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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Stephen Webb
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March 15 - April 8, 2019
Poundstone (1988) for an entertaining and readable book dealing with a variety of paradoxes. As well as those I discuss here, you can read about Russell’s barber paradox, Newcomb’s psychic paradox and many others—but not the Fermi paradox.
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Lord Douglas of Barloch (1889–1980) suggested (Douglas 1977) that the number of evolutionary steps leading from primitive life to intelligence was so large that the probability of it happening elsewhere was infinitesimal.
Mention of economists reminds me of a proof of the non-existence of time travelers that employs Fermi paradox-like reasoning (Reinganum 1986–7): if time travelers existed, then interest rates would not be positive! In fact, if people could travel back in time, then interest rates would have to be 0%—otherwise savers could use banks as bottomless ATM machines. Savers could simply travel back in time a few thousand years, deposit a few dollars, then return to the present; compound interest on even a small sum would guarantee riches.
Wow
Tipler’s argument that, in the distant future, we will all be resurrected in software by a God-like intelligence (Tipler 1994). His argument rested on the universe possessing certain cosmological properties; modern observations seem to exclude these properties and thus at least the initial version of Tipler’s theory.
Interesting
A rather more sinister constellation of people occurred in 1913 in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Joseph Tito, Leon Trotsky and Sigmund Freud all lived within a couple of miles of each other.
Wow
Citizen Hearing on Disclosure (2013) for details of Hellyer’s testimony, along with that of 39 other witnesses.
Alien testimony
The Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927) is best known as the man who helped lay the foundations of modern physical chemistry. His book Worlds in the Making popularized the notion that life on Earth might have arrived from space. See Arrhenius (1908).
The physicist Thomas Gold (1920–2004) was another scientist who liked to propose unorthodox ideas. He jokingly proposed the “garbage” scenario for the origin of terrestrial life: ETC s landed here, dumped their waste, and the contamination from the garbage was the seed for life!
Lol
The American astronomer John Allen Ball (1935–) has written extensively on the Fermi paradox. For the zoo hypothesis, see Ball (1973).
Still alive
A physics paper that takes the proposition seriously (Beane{et al.} 2012) concludes that in principle there’ll always be the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators.
O
A haunting short story called the “The Last Question” (see Asimov 1959) tells how a pair of drunken technicians one night ask a supercomputer whether there is a way to reverse the increase of entropy and thereby halt the death of the universe.
Wow. The last question
Smolin (1997) for a discussion of why we might want to apply Darwinian thinking to the problem of the universe as a whole.
Smolin.darwinism
Unfortunately for the prospects for space travel, special relativity tells us that the faster things move the more massive they become. At speeds close to , the accelerating force tends to make the body more massive rather than make it move faster. The speed of light is a barrier that can’t be reached by any object with mass—including space ships.
At the turn of the millennium, 39% of almost 75,000 respondents to an online poll stated they believed that the discovery of an ET signal would happen within 10 years ( SETI @home 2000). Fourteen years later, we’re still waiting.
Wow
Korhonen (2013) analyses the risk of ETC s initiating an attack by drawing inferences from the Cold War and mutually assured destruction scenarios. My favorite fictional description of a species whose defining trait is extreme caution — taken to the point of cowardice—is that of “Puppeteers”. They occur in Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories, including the award-winning Ringworld (Niven
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For a powerful argument as to why we should be able to converse with aliens using our system of mathematics, and perhaps a language such as LINCOS , see Minsky (1985).
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One author who might have been able to imagine alien mathematics was Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), perhaps the greatest Spanish-language writer of the last century. Borges (1998) contains several mathematical-based stories; Bloch (2008) examines the mathematical ideas in one of Borges most famous stories.
Book.different system cannot exist
Walter Michael Miller Jr. (1923–1996) was an American radioman and tailgunner on 53 bombing raids over Italy and the Balkans in World War II. His award-winning A Canticle for Liebowitz (Miller 1960) is one of the classic post-apocalyptic SF novels.
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For a lucid description of the discovery of the Higgs boson, and why it was so important, see Carroll (2013).
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Dick (2003, 2008) for lucid explanations of the implications for SETI if we live in a postbiological universe. His book The Biological Universe (Dick 1996) is also highly recommended.
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A Song For Lya appeared in Analog magazine in 1974 and went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novella. It appears in a story collection of the same name (Martin 1976).
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Foschini has won numerous awards for his contributions to communications engineering. See Foschini (1994) for the intriguing notion of the canonical artefact.
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Brooker (2011) is a popular introductory textbook on genetics.
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The columnist was Marilyn vos Savant, who is clearly a very bright woman: from 1986 to 1989 she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as possessor of the “Highest IQ (women)”; she ceased to appear not because some other woman was deemed to possess a higher IQ, but because the editors at Guinness saw sense and realized that attaching a number to intelligence in this way is essentially meaningless. Her proposed solution to the Monty Hall problem nevertheless provoked outrage from several mathematics professors; at least one academic argued that by publishing such nonsense she was
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Wow
if we came across a species that could build a structure complete with cultured gardens, internal temperature control and ventilation would we consider the species to be intelligent? Well, termites build such structures and we generally don’t attribute an individual termite with a high level of intelligence. Or is intelligence to be found in the termite “hive mind”?
Wow
See Lineweaver (2008) for a strong and beautifully reasoned argument suggesting that human-level intelligence is not a convergent feature of evolution.
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By suitable manipulation, they could “turn the gene on” in different places and have a fly sprout an ectopic eye on its wing or its leg or its antenna.
Wow
it was discovered that the “eye genes” in these three quite different species—fruit fly, mouse and man—were essentially identical in two crucial locations.
O
Olson (1988) for a discussion of the relevance of human linguistic abilities to the Fermi paradox.
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His linguistic work is highly abstruse, but for an introduction to the revolution that he sparked in 1959—and to the advances made by others in the intervening decades—look no further than Pinker (1994), which is a superbly readable book.
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Half the members of a British family known as KE suffer from severe language difficulties: not only do they struggle with grammar, writing and comprehension, they can’t properly coordinate the complex mechanical motor sequences required for fluid speech.
Wow
