Here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining it some more:
So what's the big deal? Putting it into the most basic possible terms: We've observed small particles in the universe that act like they're "talking to each other" and determining how to be, even after they're separated and shouldn't be able to affect each other. It's like we can slice a red apple in half, put each half in a box and send the two boxes to opposite sides of the world, then have somebody open one box and paint their half of the apple green, and then when somebody on the other side of the world opens the box with their half-apple in it, it's turned green too. And we don't know how this works. We've been trying to find out since the time of Einstein. Einstein himself called this "a spooky action at a distance." Not only are we observing the effect that two particles can have on each other, and not only is it instantaneous (defying everything we know about the speed of information alone), but it appears to even be possible to have the same thing happen when the entangled elements are separated not only by space, but time as well. So Israeli scientists have made photons affect each other even when they didn't coexist at the same time. So either we're dead wrong about this, or we have a way to both time travel and teleport either information or physical actions instantly. It could be a flaw in our reasoning based on some fundamental shortcoming of human perception and reasoning. A LiveScience infographic:
And finally, quantum entanglement has been simulated within the world of, of all things, Minecraft.
Are we nuts? Maybe. Maybe the universe is nuts, too.
A NASA / DARPA plan is underway to launch a "100-year" spaceship for deep space exploration. But while that's interesting of itself, I was struck by this wild anecdote:
"When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science."
The program is just one of many ambitious attempts to kick the human race into its interstellar travel era. So far, Voyager is still the most distant man-made object in the universe, and it's just crossing the threshold out of our solar system. As Cecil Adams points out in this Straight Dope column:
"Then again, the thinking goes, if you can pinpoint where to look, you can accomplish seemingly miraculous feats. Just ask the project team for Voyager 1, which is still communicating with a spacecraft so far away its incoming radio signals have less than a twenty-billionth the power of a watch battery. But let’s put that in perspective. Voyager 1 is the most distant manmade object in the universe, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’ll soon leave the outer reaches of the solar system behind and enter the depths of interstellar space. Even so, another 14,000 years will have to pass before Voyager attains a distance of one light year from earth. The star closest to us, Proxima Centauri, is more than four light years away."
...so at present technology, 100 years will be long enough to get, meh, a stone's throw from Earth, relatively speaking. However, getting our space legs on might be a necessity at some point in the future, especially if we want to do anything about threats like 29075-1950-DA, the asteroid which has the greatest probability of hitting earth. It's only expected to muss our hair sometime about the year 2880, but it's still much too soon from now to comfortably put it off. Here's a little presentation on this asteroid and other near-Earth objects, just to scare you a little bit:
You wouldn't think that mathematics, as a field, would attract that many fringe-living crackpots - at least not as much as, say, medicine or space physics. In math, after all, either 2 plus 2 adds up to 4 or else it doesn't, and there's not much room for argument after that. But, oh, how wrong you'd be! Join me on this intellectual Tilt-A-Whirl as we explore the home pages of some extremely unhinged amateur mathematicians: Zim Mathematics The startling page layout is just the appetizer to Zim Olsen's theories. However, Zim doesn't really seem as out there as some, merely extremely eccentric. On the crank side, there's the ranting philosophy of how we should think of mathematics, which reads like a better-educated Time Cube manifesto. On the other hand, we have the following masterpiece:
The Lord’s Prayer in System(s) Mathematics Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name; (1) + - × ÷ = (0) + - × ÷ = (1+0) + - × ÷ = (1,0) + - × ÷ Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. (1) +, -, ×, ÷ = (0) +, -,×, ÷ = (1+0) +, -, ×, ÷ = (1,0) +, -, ×, ÷ Give us this day our daily Bread. Y(A,B) + - × ÷ => X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) Forgive us for our sins, X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0)) As we forgive those who sin against us. W(A,B,Y(1,0) + - × ÷) => W(1,0) Lead us not into temptation X(1,0,Y(A,B)) + - × ÷ But deliver us from evil. X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0)) For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. F(1,0) = ___, ___, …___
OK, anybody who can engage in such whimsy has my benefit of the doubt. Diamond Theory Here again, I don't think Steven Cullinane is really unhinged per se. At the very least, his geometric study is fun to play with, particularly when you find this toy. And I'm not really sure that anything he says is wrong per se. But you might find yourself asking "So what?" or more to the point, "Why is this supposed to be the central theory to explaining life, the universe, and everything?" The Correct Value for Pi OK, here at last is somebody I can pin to the board. This Iranian scholar can't stand it that Pi is infinite, and insists that its true value is actually 3.125, so there! Wrong sir! Thank you for being up front and not burying it under 100 pages of dense "proof." Impossible Correspondence Ah, we love the argumentative ones! This colorful Mad Hatter uses amusing George-Clinton-type coinages like "supraconsciousness" to insist that everybody else is wrong, dammit, especially that Albert Einstein. Go on, pick a page, any page - the "Analysis of Maths by Theosophical Reduction" argues that we only need nine digits to define the universe and then wades into the I-Ching and something called the Mayan "Tzolk'in"... uh, this:
...guaranteeing that this refugee from Klingon astrology will lose the hell out of you before you can even suss out what he's rambling about. Oh, and there's a great bit of numerology about the Quran, and a piece on market cycles and Fibonacci done with no sense of irony for Darren Arinovsky's film. And hey, there's this:
"In his stand against the ether, Einstein had argued, "we should not speak of things that can't be measured." Probably the number one reason for saying that was to insure the job of measurements. Today, the Aether not only has been experimentally shown to "exist", but the reversed, subluminal group wave Aether and the superluminal phase wave Aether could also be measured once it was defined as the existent medium."
Treasures, treasures I tell you! C.F. Russel - Cubed This is impossible. I take back everything I ever said about the Time Cube guy; THIS is the craziest web person with a cube-centric theory! Oh, the pages start out tame enough,
but it gets crazier...
and crazier...
and CRAZIER!!!
God, thank you, man! I made it up to page 16 before I couldn't hang on any more and blew my load! And THEN I found this dingus. Take me! Take me away to your crazy, right-angled world forever.
Manhattanhenge is what happens when the sun lines up perfectly with the concrete-canyon streets of New York City. Due to the angle of the city's layout, this doesn't map to our traditional times of equinox and solstice, but New Yorkers mark their own.
"Hey, guys! I've invented a design for a 125% efficiency motor, and if you all fund my Kickstarter in return for a share of the profits in my new motor company, I can eventually build 500 of these things on a 3-ton scale and produce the world's first kinetic power generator! Who's in?"
"Hello? Anybody?"
Welcome to the world of The Museum of Unworkable Devices, a huge, engaging site documenting one of the most futile fields of study in engineering, the history-long quest for perpetual motion. Within, Donald E. Simanek serves as a James Randi of the engineering world, showing us endless attempts at overbalanced wheels, spinning magnets, wild stunts with hydraulic pressure, and machines which baffle the limits of the imagination as surely as they thumb their nose at Newton, Archimedes, and Einstein.
The site also works as an education in physics principles. For instance, did you know that the ball along the bottom ramp of this device reaches the goal first?
Be sure not to miss the FAQ, "Why won't my perpetual motion machine work?", where Simanek explains it all like you're 5. Ought to be required reading in high school science at least.
Perpetual motion ties into a related fallacy emerging in computing.
I've recently investigated thoroughly the latest cult, sure to usurp Scientology as the most tenacious, known to some of you already as the "Singularity". The "Singularity" is the point at which computers are supposed to surpass human brains in intellect, at which point they will continue on their own to build even smarter computers, and so on ad infinitum until we're all living in the Matrix.
I'll stop for a paragraph so you can fight the urge to puke. Deep breathing helps.
The idea of the Singularity (which has been "just a few years from now" since about the 1700s) and the bogus search for a perpetual motion machine is evident when you consider that computers do nothing until a human writes a program for them. And it's quite daunting for a human to write a program that causes a computer to be smarter than a human, since by definition the human is not smart enough to write it. And computers really are not smarter than humans at anything, they just appear to be in certain fields by virtue of brute force and speed - for instance, they beat you at chess by calculating six moves ahead from every possible move, including the ones we would eliminate through common sense. Like the would-be perpetual motion inventors, Singularitarians seek to boost the IQ of machines by making them smarter than they are so they can write themselves, just like overbalanced wheels seek to gain infinite momentum by making objects be heavier than they are so they can push themselves.
Every time, I pin down some Singularity zealot and ask them "How could you write a computer program that was smarter than yourself?" The answer is always "We'll have a computer program write the program!" I bounce back "OK, how do you write THAT program?" "We have the computer write that program, too!" Oh, I see. We'll write a program to write a program to write a program to overwhelm common sense, just like we'll trick those nasty old laws of physics by spinning a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel...
For this festive holiday season which we just kicked off today, we celebrate a time when radioactive Christmas trees were an actual headline - another side effect of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. This story from 2002...
"Officials seized the fir trees at local markets in the southern town of Rovno, where they were being sold for the upcoming Orthodox Christmas, Itar-Tass agency reported.
"The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was the world's worst
After the region was covered by a radioactive cloud, a complete ban on the felling of trees in the contaminated forests surrounding Chernobyl was imposed.
"Police said the local businessmen knew the trees from the Zhytomyr region were contaminated, and used forged documents to sell them. "
The fallout from Chernobyl was felt in many ways that were unexpected. The incident and area today provide an outstanding living experiment in just what happens to the environment after a nuclear meltdown. But along with this has come a tragic toll of death and weird tragedy - (warning, that page contains an image of a mutated puppy).
This is Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 22 light-years from Earth in the direction of the Libra constellation. It's attracted huge attention in the scientific community the past few years, due to harboring - so far - six planets, three of which have a very good shot at having Earth-like conditions suitable for life. These three planets, c, d, and g, make up three out of the top five habitable planets given in this list. Variously, c, d, and g all make good candidates for either supporting Earth-class life already, or being a suitable place for the human race to colonize.
Now, you might be saying, "Great, 22 light-years away you say? What good is that without the Starship Enterprise?" Yes, I know. I've made similar snarky observations myself...
What if I told you that way back in 1955, an idea was proposed at the famous Los Alamos Laboratories whereby, using already-existing technology, we could have a man-made vehicle bridge a distance of 22 light-years in about 44 years? In fact the idea was suggested by Stanislaw Ulam in 1947, and further collaboration came from Freeman Dyson.
The project was Project Orion, which has now been shut down. A money quote from this section:
"A nuclear pulse drive starship powered by matter-antimatter pulse units would be theoretically capable of obtaining a velocity between 50% to 80% of the speed of light."
And - strictly in the abstract - a vehicle busting 0.5c could travel 22 light-years in 44 years. However, you do have to consider that this isn't necessarily the launch speed of the vehicle; it has to thrust for a long, long time to build up that speed. You also want to think about whether you need to stop at the end. For a fly-by or crash-into mission - which are what our first missions to the moon were - no worries there.
But wait a minute - This hardy makes for a sustainable rocket fuel source, you say. Yes, quite true. But the general principle, that of using actual detonations of matter behind a ship to propel it forward as opposed to just chemical rockets, has many applications.
One of the problems of antimatter is that it's extremely expensive to produce, and even harder to keep around. But perhaps with more study, we could get it down to "canned antimatter" you could grab off a shelf and go.
Getting back to Project Orion, its main thrust was investigating nuclear pulse propulsion. Exactly what it sounds like on the tin, you fire off nuclear explosions at the rear of the vessel, and use this to attain as much as one-tenth light speed (0.1c.). This still closes a distance of 22 light-years in 220 years. Once again, fudge in acceleration / deceleration times, and you'd still get there in 400 years, or even less time if all you want to do is take a few pictures and readings from closer-by and transmit them by signal back to Earth.
Since Orion, other projects have sprung up based on its inspiration, some of them still active inquiries:
Project Valkyrie - Proposed theoretical spacecraft which could use antimatter fusion to reach .92c. Over nine-tenths of light speed.
Project Longshot - Started and stopped in the late 1980s by NASA, this would have been a rather conservative probe to Alpha Centauri B that could have gotten close-up data back to us by about the year 2195, using nuclear pulse propulsion at 0.43c.
Project Daedalus - A 1970s study conducted by the British Interplanetary Society to inquire as to whether an unmanned vehicle could use then-current technology to reach another star within one human lifespan. The fastest they could then come up with was a fusion rocket to Barnard's Star in 50 years, also about 0.1c.
Project Prometheus - Done in 2003-2005, this was another NASA study investigating the potential behind nuclear-powered systems, bouncing around ideas such as nuclear-powered ion thrusters and the like.
All of these studies indicate that even without faster-than-light travel, at least scientific probes and telescope missions could bridge the cosmos in reasonable time - for interstellar distances. And there's many more past projects and studies where those came from. We need not be intimidated by the light-year for very much longer!
The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory was a toy kit sold for one brief year in 1950, by Alfred Carlton Gilbert, who also invented the Erector Set. It consisted of a Geiger-Muller counter, a cloud chamber, electroscope, spinthariscope, and actual uranium ore, along with a book about how to prospect for uranium.
According to an interview with Gilbert, the set was not only the real thing, but perfectly safe. It was discontinued, not because of safety concerns nor because of parental outcry, but because the unit was very expensive ($50 in 1950 dollars) and even at that they lost money on every unit sold. It was also just a little more advanced than the average science-fair project set.
The A.C. Gilbert company also sold other radioactive-themed toys, including this stand-alone impressive Geiger counter:
What really gets your attention on the show are the bumpers. Each of them features complex physics-driven devices that accomplish the mundane task of displaying the show's logo. Here are several of them in one clip:
These kinetic contraptions are in the similar vein of art as those illustrated by US cartoonist Rube Goldberg and UK cartoonist W. Heath Robinson.
Japanese kids who are fans of the show enjoy making their own devices in a similar vein and showing off in videos. Here's one brilliant example:
Shown: The discovery of a 2-billion-year-old naturally-occurring nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon, Africa. What happened was that a uranium deposit in Precambrian times was triggered by groundwater seeping through sandstone. A chain reaction would initiate, boiling the water away, which would then cool the reaction but allow more water to seep in and repeat the cycle. The process apparently kept going for hundreds of thousands of years,
Oklo is the site of the only known natural nuclear reaction. French physicist Francis Perrin discovered the natural phenomenon in 1972. The French mined out the uranium in the area until supplies were depleted, but geologists and physicists have continued to study the area for clues about what happened there millenniums ago.
A great little educational video on how nuclear energy generators work:
Whenever I see a guide to what to do in case of first alien visitor contact (like this one), I always see the same stupid assumption made: the alien flew here in a big shiny ship, so obviously it's a highly advanced species compared to our own.
Bunk!
Then there's a section instructing you on how to scurry around trying to communicate with the aliens to show off how smart you are. You know, to prove we're sentient, and hence "worth getting to know".
Right there, there's some bad assumptions:
Who says they wouldn't eat a smart species? Maybe they consider sentient species a rare delicacy.
Maybe they actually aren't seeking out other sentient species. We
humans, social animals, assume that the prime motivation for
intergalactic travel is to party with some friends. Maybe the aliens
want to think of themselves as the only sentient species in the
universe, and they're just here to strip-mine the planet and leave.
Maybe they're looking for slaves. If they're just out to snap a remote
control onto your spine and make you do their bidding, extra IQ points
just make you that much more useful.
Maybe they met something else, like bats or dolphins, before they met
you. And since it might turn out that bats or dolphins are smarter in
their own way than humans are and if the aliens just happen to jive more
with the other critters than they do with us, maybe all your showing
off is for nothing.
Maybe they rate intelligence on a different scale from us. Perhaps, like
bees and termites, the aliens are born with instinct already in place
so they intuitively grok math and engineering, but they judge
intelligence based on how well you can juggle or how well you can sing
in the 20-40 kHz range.
Who's to say we don't scare the daylights out of them? There might be
something about us that's horribly disturbing to them, like how we smell
or the fact that we have hair. They'd be unable to see us as anything
but hideous monsters and no matter how much smarts we show off, they'd
just be consumed with the thought that anything as repulsive as us must
die.
You know how we humans have religions that make us expect crazy things
to happen and react in bizarre ways? Now imagine aliens with some
unfathomable dogma which dictates that Earth is Hell and everybody
living on it is a demon. How do you P.R. your way out of that one?
We have to be lucky enough to have avoided all of those scenarios before we even have a chance of making a good first impression and having it do us any good. Now back to our first bad assumption: That the aliens, themselves, are advanced, or even sentient!
The first argument I usually find is "But they got here, so they obviously must be smart!"
Well, even an animal can float on water on a raft. Primitive tribe people rowed out to islands on boats. Maybe they got here by accident.
That's usually followed by "But they crossed interstellar space, so they must have invented faster-than-light travel!"
Please, if this was your first thought, sit down before you hurt yourself! Maybe the aliens have lifespans in the hundreds of millions of years, and so a trip of 17,000 years is just a relaxing nap to them. We humans have pathetically short lifespans, you know, even compared to many other species right here on Earth. It could turn out that we got stuck with the shortest lifespans of any sentient species in the universe, and so we are unable to conceptualize traveling to other stars without breaking the laws of physics in order to reach our destination before we die. Every other species can just launch a soapbox with a pile of TNT, pointed in the right direction, then patiently sit there waiting 17,000 years to reach their destination.
Or they could have a generation ship. Or they could just clone new bodies and use them for personal organ banks. Or maybe they've embraced technology to the point where they're cyborgs who effectively can just turn themselves off to save energy and have their extremely reliable electronics turn them on when they get here. Or maybe the big, shiny flying saucer is actually a scout ship built and launched from their space station out past Pluto.
See how humans have a hard time thinking outside of their tiny little frame of reference?
But beyond all of this, who says that we're talking to the smart alien race at all?
Maybe we're actually talking to a robot. If you went across space with
the responsibility of contacting aliens who, for all you know, might be
hostile, would you rather send a robot avatar to test the water first,
or just boldly charge out the hatch and risk becoming the first human
victim of the disintegration ray?
Maybe we're talking to an enslaved race, or the domestic pets of the
race which built the spaceships. Same reasoning as the robots, and who
says we're the first species the aliens have ever contacted? Maybe
they've been setting up franchises all over the galaxy since before the
tiny speck of dust we call home even formed?
Since when do the engineers who designed the ship also become the ones
assigned to drive it around? If an alien encounters your average human
driving a car, should they assume that said human understands the
intricacies of an internal combustion engine? You drive, but you have to
take your car to a mechanic to be repaired (excepting those of you who
are mechanics themselves), do you not?
Think military: What invading army puts its head general at the front
line? Maybe we're talking to the dumb grunts sent to scout us out for
invasion and report back.
We might be dealing with a hivemind. Like bees and ants, no individual
member of a hivemind will have any noticeable intelligence; it's only
together with its 100,000 sisters that it starts looking sentient.
One more thing: Who says that anything built their ship at all? Maybe
the ship itself is a life form, like a giant space turtle, or an
asteroid covered in coral that steers it around. Maybe what we think of
as the ship is actually the intelligent life form, and the beings we see
riding on it are just parasites. We could go on all day here. It is
impossible to think of every possibility - even our scientific
exploration on Earth has rebuked us again and again with the stunning
diversity of life and the unexpected ways it gets by!
I don't know what the rest of you have planned. Given all the unknowns, it may not matter at all what we do when that momentous first contact happens. The safest bet that I'm considering, should I be in the position of human race ambassador, is to turn the tables on them: make them prove their sentience to me first. I'll just start inspecting everything about them, and record and document everything I can. If they really are interested in meeting other smart species, they'll recognize this as a sign of my own sentience - maybe it will even be better to put them off-guard and feel a little intimidated, just in case they have hostile intentions.
But there is simply too much we humans assume about everything all the time to ever have the slightest idea what we should do when that moment comes.
Humans actually suck at trying to conceptualize in non-human ways. We have a hard enough time empathizing with our own next-door neighbor now.
Update: Over a year later, Why We'll Never Meet Aliens makes it to the front page of Slashdot. Note the backlash: I always see hate and ridicule from commenters when it's not starry-eyed utopia news. Apparently the Internet only reveres science if science is a big jolly guy handing out presents.
Speaking as a former Southern California mall rat, one of my favorite experiences from childhood was riding the "Adventure Through Inner Space" ride at Disneyland. They shut it down in the mid-80s to replace it with Star Tours - albeit, also a great attraction. But not the same. And it marked the point of cultural sea change in the United States between its peak and its decline. Here is the Yesterland page mourning its passing.
ATIS was a science fiction ride. In it, we use the excitement of cutting-edge (for the time) science to instill a sense of wonder, through the fantasy element of entering a magic microscope which makes you smaller. The cheery 1950s' song "Miracles From Molecules" greets you as you exit the ride - literally, the message is that the road to future Utopia was paved with scientific progress.
Star Tours is just about the Star Wars franchise and - there will be no way to avoid angering fans so I'll just say it - Star Wars is NOT science fiction. Star Wars is space opera, a Western cowboys-and-indians shoot-em-up set in space. Gone is the enthusiasm for science and the inspiration to look to a better tomorrow; instead the story, set "a long long time ago" is a Gothic post-modern fairy tale. What a poignant indicator to mark the shift in US culture! We gave up on getting into space ourselves - here, here's a fairy tale about how space politics would be just as messed up as US politics anyway. Enjoy your sour grapes.
ATIS sounds incredibly lame to modern kids, sounding more like a hyperthyroid science fair project than a ride, and that just goes to show how our modern culture has broken the present and new generations. To a six-year-old, years before the era of CGI effects, ATIS was scary. As you waited in line, they make it look like shrunken passengers were proceeding to the end of the microscope phasing into nothing. It was a stunningly realistic effect. The cars look like they go right up there. Near the end, a huge human eye peers down on you. The ride is mostly in darkness, with bright flashing lights all around you simulating thrilling interactions on the atomic level.
But all of this would be pretty pedestrian without the hypnotic voice of Paul Frees. As the narrating scientist, he commands your attention and shapes your thoughts with lines like "I am the first person to make this fabulous journey!" and "What compelling force draws me into this mysterious darkness--can this be the threshold of inner space?" and "No, I dare not go on. I must return to the realm of the molecule, before I go on shrinking...forever!" Frees could sit down to the breakfast table and describe his bowl of cereal and make it sound too epic for mere mortal minds to face.
Sadly, no actual video footage of this iconic and original ride exists, since it was shut down before the age of cheap video recorder cameras. But one fan, name of Steve Wesson, has devoted eight years to recreating it in 3D computer-modeling animation, and it is very close to my memories of the ride:
The architecture around the ride itself was a feast of googie nostalgia. Read that carefully, that's "googie" not "Google". "Googie" is the style of retro-futurist pop-art style, common around the general Disneyland area of Southern California. Check the definitive page on the Googie style here.
Can there be any more compelling argument that the United States gave up its dreams than that rides like ATIS and styles like googie now seem quaintly outdated? We used to look forward to the future - it was filled with exciting things and it made all the kids want to be scientists so we could get there as soon as possible and have out flying cars and robot maids. But our attitude towards the future changed from optimism to pessimism right about in the mid-80s. Cyberpunk came along, and with it came the cynical attitude that now said, "It wouldn't matter how much technology we invent; humans would be the same degenerate garbage anyway."
I cried when I saw that story. Those zombies are no joke to me. The zombies want us to be governed by books that are thousands of years old. The zombies hate science and learning and love backwardness and repression. The zombies can't deal with sex or education or a president of a different race. The zombies will be here soon to snatch this computer out of my hands and take away my car, forcing us all back to the iron age to trod barefoot through the mud building pyramids while zombies crack a whip over our backs. The zombies are in power. The zombies own America, and the few remaining humans are scrambling to throw off their oppression or escape to a free land.
The United States has become a nation of zombies, dead things shambling forth to steal away the space-age, atomic-powered future promised to me in my childhood by Paul Frees and his Adventure Through Inner Space.
