Cabbie Philosophy

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astrobiology, cab drivers, philosophy, speculation

The idea for the book gelled when Dr. Charles S. Cockell was asked by a taxi driver in London, "Are there alien taxi drivers? People like me elsewhere in the universe?" The conversation, held during a taxi ride between King's Cross railway station and 10 Downing Street, Westminster, is recorded and enlarged upon in the first chapter of Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe.

The book's 18 chapters deal with similarly searching questions the author discussed with various taxi drivers over a period of a few years (he rides a lot of taxis). I'll touch on a few of my favorites.

Ch. 4: "Should We Solve Problems on Earth before Exploring Space"? This is a common question, and the discussion ranged over several topics, such as the utility of weather forecasting aided by satellite data, resource discovery and conservation, and the numerous products that had to be developed just to get people into orbit and keep them alive and useful (think fountain pens and more secure ways of sealing diapers).

My father was once asked after a speech about the Apollo program and the Moon landings, "The astronauts left millions of dollars worth of machinery on the Moon. Of what use is that?" Dad replied, "Do you know where those millions of dollars are? Right here on Earth! Every dollar spent on the space program eventually wound up in someone's pocket: from technicians to miners to metal workers to computer programmers. Those dollars circulated in the economy, as space industry workers bought houses and groceries, paid workers to mow lawns or remodel kitchens, and bought fuel for their cars."

The author's discussion, on a taxi ride between Paddington station and Heathrow airport, eventually settled on defense from asteroids. The author mentioned the 10km asteroid that drove most dinosaurs extinct 66 million years ago; those not wiped out became birds. It would be scientifically accurate for a chicken-burger joint to label their wares "Dinosaur Burgers". He went on to tell of Barringer Crater in Arizona, where a smaller meteorite blasted out a mile-wide crater a lot more recently, about 50,000 years ago. He called it "a tiny rock"; for the record its size was about 150 feet (45 m) and it weighed something like 200,000 tons. Its velocity upon impact was about 20 km/s, or 70,000 km/hr (12-13 mi/s or 45,000 mph). NASA and other space agencies are spending significant amounts of money on telescopes, both on land and in orbit, to locate all the asteroids big enough to wipe out cities or states or continents. The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) project was to learning how hard it is to deflect a small asteroid. Just for the record, those "significant funds" are a small fraction of the various "stimulus" packages perpetrated by the US government in reaction to the pandemic. That's where the cabbie's question should be aimed!

Ch 10: "Will We Understand the Aliens?" In Glasgow, a discussion ensued about whether we and aliens would be able to communicate. Consider this: Without the Rosetta Stone, it might still be impossible to decipher early Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are a few dozen scripts that are still unknown, and until about 20 years ago Mayan was one of them, until my brother's mentor, Linda Schiele, cracked the code. It helped that there are living Mayans, who still speak the language. Even though the written script fell completely out of use about a thousand years ago, the linguistic characteristics of spoken Mayan led Dr Schiele and her collaborators toward the right path. Also, what of dolphins and other vocal whales? Only recently has it been learned that sperm whales seem to have names. It's a start. But alien-human linguistics will be really hard. Dr. Cockell thinks that, because the scientific method has to be the same everywhere, and the basic scientific laws are universal, that scientific and technical terms will be the first terms we and aliens will be able to share, and much can then be derived from that.

Ch 17: "What is the Meaning of Life?" There is no person anywhere who has never asked this question. In the author's estimation, the answer, if there is one, depends on how rare or how abundant life is, particularly life with sufficient consciousness to ask the question. I'd put it in reverse: Live has meaning of we live a meaningful life. If there is no life, there is no need for anything to "mean" anything. We are defined primarily by the quality of our relationships. You or I may be a wonderful person; this will remain unknown unless we are wonderful to or for someone. Or if a person is evil, that is only manifested when he or she is evil towards others (even if the "others" are frogs being stomped "for fun" or flies getting their wings pulled off).

This delightful book is full of meaningful insights about "life, the universe, and everything", with no trace of the whimsy of  Douglas Adams. The author has the privilege of thinking about these things for his day job as an astrobiologist and an adviser to NASA. His humility and grace, relating to taxi drivers from sundry backgrounds, come through and confer wisdom to us, his readers.

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Coda: While persuading various generative art programs to produce the image above, generated by the Stable Diffusion engine in Playground, I kept a couple of others that I particularly liked, that were "almost there". The first was drawn by Dall-E3, the second by Playground 2.5.

The irresistible impulse to predict

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, speculation, prediction, futurism

The second chapter of The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow, by Dr. Steven Novella and his brothers Bob Novella and Jay Novella, begins with a quote by the sage of the ball park, Yogi Berra: "The future ain't what it used to be."

I can think of three facts about the 1969 landing on the Moon by astronauts of Apollo 11, that were not anticipated by science fiction writers, nor by futurists in general:

1. Between 10% and 30% of Americans believe it was all a hoax.
2. The sponsor was not a corporation nor a "rich industrialist" but the Federal government.
3. The world watched Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder on color TV.

It took only 50 years for a few "rich industrialists" to gather both the financial muscle and the personal will to start spaceship companies, and at present there are three! In the golden age of space fiction, mainly pre-1960, nobody dreamed the combined Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs would cost about a trillion dollars (in current dollars).

What did science fiction get right? Arthur Clarke foretold telecommunications via synchronous satellites in 1945, 12 years before Sputnik 1 surprised the world. On the dystopian side, George Orwell wrote in 1948 of a pervasive surveillance state (he was mixing Stalin with his expectation of immense progress in video technology); now it is upon us. More prosaically, in 1911 Hugo Gernsback wrote of video chatting; of course the inimitable Hugo made dozens of predictions in everything he wrote, so getting it right once in a while is simple statistics in this case.

What approach do the Novella brothers take? I'd call Skeptics' Guide a catalog of futurist ideas sorted by plausibility. I am amused by the title of Chapter 3, "The Science of Futurism." To me, that's an oxymoron. Science is about what we know, or think we know. Stuff that hasn't happened cannot be a scientific subject. To me, futurist speculation is fun, and when folks in a position to know more than most of us about technological and sociological trends speculate that one or another trend "has legs" and is likely to affect all of us, it's worth taking note. Some decent fraction of the time, the speculation turns into fact.

The authors sagely note that it's hard to distinguish robust trends from fads. I look back at a number of things I once thought were "neaty-keen!", that have vanished from the scene, with decidedly mixed feelings. I tried out a Segway at a science park once. I like them. The business model was fatally flawed, though, and my insurance company would probably have charged me more than the cost of the machine...per year. So as much as I hope for the rapid development and spread of self-driving autos, I suspect I won't live to see them "take over" (but I'll get one of they do!).

Or maybe I'll live long enough for many more trends to play out. The next-to-last chapter deals with indefinite life extension. Scale that back to "let's make it possible for most people to live 100-120 years in good health", and I have a decent chance to use or own (if we still own cars in 2040) a self-driving car, and to have not a robot butler but instead several (affordable!) robotic appliances, such as one that can make a decent omelet. Maybe I'll live to see actual, true, artificial general intelligence (AGI). My goal post for AGI is that a mechanism, entirely without "handlers and minders", does research, produces something new, and obtains a patent. A secondary goal post: one that can carry on a discussion on numerous subjects, and hold its own at a meeting of an intelligent, well-read Book of the Month Club.

Of course, artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is beginning to do some very interesting things. One is the language understanding behind "art generators" such as Dall-E and "text generators" such as ChatGPT, and the object recognition behind image sharpeners such as Sharpen AI. Would life in a settlement on Mars such as the one shown here appeal to you? I prompted Dall-E to create this image. It's a portion of a larger image I "created" with "outpainting". ANI is beginning to push our culture in new directions.

After the introductory part of the book, each of the four sections deals with matters that are less and less likely. The last section discusses the impossible, at least until new laws of physics are discovered: time travel, transporters, and faster-than-light travel for example. My, how prone we are to wrestle against the constraints of the universe!

The point is often made that fiction writers and futurist writers cannot escape putting today's people into their future scenarios. A small number of people are fanatical about "living forever", but do they have a way to predict the social disruption that would result, if even 0.1% of humans became effectively immortal? The authors discuss both positive and negative views of this, and are careful not to draw conclusions. It would be a Black Swan moment for the human race. While I'd like to "not die", I am not willing for evil people to live long enough to get really, really evil. Imagine if Stalin or Mao Zedong were still alive...

As good as the writing is, the book is rather insipid. The authors didn't want to be sensationalists. They succeeded at that.

Yogi Berra also said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Unequal land value swings

kw: real estate, speculation

Triggered by ideas in a book I've been reading, I did a little digging around in Zillow (a great site if you've never used it). One of the charts that is usually available for any house is one like this one, that shows a ten-year history of approximate values for the house, its immediate area, and the town.

This chart is for a somewhat random house in Media, PA, an area I know rather well. The upper dashed line is the average price for the zip code, the solid line is for the house, and the greenish dotted line is for Media as a whole. This is an area not too much affected by the real estate crash of four years ago.

Another area I know pretty well is Moore, OK. This house has been sold twice in recent years, as shown by the green dots. Its value has been all over the map, more because of the weather than the recession: Moore has in recent years "hosted" two of the largest tornadoes in history.

The Zip code and the city are coterminous, so there is not a third chart line. I suspect that the averaged line is less realistic, and ought to have more gyrations, in keeping with this individual house's value estimates. I chose this house for its most recent Zestimate (Zillow estimate), to be near that of the house in Media, and I did the same for the following example.

The first two homes' value histories compare quite well to the chart for a random house in northern Phoenix, Arizona. This house, recently valued about $215,000, is down from a value that was twice as high five years ago. The lines for the Camelback neighborhoods and for Phoenix as a whole were more than twice as high five years ago.

This exemplifies the kind of bubble that accompanies an area with a policy of unrestrained growth. It is much more vulnerable to recessionary forces. Even in a recession, this neighborhood is pricey, primarily because the southern half of Phoenix is a "low rent district", with much, much lower home values. It is a classic "other side of the tracks" area. And the unrestrained growth? It is not a viable policy for the current economic situation. More on such things later.

Planets, planets everywhere

kw: speculation, planets

I read an article in which the author used a chart like this one to argue that many small extrasolar planets are yet to be found. While the conclusion is right, some of the reasoning is flawed.
This chart shows a frequency diagram of the 432 exoplanets so far catalogued, plotted by their line-of-sight masses (mass times the sine of inclination). The "1" bin includes all those with a mass of one Jupiter or less. The strong inflection in the shape of the distribution is said to indicate that the smaller masses are underrepresented. And they are, as we will see.

The appropriate analysis of wide-ranging data is not linear but either logarithmic (power law) or lognormal. The same data, collected into bins with a range of 2:1 in mass, show a more useful picture:
Here, "1" is again "one Jupiter", but the mass range is 0.71-1.41 rather than 0-1. The parenthesis points out that one Earth mass is 0.0031 Jupiter mass; one Mj is 318 Me. Here the sharp inflection to the left of 0.5 Mj also indicates that the mass distribution is artificially cut off at low masses. But now we have the ammunition needed to estimate just how much.

The only stellar system for which we have a reasonably complete catalog of planetary masses is our own. This chart of the distribution of planetary masses is based, not on Mj but on Me, the mass of Earth. Looking closely, we see four pairs:

• Mercury and Mars have very small masses, 0.055 and 0.11 Me.
• Venus and Earth are the second pair: 0.815 and 1 (of course).
• Uranus and Neptune are next, at 14.5 and 17.1 Me, respectively.
• Saturn and Jupiter are the heaviest: 95 and 318 Me.
  

These fit a lognormal distribution with a logmean (base 10) of 0.57 and a logSD of 1.36. The confidence interval about both these parameters is rather large, but I'll use them to produce a fit from which we might learn something useful.

Here a Lognormal distribution with our system's parameters and the exoplanet data are cast in the same coordinates, re-figured so that unit mass is one Earth. The lightest exoplanet on this list (which includes only those found by astrometric means, rather than eclipses) is just under 2 Me. Making the quite unfounded assumption that the larger exoplanets are fairly sampled, I fitted a distribution with the logmean and logSD of the Solar System. This chart tells us that if our own Solar System is at all representative, a complete census of the stars already searched would yield about 4,000 planets, with a statistical peak near 4 Me (3.7).

Is this reasonable? For it to be anywhere close to true, we must also assume that the preponderance of "hot Jupiters" so far found is also due to selection bias, because they are so much easier to find than any other kind. I sure look forward to the first data from the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission (canceled last week by the President, but sure to be reinstated by a future administration).

Seismic Survey

kw: speculation, myths, legends

In posts on 2/20/09 and 2/26/09 I speculated about what is the real nature of a grid on the seafloor that some think is Atlantis. Since then I have taken just a little time to snoop around looking for other seafloor artifacts that may be related.

This image shows the traces of seismic surveying located on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the most thoroughly surveyed regions of the sea floor. (click to see a larger image with more clear traces showing.) The survey was "3D Seismic", which records low-frequency sonic reflections from sub-seafloor rocks. The sonic data can then be used to calculate a three-dimensional model of the configuration of the rocks to a depth of several miles. It is a powerful exploration technique, and as you can see, it chews up the ocean floor rather thoroughly.

The location of this area is 28°45'N, 88°30'W, at a depth of 7,160 ft, or 2,180 m (By contrast, the "Atlantis" pattern is found at a depth of about 17,900 ft, or 5,460 m). Considering that the area shown is about 50 miles wide by 30 miles north-south, the traces are about a half mile apart.

If the "Atlantis" pattern is a sonic survey of some kind, it is much looser, and the source was quite a bit more energetic. Possibly whoever did it was looking for much deeper targets than what is shown here in the Gulf.

Is Autism an Evolved Adaptation?

kw: speculation, autism, asperger, ASD

I recently read an article in one of the May 2006 issues of Time about autism. Seems the current term is "autistic spectrum disorders" or ASD. I wonder if these are really disorders? I also recently read that some number of folks (10% or so?) are sensitive to very low frequencies, such as those used by elephants, rhinos, and big cats for long-distance communication. These ideas milled around in my head...

I have three friends who are autistic. One is a 4th grader, one of my music students. He is intense, focused, disciplined, very frank, and more sociable than I'd expect of an autistic person. He does tend to live in his head, and not listen well unless you can get him to look at you. He is diagnosed with a mild form of Asperger.

Another, a 10th grader, is a family friend. His particular interest—obsession, really—is weather. He and I have spent some happy times talking about weather and climate. He knows he has Asperger. I have noticed his hands are always chapped, so he probably has a washing obsession also.

The third, in his 20s, is right on the edge of full-blown autism. He is hard to talk to, and usually unwilling to interact. Whatever he is interested in, he does 100%. Whenever he gets bored, he's gone.

I have seen other people who are, I supposed, placed variously along the autistic spectrum. I am told an autistic person who has a job of interest to him (80%+ are male) is a very devoted, often overly loyal, worker.

The various "bad habits" usually reported for autistic persons, such as screaming and head-banging, seem to be exaggerations of responses we all feel to overwhelming stimuli. To me they manifest less-than-ordinary impulse control.

As far as I can tell, autistic characteristics and behaviors are exaggerations of "normal" stuff. If a person mainfests the intense focus of an autistic savant, but is otherwise ordinary, we don't call it a disorder. I am myself sometimes very averse to human contact, and I've been known to indulge in "autistic rocking" when overwhelmed. Some, perhaps many, autistic persons have keener or more sensitive hearing or light sensitivity than usual.

If a person has four or five of these "fringe" characteristics, being "3-sigma" or more from the norm in them, we label it, but what is really going on? In quiet times, people with keener senses, who overreact to sounds or bright light, or who are extra-focused, are considered a nuisance. But what of more chaotic times? Keen senses detect enemies or impending catastrophes sooner. Great focus is needed for rapid problem-solving in the face of emergency.

I think the human species keeps a certain number of these people around, because there are times when we need them. They deserve our appreciation.

Poison Ivy's Past

kw: speculation, global warming, plant growth

The recent reports of the effect of higher levels of CO₂ on the growth or poison ivy got me thinking. In short, the present CO₂ level in the atmosphere is 370 ppm or so. In 2050 it is expected to be about 570 ppm. At an experimental forest in North Carolina, researchers found that poison ivy grew 150% faster, produced urushiol (the toxic oil) at a 150% greater concentration, and that the urushiol was a more toxic variety.

When I was a child, I frequently got small poison ivy rashes. This was the 1950s. There was no cortisone treatment. We could only use calomel or potassium permanganate poultices. The rash typically could be cleared up in about two weeks. At that time, CO₂ in the atmosphere was about 300 or 310 ppm.

So, let's figure. 570/370 = 1.55. (100%+150%)/(100%) = 2.5. There are two likely mathematical models. One is exponential: log(2.5)/log(1.55) = 2.1. This is the model exponent. For simplity's sake, we'll say this model predicts foliage growth and urushiol concentration both increase as the square of the CO₂ level.

The other is a linear relationship with a threshold. Plot points at (570, 2.5) and (370, 1), and you find that the slope is 1.5/200 = .0075. Then, 1/.0075 = 133.33, the level of CO₂ at which growth and urushiol production cease. The proportionality constant is 0.0075 per ppm.

What do these two models predict for a CO₂ level of 310 (when I was a pre-teen)?

First model: The square of 310/370 = 0.70, which is 30% less than 1.

Second model: Decrement of 0.0075*60 = 0.45, or 45% less.

My conclusion: It seems likely that the growth rate of poison ivy was 30% to 45% less than today, during the 1950s and 1960s, and that the concentration of urushiol was also lower by a similar amount. It is also likely that the urushiol then produced was less toxic.

I do know that my reaction to poison ivy has gotten much more severe over the past fifty years. Every case I've had since the mid-1980s required a three-to-four-week regimen with prednisone to clear up. And poison ivy looks bigger than it did then. Since I am much bigger now than when I was 12, it must be really bigger! Bigger and badder...