known as CPU scavenging. One of the most well-known grid scavenging programs has been SETI@home that utilizes unused CPU cycles on volunteers’ computers in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence in radio telescope data. There are obviously drawbacks of utilizing spare capacity that include unpredictability of the number of hosts and the speed or capacity of each host. When dealing with large corporate computer networks or standardized systems that are idle during the evening, these drawbacks are minimized.

Servers, optimal number for data centers, 491–492 Service behavior during failure, stress testing, 265 Service providers, clouds, 435–436 Services, splitting work responsibility by, 331–332 Services affecting performance, identifying for stress testing, 265 Session environments, saving, 403–404 Session storage avoiding, 403–404, 405 centralizing, 404, 405 decentralizing, 404, 405 Set method, 382 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 429 SETI@home project, 429 Sharding, definition, 311 Shards, definition, 311 Shared infrastructure, grid benefit, 457 Shareholder test, 24 Shareholder value, dilution by data cost, 415 Shareholder values, leadership alignment with, 74–75 ShareThis, case studies, 507–508 Slavery, abolition of, 80 Slivers, definition, 311 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) criteria, postmortem review, 145 goals, 80–81, 83 guidelines, architectural principles, 198 Software as a Service (SaaS), 427–428 Software engineers, roles and responsibilities, 33–34 Specific architectural principles, 198 Speed cloud computing benefit, 441–442 tradeoffs in business, 287 Splitting databases by customer, 365–367.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Many critics thought Nakamoto had ruined the system by refusing to guarantee results. They wanted his computational puzzles as a “proof of work” to verify transactions also to accomplish “good works.” They wanted bitcoin’s computations to calculate complex protein folds for cancer therapy or to do search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) calculations for the discovery of other intelligent beings in space or to fathom intricate feedback loops in the models of global warming. But a measuring stick cannot be part of what it measures. A currency generates value by measuring value. If what it is doing is already deemed valuable, money becomes just another self-referential loop, where elites define what should be deemed important.


pages: 215 words: 56,215

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

Human beings love to imagine the arrival of extraterrestrials to our small planet. As a species we have created hundreds of books, stories and movies about extraterrestrial arrival. Every day there is a new report of a UFO somewhere in the world. And there is a very well known effort called SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - that hopes to intercept radio signals from intelligent life on other planets. Just think of all of the popular movies that have explored the possibility of extraterrestrials. Here is a sampling of blockbuster films in this genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey The Abyss Alien, Aliens Apollo 18 Avatar Battle: Los Angeles Chicken Little Close encounters of the Third Kind Cloverfield Cocoon Contact Cowboys and Aliens District 9 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Godzilla The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I An Number Four Independence Day Invasion of the Body Snatchers Lost in Space Megamind Mission to Mars Signs Species Star Wars Star Trek Stargate Super 8 Superman The Thing Transformers War of the Worlds The X Files It is clear that human beings enjoy thinking about extraterrestrials and the arrival of extraterrestrials on earth.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Blockchain 3.0: Efficiency and Coordination Applications Beyond Currency, Economics, and Markets Blockchain Science: Gridcoin, Foldingcoin As blockchain technology could revolutionize the operation of other fields, innovators are starting to envision how the concepts might apply to science. So far, the main thread is related to peer-to-peer distributed computing projects for which individual volunteers provide unused computing cycles to Internet-based distributed computing projects. Two notable projects are SETI@home (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which uses contributed computing cycles to help analyze radio signals from space, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence), and Folding@home (a Stanford University project for which computing cycles are used to simulate protein folding, for computational drug design and other molecular dynamics problems).


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

As we mentioned, the transition from Type 0 to Type I is the most dangerous one, since we still have all the savagery, fundamentalism, racism, and so on of the past. It is possible that one day, when we visit the stars, we may find evidence of Type 0 civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I (for example, their atmospheres may be too hot, or too radioactive, to support life). SETI (SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE) At the present time, the people of the world are certainly not conscious of the march toward a Type I planetary civilization. There is no collective self-awareness that this historic transition is taking place. If you take a poll, some people might be vaguely aware of the process of globalization, but beyond that there is no conscious awareness that we are headed to a specific destination.

Quantum computers Quantum dot computers Quantum theory computers and, 1.­1, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 medicine and nanotechnology and superconductors and Railroad industry Ramjet fusion propulsion system Rasputin, Grigori Rattner, Justin, 4.­1, 4.­2 Reagan, Ronald Recession of 2008, 7.­1, 7.­2, 8.­1 Reeve, Christopher Relativity, theory of Remodeling in 2100 Replicators Cave Man Principle and, 4.­1, 4.­2 creation of anything with feasibility issue gray-­goo scenario living tissue, creation of plastic 3-­D images, creation of self-­assembly (bottom-­up approach) to social impact of Resurrecting extinct life-­forms Resveratrol Richter, Ronald Robotics/­AI ASIMO robot, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 bodily enhancements brain science and Cave Man Principle and, 2.­1, 2.­2 common sense and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 consciousness and, 2.­1, 2.­2 driverless cars emotional robots expert systems and far future (2070) friendly AI history of human job market and human-­robot merger human-robot social interaction, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 immediate recognition and medicine and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 midcentury (2030) mind control of robots by humans modular robots, 2.­1, 4.­1 musical robots nanobots, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 near future (present to 2030) pattern recognition and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 remote-­controlled and autonomous robots reverse engineering the brain for self-replicating robots, 2.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 singularity and software limitations on soldier robots space travel and, 2.­1, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3, 6.­4 surrogates and avatars “takeover” threat posed by robots, 2.­1, 2.­2 top-down and bottom-up approaches to, 2.­1, 2.­2 Rohrer, Heinrich Rose, Michael RP-­6 mobile robot Rubin, Gerry Rutan, Burt, 6.­1, 6.­2 Sagan, Carl, 6.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Scanning tunneling microscope Schentag, Jerome Schopenhauer, Arthur Schrö­dinger, Erwin Schultz, Tanja Schuster, Stephan C.­ Schwabl, Mike Schwartz, Peter Schwarzenegger, Arnold Second Life (Website) Self-­assembly Self-­awareness Self-replicating robots, 2.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Sen, Ayusman SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) Shakespeare, William Shape-­shifting technology Shaw, George Bernard Shen, Weimin Shopping in 2100, 9.­1, 9.­2 Shostak, Seth Silicon chips, limitations of, 1.­1, 1.­2, 4.­1 Silva, Alcino Simon, Herbert Simon, Julian Simonyi, Charles Sinclair, David, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 Singapore Singularity Sirtuins SixthSense project 6th Day, The (movie) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet) Slingatron Smalley, Richard, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 Smart dust Smith, Adam Smith, Gerald Social robotics Solar power Solar sail propulsion system Sonograms Sonoluminescence Space elevator SpaceShip spacecraft, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3 Space solar power (SSP) Space travel, itr.­1, 6.­1 asteroid landing big bang research booster-­rocket technologies cost of Europa exploration far future (2070) genetic engineering of humans for human-­robot merger and life in space, search for, 6.­1, 8.­1 Mars landing/­colonization Martian moon landing midcentury (2030) moon landing/colonization, 6.­1, 6.­2 nanotechnology and, 6.­1, 6.­2 near future (present to 2030) planets outside the solar system, search for private initiatives robotics and, 2.­1, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3, 6.­4 space elevator tourism water in space, search for, 6.­1, 6.­2 weightlessness problem See also Starships Spinal cord injury treatments Sports and games, 8.­1, 9.­1 STAIR (Stanford artificial intelligence robot), 2.­1, 2.­2 Starships antimatter rocket propulsion system nanoships nuclear rocket propulsion system ramjet fusion propulsion system solar sail propulsion system Star Trek series, itr.­1, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 1.­4, 1.­5, 2.­1, 2.­2, 3.­1, 4.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Star Wars saga, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 1.­4, 2.­1, 8.­1 Steam power Steffens, John Stem cell technology Stewart, Potter Stock, Greg, 2.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2 Stormer, Horst Stratton, Mike Sullivan, Mark Superconductors telekinesis and Surgery Surrogates Surrogates (movie), 1.­1, 2.­1, 2.­2 Sussman, Gerald Swarming behavior, 6.­1, 6.­2 Tachi, Susumu Taleyarkhan, Rusi Taylor, Doris, 3.­1, 3.­2 Taylor, Theodore Technologies as utilities Technology, four stages of Telekinesis Telepresence Telomeres of a cell Terminator movies, 1.­1, 2.­1, 2.­2, 4.­1 Terraforming of Mars Terrestrial Planet Finder Terrorism, 3.­1, 8.­1 Tesla Roadster Test tube babies Things to Come (movie) 3-­D technology Three Mile Island nuclear accident Thurow, Lester, 7.­1, 7.­2, 7.­3, 7.­4 Tidman, Derek Time Machine, The (Wells) Tissue engineering, 3.­1, 3.­2 Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Total Recall (movie) Tour, James Tourism industry Tourism in space Trains, maglev Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (movie) Transistors, 1.­1, 4.­1 Tsien, Joseph Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Tundra, melting of Turing, Alan Twister (movie) 2001 (movie) Type 0-IV civilizations.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Synaptics is briefly highlighted in Carol Levin, “Here’s Looking at You,” PC Magazine (December 20, 1994): 31. Carver Mead’s web site also provides detailed information on this research at the “Physics of Computation-Carver Mead’s Group” at <http://www.pcmp.caltech.edu/>. 28 The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute conducts research on other signs of life in the Universe, its primary goal being the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The institute is a nonprofit research organization, funded by government agencies, private foundations, and individuals, which in turn provides funding for several dozen projects. For more information, see the SETI Institute web site, <http://www.seti.org>. 29 The author is dictating portions of this book to his computer through the continuous speech recognition program called Voice Xpress Plus from the dictation division of Lernout & Hauspie (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence).


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Another major player in this area is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). This special software, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, allows individuals to donate unused computer time to a variety of scientific projects, including SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), climate prediction, cancer research, astrophysics, and many others. The software to participate in these programs can be downloaded from the web.* *[ http://folding.stanford.edu and http://boinc.berkeley.edu ] In the future, we can anticipate that grid computing will become increasingly important.


pages: 173 words: 14,313

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

., 10 Rader (Slashdot pseudonym), 112–13, 117 Rakoff, Jed, 81 record industry, 11, 39, 116–18 record labels, 3, 4, 11, 35, 90, 112 reel-to-reel tape, 117 Rehnquist, William, 139 Rhapsody, 122, 135 Rhetoric Review, 130, 156 rhetorical theory, 7, 38, 107–8, 120–21 wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 163 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America): suit against Napster 6, 34; lawsuit campaign against users of peerto-peer networks by, 6, 86–93, 97, 99, 121; use of hyperbole, 52–56, 66, 68, 77–82; positioned as tyrant 110; price-fixing 112; uploading of bogus fules 119; arguments against copying music onto computers, 134–35; participation in Grokster case,136 Richardson, Eileen, 40 Ritter, Jordan, 33 Robertson, Michael, 77–83 Robin Hood, 106 Rosen, Hilary, 79, 82 Ross, Andrew, 31–32, 35, 44 Rothstein, Edward, 116 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 20 Scalia, Antonin, 137 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society): Port Huron Statement, 27 Seabiscuit: variable prices of editions across media 72–76 Secor, Marie, 120 Segaller, Stephen, 26–28 Selfe, Cindy, 130 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 105 SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), 147–48 Sharman BV, 136 Slashdot, 112–14 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1999, 101, 129, 141 Sony, 57, 108, 122, 133, 137-39 Sony v. Universal Studios, 57-8, staple article of commerce doctrine, 133-40 Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 164 Souter, David, 137–40 Soviet Union, 115–18 Spider-Man, 18 spyware, 12 Stallman, Richard, 28, 39, 83, 84; Free Software, 28; GNU, 28; GPL (general public license), 28 Stapp, Scott, 53 stasis theory, 107, 120–21 steganography, 70 Stevens, Cat, 104 Stevens, John Paul, 133 Stevenson, Adlai, 116 Stooges, The, 10 Streamcast, 131, 136–40 Strumpf, Koleman, 54 students, 4,14–20, 51, 131, 141, 145–46 Sullivan, Lorraine, 93–96 TEACH Act, 16–19, 141 Thomas, Clarence, 137 Thomas, Douglas: Hacker Culture, 23 Time (magazine), 34, 38, 52 Tucker, Carlton, 23 U.S.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Clarke novel 2003 Liftport Group is formed to develop space elevators 2011 First European Space Elevator challenge takes place 2070 Japanese scientists claim to have developed a working elevator 40 Alien intelligence Have you ever wondered what would happen if scientists discovered compelling evidence of intelligent life existing on another planet? Or how we’d respond to an intelligent civilization that decided to pay us a visit in person? Believe it or not, some sensible people at SETI—an organization dedicated to finding other forms of intelligent life out in space—have been thinking about this. The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is a fascinating organization full of hugely intelligent and ferociously curious people. Their job is to find out whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets, which, as Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, is one of the most fascinating and important questions that we can ask.


pages: 673 words: 164,804

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

It sounded crazy at first: He proposed using the computing power of home PCs to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. But Gedye was serious. He had contacted Woody Sullivan, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington and an expert in the theory behind SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Woody had steered him to Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at UC Berkeley. The four of us—Gedye, Werthimer, Sullivan, and I—met several times over the next year, trying to assess the viability of Gedye’s idea. We decided that existing technology was sufficient, though just barely, for recording radio data and distributing it over the Internet.

WorldOS Corporation Devices as Peers Bluetooth Brazil Project dHTTP (Distributed HTTP) Endeavors Technology, Inc. Jini Distributed Computation 2AM Applied MetaComputing Centrata Datasynapse Distributed.net DistributedScience Entropia Parabon Computation Popular Power Porivo Technologies, Inc. SETI@home: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Ubero United Devices, Inc.: Individuals Accelerating Science Distributed Search Engines gonesilent.com (aka InfraSearch) OpenCOLA Plebio WebV2 File Sharing CuteMX.Com (GlobalScape, Inc.) File Navigator Free Haven Freenet Gnutella Hotline Communications, Ltd. Jungle Monkey Mojo Nation Napster Ohaha OnSystems, Inc.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

That could appear as chemical or light pollution, giant constructed objects like a Dyson sphere built to collect maximum stellar energy, or coherent electromagnetic signals. Your astronomers have been searching for encoded radio signals from other star systems since the 1960s. An American radio astronomer named Frank Drake originally spearheaded the work until the institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence eventually took it up. Founded by Jill Tarter6—one of the few humans for whom I have nothing but respect—SETI’s work has been ridiculed by many human astronomers, but it’s always been one of my favorite human organizations because it dared to wonder what other interesting creatures I might hold.


pages: 614 words: 174,633

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson

Alistair Cooke, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, British Empire, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, haute couture, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

It was a remarkably assured performance, particularly given the riskiness of the subject. “Those parameters are poorly known,” Sagan had written with considerable understatement. Such back-of-the-envelope calculations had been worked out before, of course, most famously by astronomer Frank Drake as an analytical tool for the first meeting in 1961 of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a meeting that Sagan had attended. After a lot of debate, the SETI group had produced a figure of between a thousand and a hundred million civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a rather wide spread, to be sure, but on the other hand, either figure would be extraordinary. In his paper, Sagan had attempted to refine this, working up an estimate of something on the order of 106 extant advanced technical civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a round million—and had even hazarded that the most likely distance to the nearest such community was several hundred light years.

., 17, 204 Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, 411 Ross, Alex, 360 Rossiter, Leonard, 139 Rothko, Mark, 347 Royal Albert Hall, 246, 247 Rubinger, Bob, 24–25 Ryan, Robert, 90 Ryder, Winston, 380 Saarinen, Eero, 118 Sagan, Carl, 11, 18–21, 64–66, 84, 213–14, 385 Saint Laurent, Yves, 140 Sands of Mars, The (Clarke), 32 Sarris, Andrew, 419 satellites, 56–57, 125 Saturn, 136–38, 144 Saving Private Ryan, 259 Scheider, Roy, 442 Schurmann, Gerard, 356 science fiction, 8, 19, 28–29, 36–39, 69, 79, 84–86, 94, 108–9, 264–65, 269, 433–34 Scientific American, 344 Scotchlite, 269, 295 Scotland, 243–45, 245, 395, 396 Scott, George C., 90, 186 Séance on a Wet Afternoon, 35 Segal, Mort, 333 Selassie, Haile, 232 Seldes, Gilbert, 35 Sellers, Peter, 41, 43, 262, 315, 433 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 20–21, 22, 30, 31, 44, 48, 53, 54, 88, 89, 102 Serendib, 26 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 19 Seventh Seal, The, 200 Shadow on the Sun, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 139 Shapiro, Michael, 422 Shapley, Harlow, 69 Shaw, Artie, 35, 38, 62 Shaw, Robert, 90, 91 Shay, Don, 343–44 Shepperton Studios, 111–12, 147–50, 151–57, 153 flies and bats at, 156, 157 Shining, The, 175, 438 Shrimpton, Jean, 284 Sight & Sound, 438–49 Silence, The, 35 Silent World, The (Cousteau), 21 Silverstein, Maurice, 409, 420 Simpson, Roy, 279–82, 292–94 Simpsons, The, 433 Singer, Alexander, 35 Skeleton Coast, 271 Skinner, B.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Science writer Michael Shermer found that iconic brains like paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and astronomer Carl Sagan scored off the charts in both conscientiousness and openness to experience, indicating an ideal balance between being pliant enough to accept the occasional kooky claim that turned out to be correct, but not so credulous that they fell for every outlandish theory they stumbled across. “Sagan, for example, was open to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which, at the time, was considered a moderately heretical idea,” said Shermer. “But he was too conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and aliens have actually landed on earth.” Long story short, sometimes when something sounds too wacky to be true, it really is that delightfully—truthfully—wacky.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

It was harder to determine North Korea’s nuclear head count back then. Now we just type it into the search field. Prayer Science has looked for God, or a higher intelligence. Over the last century, there have been numerous well-funded efforts to scan the universe for radio emissions that might register life, for example, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Carl Sagan cogently compared this effort to a prayer: lifting your gaze to the heavens, sending up data, and waiting for a response from a more intelligent being. We hope that this superbeing can capture, process, and return an answer. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ, of the University of California San Francisco, invited psychic healers from as far as 1,500 miles away to pray for ten subjects, each with advanced AIDS.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

NASA has turned the project into a game where you earn points for “being a mapmaker” or “counting impact craters.” As these projects are voluntary, they attract only participants passionate about the subject and motivated to engage with a group of people to help solve real challenges. The same principle applies to SETI@home, which stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” set up in 1999 by Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In the essay “Sharing Nicely,” Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler pointed to the world’s largest distributed computer network to highlight the trend toward sharing and to prove the potential of a distributed network.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

It hosts an annual conference, is engaged in political activities with regard to space and spaceflight, and publishes a monthly newsletter. Membership is open to all. Address: 9318 Warren Street, Silver Spring, MD, 20910 Phone: (623) 271-2045 Email: info@spacefrontier.org Web: spacefrontier.org THE SETI INSTITUTE The SETI Institute supports the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through direct observation and other research. It also participates in astrobiology research. The Institute offers scholarships and research opportunities, as well as a wide array of public engagement programs. The newsletter is free, and membership is not required. Address: 189 Bernardo Avenue, Suite 200, Mountain View, CA 94043 Phone: (650) 961-6633 Email: info@seti.org Web: seti.org SPACE STUDIES INSTITUTE The SSI was founded by Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s and continues to pursue his dream of space settlement.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

These figures are shorter than estimates typically plugged into the Drake equation for the lifetime of a communicating civilization. The 1961 estimates were 1,000 to 100 million years. Could we detect regular broadcast signals from distant stars? It’s not likely, given the technology at our end. Our SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) efforts bank more on the hopeful prospect that advanced ETs will want to communicate with us and are able to build superpowerful beacons to do so. Have we ever built such beacons? No. Will we do so? It’s hard to say. Already some fret that interstellar broadcasts would paint a target on our back.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Merit is sometimes based wholly on impersonal attributes, such as the precise location of your 3-D printer (for local manufacturing) or home Wi-Fi router (so someone can connect), how much processing capability you have on your server (for use by an organization such as SETI in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence), or whether you are available to work at an awkward time (for taxi, delivery, or emergency service). Indeed, there is a whole range of Peers Inc collaborations where location or timing is the attribute of greatest importance, and still others where no money is transacted or where the “peer” is a device.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Although Kurzweil and Tegmark are both smart enough or canny enough to dismiss the existence of extraterrestrial minds, most of the movement is intoxicated by the view that we are not alone. The usual conclusion is that intelligent life on other planets is so easy, so determined by material forces, that it is “inevitable.” Expressing this assurance is SETI, the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” a collective effort conducted on hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe searching through electromagnetic debris for a glint of mind elsewhere in the universe. Nothing has turned up in thirty-five years or so, but Yuri Milner, the great Russian physicist-investor, has pumped another $100 million into the cause in his “Breakthrough Listen” project.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms 9. A Passing Nightmare? Afterword Notes Index HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL Chapter 1 Priorities and Prospects A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.1 He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call “higher intelligence,” meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which “achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Explaining the origins of life on Earth and trying to figure out if something similar might have emerged elsewhere in our universe are among the most difficult problems facing modern science. At the moment, we know of only one planet with life. Astrobiologists are searching for life elsewhere through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, which began in 1960, but so far they have found none. For now, we are confined to studying the origins of life on Earth. Even that is extraordinarily difficult, as it means trying to determine what was happening on our planet almost four billion years ago, when Earth was very different.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

People blog whatever the heck suits their fancy. If someone blogs, “I feel awesome today! Just wanted to share,” you might assume it interests only the blogger’s friends and family, and there’s no value for the rest of the world. Such remarks just get thrown out there to an imaginary audience, like search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) transmissions, scattered to oblivion in an attempt to reach nonhuman yet attentive ears, somewhere, someday, maybe, if they exist. Bloggers shout, unheard, into the void. As with most applications of predictive analytics (PA), Eric and Karrie’s system repurposes data. Whatever the intended purpose and target audience of the bloggers, they are delivering a wellspring of raw material that lies dormant, waiting to be reinterpreted by listening to it in a new way that uncovers new meaning and insight.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

They carry on looking at the night sky. “No,” Robbie says, finally, “I don’t think there’s anything up there tonight.” First Contact If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Science and Technology Task-group. They’re a group of distinguished scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn’t take lightly. “Imagine a civilization that’s way in advance of us wants to communicate with us and assist us in our development,” Paul says.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

A host of luminary scientists rounded out the passenger list: Carl Sagan, NASA adviser and director of Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies; German-born rocket designer and space visionary Krafft Ehricke; Marvin Minsky, the man breaking ground with artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); radio astronomer Frank Drake, director of the Arecibo Observatory, who was pioneering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and physicist Robert Enzmann, who had developed ideas about nuclear-powered rockets. As Asimov would later explain in one of his regular articles in The Magazine ofFantasy and Science Fiction, he had been recruited the previous spring by Richard Hoagland, "who was aflame to lead a party of idealists" to see the launch of Apollo 17.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

To make a definitive leap into artificial reality, we’ll need both more ingenuity and more computational power. Fortunately, both could be at hand. The SETI@home project has enabled people around the world to donate their idle computer time to sift radio waves from space, advancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In connection with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, CERN—where, earlier, the World Wide Web was born—is pioneering the GRID computer project, a sort of Internet on steroids that will allow many thousands of remote computers and their users to share data and allocate tasks dynamically, functioning in essence as one giant brain.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Nature In Focus News 480: 161–162. 40. Pew Research Center (2014). Economies of Emerging Markets Better Rated During Difficult Times. Global Attitudes Project. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center. Chapter 3, “Inequality and Economic Mobility.” 41. Merali, Zeeya (2015, July 20). “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Gets a $100-Million Boost.” Nature. Retrieved from www.nature.com/news. 42. United Nations Development Programme (2010). The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development. Human Development Report 2010. New York: United Nations. 43. The Economist (1997, May 8).


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

OPEN SOURCE HONEYCLIENT: PROACTIVE DETECTION OF CLIENT-SIDE EXPLOITS 145 The Future of Honeyclients There are over 240 million websites on the Internet today (and of course the number keeps growing by leaps and bounds), and there’s not one group that can cover all of those websites with honeyclient technology. To better fight these attackers that damage our machines and steal our data, we need to band together and learn from each other. We should envision a future where honeyclients take a SETI@home (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home”) approach, in which each honeyclient is able to process its own data and send it back to a central database repository that can more effectively correlate the data. This can help us identify targeted domains: for example, if company A’s employees are being targeted by company B in order to compromise someone’s computer and steal corporate documents.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Oberg, “Mars Probe Went off Course.” 11. Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton and edited by Edward Hutchings, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), 343. 12. Sarah Scoles, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017). 13. John Noble Wilford, “In ‘Contact,’ Science and Fiction Nudge Close Together,” New York Times, July 20, 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/movies/in-contact-science-and-fiction-nudge-close-together.html?mtrref=www.google.com. 14. T. C. Chamberlin, “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses,” Science (old series) 15, no. 92 (1890), reprinted in Science, May 7, 1965, available at http://arti.vub.ac.be/cursus/2005-2006/mwo/chamberlin1890science.pdf. 15.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

More areas open up to peer production as the principle of peer-to-peer is applied not only to reduce costs for variable capital (i.e. living labour), but also to cheapen constant capital (infrastructure, machineries etc.). That could be the deeper implication of the SETI@home project. SETI@home is a favourite example in hacker literature, mingling high technology with fascination for science fiction. SETI stands for: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI searches for intelligent alien life by scanning for radio signals from outer space. The huge task of analysing the data received is distributed to volunteers who lend spare capacity on their personal computers. For a succession of years the project has out-performed state-of-the-art supercomputers at a fraction of the cost.21 The SETI@home project is not as dramatic as the controversies surrounding filesharing networks, nor does it have the zeal of grassroots journalism.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Human curiosity has proved time and again to be an unstoppable drive, and these two endeavors—the development of AI and the search for ET—will undoubtedly continue at full speed. Which one will get to its target first? To even attempt to address this question, we have to note that there’s one important difference between the search for extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations and the development of artificial intelligence. Progress toward the “Singularity” (AI matching or surpassing humans) will almost certainly take place, since the development of advanced AI has the promise of producing enormous profits. On the other hand, the search for life requires funding at a level that can usually be provided only by large national space agencies, with no immediate prospects for profits in sight.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

., 60, 72 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 276 Roper surveys, 233 Rosilin Institute, 195 Roundworms, 197-198 Rule of twos Asia and, 115-116 China and, 115-116 in gender roles, 247 in market shares, 111-113 in politics, 112-114 in self-correcting systems, 8, 111-116 Russia capitalism in, 54, 134-137 economic crisis in, 51 education in, 215 Gorbachev economics, 48 gross domestic product, 68 in New Economy, 8, 136-139, 291 nuclear bombs, 135 predictions about, 169 U.S. economic leadership and, 70-71 World War II, 14 San Francisco, 72, 73, 188, 216 Santa Fe Institute, 264 Satellites, 50, 89, 233 Saudi Arabia, 250 Savings, 117,120 Scenarios for prosperity, 10 334 Schroeder, Gerhard, 94, 122 Schweitzer, Gerhard, 205 Science. See Wild science Scotland, 195 Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), 221 Seattle, 26, 72 Secretary of the Treasury, 292 Seinfeld, 234 Self-correcting systems, 111-116 Servers, 27 Shanghai, 110,124, 128, 182-185 Silicon Valley axis of innovation, 72, 73 business model, 44-45 entrepreneurial education, 87 job openings in, 82 nanotechnology in, 205 vs.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

The one earmark of civilization that is likely to be recognized across the universe is number. In Carl Sagan’s science-fiction novel Contact, aliens in the vicinity of the star Vega beam a series of prime numbers toward earth. The book’s heroine (played by Jodie Foster in the movie version of Contact) works for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She realizes, with a frisson, that the prime-number pulses her radio telescope is picking up must have been generated by some form of intelligent life. But what if aliens beamed jokes at us instead of numbers? We probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish the jokes from the background noise.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens. I praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

He was a bestselling author; his TV show Cosmos had been a hit; for more than a decade he had averaged two guest slots a year on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which for anyone who wasn’t Bob Hope was pretty remarkable. And he had long worried about nuclear weapons – one of the reasons he gave for his interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was that success would show that technological civilizations did not have to head down the path to supernova suicide. But until the early 1980s he had not used his charisma and nous to campaign on that or any other political issue, even though friends on the left, such as Stephen Schneider, had long encouraged him to do so.* The TTAPS results might not have been enough to turn Sagan into a campaigner on their own – a brush with death on the operating table and a new marriage seem also to have had a lot to do with it – but they gave him ammunition.


pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

One can imagine a different chemistry or biology on the other side of the universe, but prime numbers will remain prime whichever galaxy you are counting in. In Carl Sagan’s classic novel Contact, aliens use prime numbers to contact life on earth. Ellie Arroway, the book’s heroine, has been working at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, listening to the crackle of the cosmos. One night, as the radio telescopes are turned towards Vega, they suddenly pick up strange pulses through the background noise. It takes Ellie no time to recognise the drumbeat in this radio signal. Two pulses are followed by a pause, then three pulses, five, seven, eleven, and so on through all the prime numbers up to 907.


pages: 436 words: 140,256

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

There is no direct way to prove whether creatures capable of language, art, agriculture, or drug abuse exist elsewhere in the universe, because from Earth we could not detect the existence of those traits on planets of other stars. However, we might be able to detect high technology elsewhere in the universe if it included our own capacity to send out space probes and interstellar electromagnetic signals. In Chapter Twelve I shall examine the on-going search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. I shall argue that evidence from a quite different field—studies of woodpecker evolution on Earth—instructs us about the inevitability of evolving intelligent life, and hence about our uniqueness, not only on Earth but also in the accessible universe. EIGHT BRIDGES TO HUMAN LANGUAGE The gulf between animal vocal communication and human speech has traditionally been viewed as unbridgeable.


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

This particular foray out onto the tightrope represents the distinction between well-rooted speculation and declarative superstition – demonstrating, with a degree of irony, that the objective truth of science can send out imaginative probes just as daring as, and considerably better founded than, any form of supernaturalism. The next ‘dart’, ‘Searching under the lamp-post’, on the same subject but in lighter vein, takes a somewhat sceptical look at one approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The final piece in this section both continues the thread of science-based speculation and sets out with unmistakable clarity a crucial distinction: that between the ‘soul’ as detachable inhabitant of an afterlife and the ‘soul’ as locus of the human spirit, its deep well of intellectual and emotional capacity; between the soul of established religion and wistful supernaturalism, and the soul as celebrated in the title of this collection, and in Richard’s introduction to it.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Napster is the most famous peer-to-peer technology, even though it is not exactly peer-to-peer. (There is a central server that keeps a database of who has what; the music itself is kept on other people's machines.) But Napster is the horse and buggy in this transportation system. It is only the beginning. Consider the SETI project. SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—scans the radio waves for evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. It does this by recording the noise of the radio spectrum that we receive on planet Earth. This noise is then analyzed by computers, looking for telltale signs of something unexplained.28 Who cares about wandering X-Files types?


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

15 Likewise, CRISPR genetic modification technologies could change what it means to be human. Shouldn’t more than just a few scientific bodies or government officials have a chance to weigh in on what kinds of experiments and modifications we feel comfortable with, and which ones go far beyond our moral boundaries?16 Or consider the work of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and its offshoot Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. METI, a very small coalition of scientists, has already started sending messages into deep space in the hopes of alerting other life forms in the universe to our existence. But a growing number of astrophysicists and ethicists are calling for a ban on such deep-space messaging—at least until humans can collectively agree on it.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Revel, Oliver “Buck,” on terrorism Rheingold, Howard Right to Privacy Risk analysis of perception of Robots, miniature Rome, ancient Ronfeldt, David Roosevelt, Franklin Rotenberg, Marc Rothkopf, David Royalties, defined RSA encryption cracking of RSA Public Key Safire, William Sagan, Dorian Schaeffer, Rebecca Schneier, Bruce Schwartz, Peter Scientology, Church of Secrecy allure of importance of temporary value of Self-deception Self-monitored society, possibilities for Self-righteousness SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Seuss, Dr. Shakespeare Shareware Shimomura, Tsutomu Shockwave Rider Signatures Simulated experience Singapore freedom vs. order in video surveillance in Singleton, Solveig Smart highways SMART satellite tracking Smith, Janna Malamud Smith, Robert Ellis Social Security number characteristics of as name threat to privacy of use as password usefulness of Society error correction in tenets of Software, piracy of Solitude, defined Soros, George Soviet Union, repression in Spammers Speaking tours Spinoza, Baruch Stack, Jack Stalin, Josef Stalking e-mail Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Steganography Stephenson, Neal Sterling, Bruce Steve Jackson Games Stevens, John Paul Stock, Gregory Stock market, accountability of Stock market expert swindle Stoll, Clifford Subjective, triumph of the Subornation Supermarket discount cards Surveillance acceptance of audio of authority current uses of defense against elites engendered by ethical issues regarding future uses of mutually assured obsession with overload of radio tracking video views on workplace Surveillance dust Sweden, privacy issues in Swift, Jonathan Swire, Peter P.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The couple is also a major supporter of Conservation International, a group that seeks to preserve the earth’s “hot spots.” These areas make up only 1.4 percent of land surface but contain some 60 percent of terrestrial plant and animal species. Gordon Moore, Paul Allen, William Hewlett, David Packard65: Congress ridiculed NASA’s controversial Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program and cut its funding in the mid-1990s. At that point, SETI managers ran to the Forbes 400 list to find potential funders. Moore, Allen, Hewlett, and Packard were among those willing to fund the search for alien life within our galaxy. They put up a cumulative $20 million to extend the program, but the search is proving painstakingly slow.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

As Jonathan flipped through the pages, his pediatrician said in passing that, hey, I have these tickets for a talk by Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer, and do you want to go instead of me? Jonathan nearly said no—his destiny was in medicine. The offer even offended him on some level. I’m going to be a doctor—what don’t you understand about that? But for whatever reason he said OK. Drake, one of Sagan’s colleagues at the university, had worked on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the sixties and seventies, and in that evening’s lecture, he outlined the latest science from the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And once again, there was Jonathan, on this ball of rock swinging round the sun, and there was this guy Drake speaking, revealing Arecibo findings that were helping to unlock the secrets of the universe, and with every word and across each passing minute, Jonathan could feel the physician’s life slipping away like a lab-coated ghost leaving his body.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. Coming up are several new novels, including Weaver, Flood, and Ark. As the disquieting story that follows suggests, perhaps it’s better if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence doesn’t succeed. . . . Near the centre of the Moon’s far side there is a neat, round, well-defined crater called Daedalus. No human knew this existed before the middle of the twentieth century. It’s a bit of lunar territory as far as you can get from Earth, and about the quietest.

“Of course you understand the importance of it being on Farside.” For the millionth time in my life he had set his little brother a pop quiz, and he looked at me as if I was catastrophically dumb. “Radio shadow,” I said. To be shielded from Earth’s noisy chatter was particularly important for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to which my brother was devoting his career. SETI searches for faint signals from remote civilisations, a task made orders of magnitude harder if you’re drowned out by very loud signals from a nearby civilisation. He actually applauded my guess, sarcastically. He often reminded me of what had always repelled me about academia—the barely repressed bullying, the intense rivalry.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Here we have physical objects very unlike each other, and whose behaviour is dominated by different laws of physics, embodying the same mathematical and causal structures – and doing so ever more accurately over time. Of all the physical processes that can occur in nature, only the creation of knowledge exhibits that underlying unity. In Arecibo, Puerto Rico, there is a giant radio telescope, one of whose many uses is in the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In an office in a building near the telescope there is a small domestic refrigerator. Inside that refrigerator is a bottle of champagne, sealed by a cork. Consider that cork. It is going to be removed from the bottle if and when SETI succeeds in its mission to detect radio signals transmitted by an extraterrestrial intelligence.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Gordon opened the observatory in 1963, aiming to study the scattering of radio waves off molecules in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Since then, significant astronomical discoveries have been made at Arecibo, including the detection of the first planets outside our solar system. The telescope has also been at the center of several projects in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1974, astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan wrote the Arecibo message, a binary string that was beamed from the telescope toward the star cluster M13 some 25,000 light-years away. If the message is eventually decoded by an intelligent race, the extraterrestrial recipients will be greeted with a 23-by-73-pixel bitmap image depicting a human being, chemical formulas, the solar system, and even the telescope itself.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As of mid-2004, Folding@home had amassed contributions of about 840,000 processors contributed by more than 365,000 users. 169 SETI@home and Folding@home provide a good basis for describing the fairly common characteristics of Internet-based distributed computation projects. First, these are noncommercial projects, engaged in pursuits understood as scientific, for the general good, seeking to harness contributions of individuals who wish to contribute to such larger-than-themselves goals. SETI@home helps in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Folding@home helps in protein folding research. Fightaids@home is dedicated to running models that screen compounds for the likelihood that they will provide good drug candidates to fight HIV/AIDS. Genome@home is dedicated to modeling artificial genes that would be created to generate useful proteins.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Resembling an extraterrestrial spaceship grounded in the middle of karst country, the Arecibo Observatory looks like something out of a James Bond movie – probably because it is; 007 aficionados will recognize the saucer-shaped dish and craning antennae from the 1995 film Goldeneye . In reality this 20-acre ‘dish’, set in a sinkhole among clusters of haystack-shaped mogotes, is planet earth’s ear into outer space. Involved in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme, the telescope, which is supported by 50-story cables weighing more than 600 tons, is used by on-site scientists to prove the existence of pulsars and quasars, the so-called ‘music of the stars.’ Parque De Las Cavernas Del Río Camuy UNDERGROUND CAVERNS ( 898-3100; Hwy 129 Km 18.9; adult/child US$12/6, parking US$2; 8am-5pm Wed-Sun & holidays) This park is home to one of the largest cave systems in the world and is definitely worth a stop (but call ahead if it’s been raining – too much water causes closures).