So just how cancelled is the singularity? To review: population growth increases technological growth, which feeds back into the population growth rate in a cycle that reaches infinity in finite time. But since population can’t grow infinitely fast, this pattern breaks off after a while. The Industrial Revolution tried hard to compensate for the “missing” population; it invented machines. Using machines, an individual could do an increasing amount of work. We can imagine making eg tractors as an attempt to increase the effective population faster than the human uterus can manage. It partly worked.
Tag: science
UK Iron Age ritual burials
The Iron Age site at Childrey Warren was particularly fascinating as it provided a glimpse into the beliefs and superstitions of people living in Oxfordshire before the Roman conquest. Evidence elsewhere suggests that burials in pits might have involved human sacrifice. “These findings open a unique window into the lives and deaths of communities we often know only for their monumental buildings, such as hillforts or the Uffington White Horse. The results from the analysis of the artifacts, animal bones, the human skeletons and the soil samples will help us add some important information to the history of the communities that occupied these lands so many years ago.”
Strange Stars & Matter
Nuclear physicists hypothesize that when the cores of neutron stars are subject to enough pressure, the quarks that make up the core can turn from up and down quark varieties into strange quarks. As this Kurzgesagt video explains, this strange matter is particularly stable and if it were to escape from the core of the neutron star, it would convert any ordinary matter it came into contact with to more strange matter
Virus Social Evolution
Another aspect of social evolution of viruses that Sanjuán is investigating is why multiple viral particles sometimes gather and infect a cell together. The trade-off is that, if the viral particles assemble, there are fewer units to infect different cells. So “in principle, this is costly because it limits diffusion capability”. But his team found that the aggregated viruses grow faster and produce more progeny. This result was dependent on cell type: In tumor cells that have no innate immunity, being aggregated was costly. But in normal cells, which do mount an innate immune response, being aggregated was beneficial for the viruses because it allows the viruses to overwhelm the innate immune response
DNA SETI
Should We Search for Messages from Extraterrestrial Intelligences in Terrestrial Genomes? Compared to other methods of interstellar messaging, DNA-encoded messages could have the advantages of being auto- amplifying and blanketing across space and time (i.e., everywhere and persistent)
Black hole event horizon
For the first time in human history, astronomers have combined the power of telescopes from across our planet to create an image that shows the event horizon of a black hole.
Brute Force Math
math has used brute force to find solutions for quite a while.
Ice Ball Earth
The Earth has endured many changes in its history. One especially dramatic episode appears to have come between 700 ma and 600 ma ago, when scientists think ice smothered the entire planet, from the poles to the equator—twice in quick succession.
Perceptual Control
Translating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control
some people (often including me) find free energy/predictive coding very difficult to understand, but find perceptual control theory intuitive. If these are basically the same, then someone who wants to understand free energy can learn perceptual control theory and then a glossary of which concepts match to each other, and save themselves the grief of trying to learn free energy/predictive coding just by reading Friston directly.
Consensus Reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows 2 observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it. They use 6 entangled photons to create 2 alternate realities—1 representing Wigner and 1 representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 