What is the Singularity?

Many people scoff and have problems even understanding the Singularity.  With credit to Charlie Stross the singularity is defined as a specific 13 year period from 2047 through 2060.  Here is a chart of the computational speed of the fastest computer in the world, as measured in floating point operations per second.  You can see that today we have a computer rated at 8.16 petaflops. A human brain has the computational power of approximately 100 petaflops.  So even today the most powerful computer is an imbecile as compared with a human.  It will be 2016 before the fastest computer can claim to match the power of a human brain.  That is NOT the beginning of the singularity.

The population of this planet will soon peak out at 9 billion souls.   9 billion people have the computing power of about 10^27 flops (1000 yottaflops).  Does that sound like a lot?

According to this chart in the year 2047 the fasted computer in the world will have the capacity of 1% of all existing human brains.  13 years later the fastest computer in the world will be 100 times more powerful than all human brains combined.  This sudden transition of the dominant computing species on Earth is the Singularity.  That's it.  It's pretty easy.  It's going to happen unless we destroy our computer chip manufacturing infrastructure.

A more radical view is to use the top curve, the sum computer power of the 500 fastest computers in the world.  Next year this sum will match a human brain.  The singularity (the transition from 1% to 99%) will span the years 2042 to 2055.  A pessimistic view says that a human brain has more like 1000 petaflops, or even 10,000.  That just pushes the singularity out another 5-10 years.  It does not even remotely change this argument.

If you don't believe this will happen then you need to give a very good, very technical reason why this growth curve will stop.  It cannot just slow down, that only delays the transition a few years.  If you do not have a well defined technical reason for proving this computing growth curve will stop then you have no argument against the singularity.

We simply cannot know or predict the consequences when 1000 yottaflop intelligence is actively rewriting its own software and designing its own offspring, when exaflop and zettaflop constructs are free to think and create for themselves.  Anyone who says they know what will happen is simply wrong.  The real truth is that we really do not know, we cannot know.  How will we even communicate when less than 0.01% of the computing in our solar system is done by human brains?

And a final note.  These beings will grow 1000 times more powerful every 11 years.  Unless our population suddenly grows 1000x every 11 years then we cannot even conceive of keeping up.  By the 22nd century human brains will be an infinitesimal portion of the computing power of this solar system.  If you want to know what it might look like read Accelerando by Charlie Stross.  This might be the most important book ever written.

RIP Robert Bradbury

Robert Bradbury the person who introduced us to Matrioshka Brains has passed away.  Here's an eloquent memorium from George Dvorsky. I wonder if we will ever learn that there are billions of Matrioshka Brains in the Milky Way, most of them far from the galactic center.  We currently call them dark matter.

If I had my choice of where to live in the Milky Way I would want to be as far as possible from the monster black hole at its center.

Alien Microbes

Richard Hoover of NASA claims to have found alien microbes inside of a meteorite (right side,  left side is a real terrestrial bacterium).

I predict 2 types of responses:  pathological rejection and people who equate this with sentient space faring beings.

Frankly I think panspermia is the only theory of evolution which makes much sense.  Integrate evolution over 10 billion planets and 10 billion years and you get believable statistics.

Realistic Time Travel

In the quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics sense a forbidden event is never completely impossible.  Rather it is extremely improbable based upon some symmetry, entropy, or energy constraint.  I propose that in most situations time travel into the past is extremely improbable. Theorem:   Time travel into the past has an exponentially increasing improbability as changes to the timeline become observable.

Corollary 1:  Time travel into the past is allowed if and only if it does not disrupt the timeline.

Corollary 2:  The butterfly effect is included in timeline disruptions.

Corollary 3:  The butterfly effect does not apply below the level of Heisenberg uncertainty.

Sending a human backwards in time to Earth would create a sudden pressure wave as the air (or water) at that location is displaced.  The butterfly effect implies this will always be a forbidden transition.

But a human could be sent to a height where the air pressure is essentially zero then gradually move downward.  However it is unlikely that a human could move around and do anything useful without causing sufficient changes to prevent the trip in the first place.

Sending a tiny robot back in time is much more likely to result in no disruptions to the timeline, especially if that robot does little more than float around on air currents and observe.

A time machine will attempt to send a tiny robot back in time hundreds or millions of times per second.  Attempt after attempt is rejected by the timeline, but there is a statistical chance of success.  After millions or trillions of attempts a delivery vector is found resulting in an identical timeline and the robot is successfully transferred.

Would insertion of a tiny robot into a hurricane result in any changes to the timeline?  The minute changes to the air currents at the arrival point could be quickly washed out by the extreme winds in a hurricane.  Perhaps the target location with the highest chance of success is the Atlantic ocean during hurricane season.

And how would that robot return to our time?  The same way rocks travel forward in time.  The robot would find a quiet place and sit there until it is found.  It doesn't even need power for that part of its mission.  Success only requires non-volatile memory and perhaps a long lived radioisotope to make it easier to find under the detritus of the centuries.

This might mean that a careful search would reveal some of these robots sitting around important places like Jerusalem or Dealey Plaza.  But if we found one and decoded the stored media that would change the timeline and wouldn't the trip have been forbidden in the first place?

Buckyballs in Space

Well it's not scifi but it's still great. As we predicted in 1985, buckyballs have been found in outer space.

It's not a big surprise, but it's a great 25th anniversary present. Here are the data:

IR spectra of buckyballs in space

In 1986 Rick Smalley asked me if I thought that c60 could be the primordial nucleation site for planetary coalescence. He theorized that c60 could survive the extreme UV of the interstellar environment. No other molecule could survive to become a nucleation site.

Godspeed James P Hogan

You meant a lot to me.  Inherit the Stars was one of the first serious scifi books I read as a teenager.  The discovery of a 50,000 year old dead astronaut on the moon was a powerful idea.  I also very much liked your book about prejudice in the scientific community: Kicking the Sacred Cow. I hope you get a flyby of Ganymede.  You deserve it.

Where to Find Alien Life

One of the reasons life survives on Earth is that we have a big brother protecting us from sterilizing events (asteroid bombardment).   Jupiter has been a powerful sink for asteroids that would have killed us all.  To find alien life in another system we should focus on those systems which have a large planet well outside the habitable zone as seen here. Exoplanets.org has a list of known exoplanets, and it is sortable by the semi-major axis.  Click on that column to sort the exoplanets by their distance from the primary.

Jupiter is about 5 astronomical units (AU) from our G-type star.  Here are the first 4 likely candidates.

590 light years away near Pavo is HD 190984 , an F8 star with a big planet at 6 AU.

40 ly away is 55 Cancer, a G8 star with a big one at 5.9 AU.

At 85 ly in Libra, HD 134987 is a G8 star with a planet 0.8 Jupiter masses at 5.8 AU.

49ly away mu-Ara is a G3 star with a planet twice the mass of Jupiter at 5.3 AU.

Statistically speaking these are outstanding targets for hosting alien life.  A more detailed analysis may preclude one or more of these due to orbital eccentricity, other planets, or binary star systems.  But if spontaneous generation of life is common then at least one of these systems hosts alien life.

Too cold for life

Speculation about life on Titan or other cold worlds is misguided because the chemical reaction rates are simply too slow. All chemical reactions have a rate.  That rate has an exponential dependence on temperature as described by the Arrhenius equation.

rate = A exp (-Ea/kT)

Ea is the activation energy, k is Boltzmann's constant, T is the temperature, A is the pre-exponential factor

Chemical activation energies are best measured in electron-volts or eV.  Typical values are between 1 and 3 eV, usually closer to 2.0.  The ground temperature on Titan is around 94 oK or -179 oC.

Thus a chemical reaction on Titan would be roughly 73 orders of magnitude slower than the same reaction on Earth (298 oK).  So a reaction which takes a microsecond on Earth would require 10^60 years on Titan. (That's 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years).

Pre-exponential factors for chemical reactions have a certain value which represents steric  effects.  They cannot be 60 orders of magnitude larger because molecular geometry is not that pliable.

Traditional chemical reaction based life is impossible on Titan or any other location where the temperature is so far below 298 oK.

SETI Institute Celebration

The SETI Institute will host Celebrating Science 2010 Family Science Faire Saturday May 22, 2010. From their announcement:   At our Celebrating Science 2010 Family Science Faire, you will have the opportunity to meet SETI Institute scientists and discover what the future holds for SETI and astrobiology. Learn about the SETI Institute's pioneering exploration of life, our solar system, and beyond, including the search for signals from other civilizations.

Your opportunity for hands-on science! We will have fun, interactive activities for youth aged 8-15. They will be able to sign up on a first-come, first-serve basis for educational science-based activities. We will also have fun and creative activities for our younger up-and-coming scientists.

Meet the father of SETI and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake. Visit the gift shop for a Drake Equation t-shirt and ask Dr. Drake himself to sign it!

Hear Seth Shostak speak at 2:45 on "Why Your Grandkids Will Live in Space." Dr. Shostak will be available to autograph his latest book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

An excellent time travel movie: Timecrimes

I watched Timecrimes on Netflix streaming video.  It was excellent. It met many of my criteria for a good time travel movie:  It had a time machine and they used it several times, there was a time loop and the protagonistic had to work hard to eliminate and prevent any paradoxes.

The middle of the movie was really slow but presented a lot of details which were critical to the ending.

The movie is in Spanish, looks like there will be a new English version in 2011.

Vote against your incumbent

Here is my hopeful prediction of Nov 3, 2010, the morning after the 2010 mid-term elections. Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Boehner hold a joint press conference to discuss the stunning results of the elections.  71% of incumbents were voted out of office.  Republicans took control of congress with a 235 - 200 majority.  66% of Republican incumbents were voted out of office, 75% of Democratic incumbents lost their seat.  Only 114 incumbents were re-elected, and more than half of those won by less than 1%.

Speaker Pelosi takes the podium first.

"Good morning.  I've asked Minority Leader Boehner to join me here today so we can jointly address what can only be considered as the most stunning mid-term elections in the history of this great country.  With 75% of my fellow Democrats losing their jobs I can only say that this speaks to the core of anger and disgust Americans feel about Congress.  Despite overwhelming majority populations many congressional districts held by Democrats for decades will switch hands to a Republican representative next January.  Even my own district almost elected an independent, I only won by 0.3% of the vote.  When questioned about issues the voters showed strong unhappiness with the scale of the new health care reform bill.

I accept full responsibility for this failure, it's clear that Democrats failed this country.  I will not stand for any leadership position in the new Congress.  My goal is to mentor the 175 newly elected Democrats as they begin helping this country as quickly as possible."

Minority Leader Boehner now takes the podium.

"I would so much love to brag about our great victory today, we took control of the House and voted out so many Democratic incumbents.  But I think only a fool would regard last night's elections as a victory for Republicans.  66% of my colleagues, including myself, were voted out of office last night.  Our policies and methods of opposing the health care reform bill were frequently mentioned as reasons for voting for Democrats.  We failed the American people and we failed our party.  Democrats now control districts with overwhelming Republican majorities.  Congress has been devastated, burned to the ground, and remade whole again by the will of the people.  As I leave office I can only take a small measure of comfort in thinking about the fresh new faces who will take office in January and restore American confidence in our Congress.

I apologize to everyone for this failure.  And I am sure this is a great day for our country."

Wishful thinking.  If only people will do it.  Please vote your incumbent out of office even if it means voting against your party.