My suspicion is that if it ever was supposed to be a revolt, the mob at the Capitol surely delivered a shock against the ruling class by showing that even fools appearing at the seat of power, can deliver a sucker punch to the establishment. The ruling class, comprised of China facing corporations, their paid politicians, and Universities funded by Xi's Chinese governmental institutions,* has not served the US middle class well. However, as their has been no actual, sustained, peasant revolt, they must be quite comfortable in their quality of rule? George Carlin's humor often confounded the liberals notably, as he tended to speak in favor of freedom of speech. Harken unto this ancient sound byte from the Oppy and Anthony show featuring Carlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWY5AmTfXYw
On the physics of a galaxy that possesses technologically driven life, I am no longer optimistic in this. In any case we have other fish to fry, namely the possibility of a split, as a nation state. We agree on nothing or what is important, or what is valued. *Confucius Institutes -----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, May 10, 2021 1:41 pm Subject: Fermi paradox On January 6, 2021, a disorganized mob of Trump supporters batter-rammed their way into the Capital building of the United States and forced Congress to flee. Those supporting this action, and there are plenty still out there, saw this as the next “Spirit of 1776” revolution by true patriots. The image and parallels I get from this are far more disturbing. I might compare this to the first sacking of Rome in 410AD; an event that saw the beginning of the end of a civilization that over the next 66 years unraveled and collapsed. Even deeper though, this may suggest something far more deeply flawed about the entire human species and our prospects. Most interested in space and astronomy are familiar with Enrico Fermi’s question “Where are they?” concerning intelligent life. This so-called Fermi paradox poses the Copernican Principle, that any region of the universe is not unique and so life must be universal, conflicts with the lack of any evidence of intelligent life. So far, the SETI program has found radio noise and silence after several decades of looking. Of course, so far only a small segment of this galaxy has been searched, so the prospect is maybe still open. Yet, Fermi’s paradox remains, because if any form of intelligent life were to persist it suggests they, or maybe their robotic emissaries or successors, would move through the galaxy within a period of a million years or so. So far astronomical evidence reveals no instance of some intelligent life modifying a stellar system in any large manner. So, where are they? It is best to consider what we mean by intelligent life. Cetaceans are clearly intelligent in some way, even if very different from human intelligent. However, they do not modify their environment by controlling energy and materials. Humans do, and this started with a branch of Homo erectus called Homo ergaster that emerged around 600 thousand years ago. This species in the hominid lineage learned to control fire. At this point a life form on this planet learned to use energy outside of its metabolic needs, and to grow this energy use far beyond metabolic needs. Also, the manufacture of flint axes and stone tools began to accelerate. To make a stone axe requires a considerable amount of neural processing to know from the appearance of a flint the planes of crystallization and how it will fracture. With these developments it is evident hominids began to modify their environment and evolution was a coordinated selection process that saw modification of species and the ability to modify their immediate environment. With the evolution of Homo sapiens some 100 to 150 thousand years ago the adaptation of the environment by intelligent thought surpassed biological evolution. We now life in conditions where this has exponentially accelerated to extreme dimensions. Some conservative politicians complain we are on a Ponzi game. Sure, we have been in a Ponzi game for at least the last half million years with using ever more energy and environment. What does this have to do with Fermi’s paradox? Life on Earth, and presumably this would hold with life on other planets as well, evolves by natural selection. The white noise or Markovian statistics with single nucleotide polymorphisms and other mutations is run through a filter of fitness. The output is then a form of pink noise or sub-Markovian statistics that have structure. This is a remarkable process, and one that I think has deeper aspects in physics. In this way life evolves into forms that have greater complexity. Compare the complexity of an advanced mammal such as a human, whale, elephant and even a dog, with that of a fish. Or for that matter compare an insect with a bacillus. Such life forms evolve to fit an environment, and while such evolution does modify the environment as well, such species do not engineer their environment. We humans engineer our environment and in doing so we set ourselves in an environment that becomes ever more different than what we evolved to fit within. It is plausible that any form of intelligent life in the universe that engineers its environment may do much the same. There are several examples of this. Human beings are not entirely peaceful. As much as we want to think we are creatures of peace, there are plenty examples of subsistence or tribal cultures that engage in warfare. In fact, the African slave trade emerged from a practice of tribal raids that captured individuals for slaves. Archeological finds in the American southwest have found kivas filled with burned remains of people, who were evidently burned alive by people from another tribe or culture. Of course, our history is packed with examples of wars. Then with the end of World War II came the atomic bomb and the realization that total war is not possible, However, humans persist in building or trying to acquire nuclear weapons. It may only be a matter of time before something goes terribly wrong. Another example to this is our impact on the planetary environment. Humans are erasing arable land and active biology on this planet by an area equal to about one Belgium per year. Human populations are growing, and declining arable land is a problem. The oceans are dying off at an alarming rate and at end of this decade the mass of plastic in the oceans will exceed that of ocean life. Of course, then comes the warming of the climate by our burning of fossil fuels that produce CO_2. This may in time render this planet uninhabitable, and already regions are becoming difficult with fires. We might think that we can solve these things. However, increasingly we seem paralyzed by ourselves. Of course, a part of this is the massive denial of any problem with the environment, and in particular climate change. There has been a growing “alt-science” cult development, and this extends in general to what Trump’s spokeswoman Kelly Ann Conway said with, “We have our alternative facts.” We have seen the rise of anti-vaccination movements, at a time of a nasty pandemic, and the rise of increasingly tribalistic politics that seeks to raise conflicts between people. These things are becoming ever more political. This rise of denialism saw its first rise with the creationist movement with fundamentalist or evangelical Christians in the United States. The rejection of biological evolution, something that began to rise in force in the 1970s, saw the social rejection of a branch of scientific work. Biological evolution has a massive amount of data to support it, and this extends from the paleontological work with fossils to molecular biology of genes. Yet fully 50% of American refuse to admit evolution, and this trend is being proselytized into the rest of the world. This “alt-science” denialism has found other expressions from anti-vaxxers, climate denialism, geocentrism and in recent years the ultimate absurdism with flat-Earth ideas. This reflects very possibly the advance of mythic based psychology over reasoning, and this is finding a wide variety of forms. It is also being promoted most successfully by the computer, which is ironically a device developed by the epitome of rational thinking. The idea human intelligence evolved primarily to solve rational problems is probably false. It probably mostly evolved to promote communications between members of any group. Think of this as the evolution of language. The evolution of language probably came about to communicate information about the environment. This involved probably the projection of the human mind onto the world combined with the ability to express this in a narrative format. Projection is a power psychological tool, and the young Einstein in effect projected his mind onto a reference frame moving at the speed of light to realize a paradox. We do this in fiction with structuring fictional characters, and we project our minds onto the world in the form of spirits or gods. This may have had a survival advantage in communicating information about the environment in a story format. With this has come religions and narratives about supernatural beings, that in late ancient periods of history and religions from the iron age involved an infinite being. By the medieval period monotheist religions had a firm grip on societies from the Indus Valley to Ireland. This changed with the rise of science, where with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo the culminating in Newton saw a world view completely at odds with theology. The return of Halley’s comet in the later 18th century saw calculation as a predictor work, while prophesy waned. The age of enlightenment came and brought about the idea that reasoning, measurement and phenomenology were the basis of the world. Even Christianity amongst the educated turned into deism, a shadow of its former self. In modern times this has shifted again. With the rise of monotheism was the rise of alpha-numerical formats. Paleo-Hebrew and the Greek linear-b script were a part of a transition from pictograms to complete symbolic forms. The Commandment “Though shall have no graven image” in its strict form means there are to be no pictures, certainly not of people and even more against images of God. It takes little thought to realize with television and now computers this has been overturned utterly. While Christians obeyed this commandment in serious breech, consider the barrage of pictures of Jesus, at least most information was communicated by writing. Now in this age of the internet and social media we have utterly turned about. We may in fact be approaching a post-literate age or culture. With this has come the rise of what I might call cybermythos, or the emergence of world views that are very specific, even tribal with tribes defined ideologically, and not based on reasoning or evidence. There is a fragmentation of cultish tribes, from reptilian-people ideas, to flat-Earth, to QAnon and of course traditional religion. We should be aware how this all involves a lot of magical thinking. The book of Revelations has Jesus coming back and sweeping all the clouds away, and the story of Cinderella has her “wish upon a star” and her fairy godmother comes to turn a pumpkin and mice into a horse drawn carriage that in the end takes her to “happily ever after.” The thinking is really the same. Magical thinking, where we might at least cite the story of Cinderella as honest in admitting it is a fairy tale, while the second coming of Jesus keeps being hustled off as ontological or truth. The rise of conspiracy narratives, I avoid the term “theory” because these are not theories, is a sort of magical suspension of reasoning and the belief in some guru, Alex Jones comes to mind, and a focus on there being a “plot” we must all beware of. Maybe we are backing away from this, if at least in a temporary and halting way. The electoral defeat of Donald Trump, where there is a sizable cult following saying he was in fact elected, may be some response to this. However, there are problems with the political left as well. George Orwell in his treatise on the psychology of totalitarian power, written in fictional form 1984, warned of the compression of language and its reduction to tiny, fragmented terms, and we see this on both the left and the right. Trumpism brought us MAGA, Stop the Steal and Q (amazing a political ideal can be compressed into one letter), but on the left we have BLM and Defund Police and other calls. The whole language is reduced to the smallest possible, and it reflect our trajectory into a post literate culture, which has a pernicious effect of leading us into a post-truth culture, What does this have to do with the Fermi paradox? It points to how we are emerging into conditions that are impossible to sustain. I have done a fair amount of computer programming in my time, and a post-symbolic or post-literate culture will fail to cultivate people who can actually program computers. Will AI ever get to the point it can program itself? That remains to be seen, and the short science fiction video “PETS” makes some point about this prospect. This might mean the format for promoting this cybermythos may not be long lived in the future. Further, if humans are thinking this way, we will become ever less capable of solving problems. Through my lifetime there is only one environmental problem that was nearly completely solved, the CFC induced ozone hole problem. With everything else we have honestly not really solved anything. We still have nuclear weapons, and this contradicts our warring tendencies. Curiously, this inability to solve much corresponds a lot with the rise of right winged politics. We have in effect developed an environment that we are not adapted to or have evolved to fit into. This in various ways may occur to intelligent life in the rest of the universe. The late comedian George Carlin has a routine, “Saving Planet Earth.” It starts out as an anti-environmental rant, where George was cleverly prepping the audience. He then transitions with the line “Earth is not going anywhere. WE ARE! Pack your shit folks, we are going away.” He then makes the point that Earth will survive. 20 million years from now life on Earth will probably be carrying on very well. We will not be here. He further makes some interesting comments of a cosmic nature. Is there any cosmological reason for us being here? Maybe John Wheeler was onto something with his idea of a self-excited universe, this is maybe a possibility. Wheeler also proposed how a measurement made at one time can select states at an earlier time, the so called Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiment. This has been experimentally demonstrated. Possibly, if we measure neutrinos or even gravitons from the early universe, we may select the quantum states or even the strength of coupling constants that make the observable universe possible. Think of this as a cosmological Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment. It might be possible, though I have no idea how we can ever know we end up playing this role. Maybe intelligent life in the universe forms a statistical sample space of such outcomes that in some average selects the quantum states of the observable universe. It might be that George Carlin’s “big electron” or this sort of self-excited cosmology are real. It though does not seem as likely intelligent life develops in most science fiction paths as star faring beings. If this happens for even a significant fraction of them, we would probably know it. I suspect intelligent life in the vast majority of cases develops an environment they are not really evolved for and then snuffs themselves out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/324cd42b-5555-428f-98d2-0d3d1510e725n%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1201780977.25144.1620697762308%40mail.yahoo.com.
