Say hello to my pet rock: Apophis. This last time we talked about him was February 19th, 2007.

So, what is so exciting about a rock? Especially one thats so far away? I don’t think its that this rock is partly iron. In fact, that may be something that makes it seem less exciting. Its not that this rock is humming through space at the breakneck speed of 1145 MPH. Its not the rock’s mass, some 260,000,000,000 kilograms. No, even though this rock is big and its moving ridiculously fast, theres something much, much more interesting and exciting about Apophis: It just might destroy all or most life on Earth. This isn’t exactly the kind of headline one likes to come across, but especially regarding my old friend, Apophis.

In the article below, a 13 year old German school boy revises NASA estimates on the trajectory of Apophis as it relates to Earth-orbiting satellites. Interestingly, according to various media outlets NASA agreed with the young boy. The original [NASA] estimate concluded Apophis would pass Earth in 2029, giving the giant rock a 45,000 in 1 chance of hitting the Earth on its next pass in 2036. Accounted here, the revised estimate by the German boy suggests that Apophis may have a much better chance of impacting with the Earth. The young boy suggests when Apophis passes in 2029, a pass whereby the asteroid will come closer to the Earth than some man-made satellites, that if Apophis were to come into contact with any of those satellites, it would have the much geater chance of 450 to 1, of hitting and devastating our planet in 2036.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth — and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

Edit: News outlets are now reporting that NASA believes the boy’s sums may have been incorrect.

From Scienceblogs, a quote I must not let you miss, showing an interesting turn of conversation. Check it out the full beast here. Terse and lovely, the turn goes…

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Cunningham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”

An assumption based in logic, that seems unfortunately too true about our Country is that, in the United States of America, not knowing something makes one popular. This is because, more Americans “don’t know” than those that “do know”,  making ignorance a more socially acceptable attribute at times than intellect.

America, in an age of information, has become a home for a Culture of the Stupid. So says the Washington Post and its sources in a piece titled The Dumbing of America. We have to wonder if this phenomena is the result of people mistaking vision for academic, intellectual or social elitism. Or, if this is just the beginning of an era of Anti-Intellectualism.

…And all the science I don’t understand — it’s just my job five days a week…

In August of 2007, scientists found a one billion light-year sized hole in the universe. Left to my unending curiosity, I’ve done a bit of thinking. And now, I’d like to offer the few ideas I had about the discovery. Ponder what intrigues, enjoy what silliness entertains.

Theory #1 - The Hole — the cold spot — is the area associated with the events of the Big Bang.

Not unlike a crater on some surface, this cold spot could represent an area where billions of years ago, the event we commonly refer to as The Big Bang, took place. While over time space itself (we believe) has expanded, one would expect most everything was expelled outward from that point at extremely high temperatures (leaving the most immediate area entirely barren). Everything was “vaporized” or more accurately put, transitioned to highly energetic plasma and gas. The CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) tells how just how it was distributed. Does this “hole” give us an indicate from where?

Theory #2 - The Hole is Aliens!

By creating electromagnetic fields many linear detection methods can be deflected or subverted. It makes sense, at least depending on how you look at projects like SETI. And, of course these aliens would need to know the ole’ saying: out of sight — out of mind.

Theory #3 - The Hole represents the discovery of new physics

Last, the most likely: this region of space contains unknown properties or material with unknown properties to physics. This would lead to our inability to make accurate detections and potentially offer us a region of space that seemed to lack all features. We’ve only narrowly escaped our home venue of Earth. While it may seem a radical idea to accept, there is no evidence that our observations from Earth aren’t dramatically limited to a subset of realities describable by our derived physics only.

As we look around, the closest things are the most immediate to us. So rarely do human beings take on a planetary perspective. In the 1990s Carl Sagan showed the world an image of a pale blue dot. For some of us the idea presented by Sagan with the picture changed the way we think about every thing. It helped to give some of us the first inkling of a planetary perspective. It has been over a decade since Sagan’s inspirational thoughts and I’m glad to announce NASA has helped to issue a bit of a reminder. Presentations so simple yet powerful are why NASA should never stop with manned space flight nor with unmanned space flight.

Here is a picture of every one of us, and all that all of us have ever achieved in the thousands of years of human civilization (as seen from the surface of Mars). So, if anyone asks…

There is an article I read which I can’t seem to say enough is Absolute Genius — because thats what its describing: absolute genius. Its called Programming can Ruin Your Life. I keep saying absolute genius because, for me, all of this is truth about reality. Every bit in the article.

I feel what the author has described here, is sort of the weight to which genius can burden. I covered and explained this idea that genius grows exponentially through its own internally created pressures or burdens in a series of essays I wrote entitled “Neurogenesis”. Maybe one day I’ll republish them here. In the meantime, let me lay in with examples of this wonderful piece of literary work… and give you an idea of the bold diagnosis this writer has made of most Programmers (or, as I state in Neurogensis, most geniuses).

When faced with an interesting programming problem your mind will chew it over in the background. Maybe it’s an algorithm you need to develop, maybe its a tricky architecture problem, maybe its data that needs a model. It doesn’t matter. Your mind will quietly work the problem over in search of a solution. The ah-ha! moment will come when you’re in the shower, or playing Tetris. This practice of constant churning will slowly work its way into the rest of your life. Each problem or puzzle you encounter will start its own thread; the toughest and most troubling of which will be blocking.

This all seems very, very accurate to me. I’ m even quite certain that this sort of problem-solving phenomena translate to other careers too. In fact, I contend it translates across so many disciplines because this describes a human compulsion toward optimization (or the providing of a solution of an optimization problem). I contend optimization is the only problem ever being solved during all human problem-solving. But, thats a contention that takes us to deeper place than I want to go with this post. Don’t worry, we’ll get there some day.

One thing I notice about other people is how little they think and I mean that about everything. I can’t imagine how one could exist with such precious little going on inside them as I find with most people. In fact what I’m noticing is not how little those people think but how much I myself think by comparison. I always wonder,”Why don’t they just stop and think for a second?” Thats a good example though.

No wait, its not good, its a Programmers example, its perfect! I’m wondering why others are NOT thinking, in effect, thats just more thinking I have to do [for them] (or thats how I observe the case to be). You see, in problem-solving with Programmers, what I realize is, they’re always thinking, because they’re always programming. But, consider it, and it should only make more sense to you even if you’re a non-programmer.

If your job is to feed exotic and somewhat exclusive phrases of a dynamic and specific language into some device and then predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable outcomes, you will become as much like that device as possible. This is the mammalian method-trait called mimicry. This method-trait is true of how human beings grasp information at all through all language. Progressively over time the input and output of procedures of communication with others grow as we do, embedding in our minds the pathology to interact socially. Or as it could also be described, so that we’re able to feed other people information and predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable ones.

So Programmers, like anyone learning or coping with anything follow a pattern of mimicry in order that they become even better at translating these exotic phrases and languages and predicting outcomes (or at least as close as they can become to the machine). But, mimicry has its draw backs in this case since we’re now trying to mimic something not nearly human — a programming language.

Programmers become obsessed with perfection. This is why they are constantly talking about rewrites. They cannot resist optimum solutions. Perfection requires tossing aside mediocre ideas in search of great ones. A good programmer would rather leave a problem temporarily unsolved than solve it poorly. A good solution takes into account all predictable outcomes and solves the largest number of them in the most efficient way. This mindset prevents you from writing code with limited utility and life span. While its a wonderful trait to have in programming, the demons of scope and efficiency will start to assert themselves on your ordinary life. You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.

This statement by the author acts to solidify my point as well as his; that an obsession for perfection is actually a shedding of the human condition. This means Programmers have trained their minds to be inhuman as such that they cannot make a choice knowingly acceptant that it will be deficient or have a limited life time. This kind of avoidance of care for simple things such as is described is something well known about the personality of most Programmers.

Finally, note the point above that thinking in this way reduces the number of your potential choices to those seemingly optimal at design time. This means Programmers only do things that they analyze as optimal in that moment. So, a night out on the town where one acts foolishly without regard for themselves to a degree, as well as the feelings of the others around (whom act and have cascading affect on those they surround thereafter) — throwing caution to the wind — would not be very attractive to someone measuring each element of their experience in terms of optimality toward building a method based in perfection.

And, it is for some of those reasons that genius tends to burden. Or, as I have put it in Neugenesis: Elegant thought is a symptom of a passionate, sensitive mind, its expression is nothing more than the easing of its burden.

Well, thank goodness for this news that the Fermi Paradox is back with a vengeance. And, its such an amazing question to think about: How come, despite billions of years of time, millions of light-years of life-supporting space, and all the complexity of the Heavens, the Universe is filled with what we can call the “Great Silence”? As Fermi put it, “Where is everybody?” What are they doing? Why can’t we detect them? Why can’t they detect us? No one seems to know.

A number of prominent futurists, a list that includes Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, have speculated that the destiny of advanced intelligence is to re-work the cosmos itself. This has been imagined as an intelligence explosion as advanced life expands outward into the cosmos like a bubble. The entire Galaxy would be re-organized with much of its matter converted into computronium. Eventually, it is thought that the laws of the Universe will be re-tuned to meet the needs of advanced civilizations.

Interestingly enough I myself am writing a science fiction novel with the working title “Tether.” And, its about human beings discovering exactly this kind of cosmological engineering technology –Science moving at the speed of fiction…

Unfortunately, we do not appear to inhabit a Universe that even remotely resembles this model. The cosmos appears natural and unperturbed. This is reminiscent of the God problem and the presence of evil. We live in a Universe that is hostile, indifferent and pointless. If advanced ETIs had the capacity to re-engineer the Universe such that it was safer, more meaningful and paradisical they would have done so by now. By virtue of the fact that we observe such a dangerous Universe we should probably conclude that such a project is not an option.

This is all mostly true. But, of course the Universe appears dangerous to us, and the project seems as though its not an option. For one thing, and with this example its entirely a given: we would not be the species doing the cosmological re-engineering!

If this case were true, our Universe wouldn’t be tailored for us. In fact, given that, the Universe would appear especially in this case, dangerous and unperturbed as we observe it. Put another way, these aliens being different from us, would likely re-engineer a Universe that was not ideal for us.

Indeed, with clear reflection on this idea, one realizes logically, it is only because we have no working theory of Life, let alone for which this universe would be ideal, that we have no working theory in which the Universe could be re-engineered for life, to be ideal. Nor any theory to counter that notion directly.

What this does, is, give us more directions to go in. An interesting idea might be, as we see few species opt for technology on our planet as a means of solving evolutionary problems, that perhaps it is an indication of the success of species throughout the history of all life which opted for technology. In other words, perhaps technology is a bad thing to opt for. What if everybody was only ever able to engineer their own accidental destruction? Or, perhaps even more forward thinking, our accidental and eventual creation?