IdeaFestival

Gott Mars? The human imperative to explore

How important is the human exploration of space? One argument take you're unlikely to hear in most debates over the wisdom of going to the stars involves a calculation by Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Louisville native, Princeton Astrophysicist and speaker at the IdeaFestival this September.

In 1993 he used the Copernican Principle to assess the odds for human survival and came up with the near certainty, statistically speaking, that humanity would go on for at least another 5,100 years.

The Copernican principle makes reasonable guesses about the future using one known fact and the assumption that there is nothing special about this moment in time. In 1969, Gott used the principle to accurately predict, for example, how long the Berlin Wall would stand.

John Tierney's New York Times article, "A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization" elaborates:

Suppose you want to forecast the political longevity of the leader of a foreign country, and you know nothing about her country except that she has just finished her 39th week in power. What are the odds that she’ll leave office in her 40th week? According to the Copernican Principle, there’s nothing special about this week, so there’s only a 1-in-40 chance, or 2.5 percent, that she’s now in the final week of her tenure.

It’s equally unlikely that she’s still at the very beginning of her tenure. If she were just completing the first 2.5 percent of her time in power, that would mean her remaining time would be 39 times as long as the period she’s already served — 1,521 more weeks (a little more than 29 years).

So you can now confidently forecast that she will stay in power at least one more week but not as long as 1,521 weeks. The odds of your being wrong are 2.5 percent on the short end and 2.5 percent on the long end — a total of just 5 percent, which means that your forecast has an expected accuracy of 95 percent, the scientific standard for statistical significance.

The "Space Colonization Imperative" suggests that humans should have a space colony up and running on Mars in the next 45 years, since, applying the Copernican principle, the space program is half way through its expected life span. If we don't have a permanent base on Mars by then, it might be too late.

His column also drew a response from one of my favorite writers on big space themes, Paul Gilster. His "Odds on a Human Future" post also describes Dr. Gott's thinking on the matter.

Wayne

Science of magic: "Theatrical linking of cause and effect"

Teller is an authority on the history of magic, but in a session I am really looking forward to he will take the stage at IF in September to discuss the science behind it. As science writer George Johnson wrote in "Sleights of Mind" last year, now that we've heard from the scientists and philosophers - the experts, if you will - about what and how the mind knows, about what lies at the limits of cognition, "it's time to hear from the pros."

Attend this session and you will. Johnson described Teller offering instruction in the science of magic at a meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness last August:

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

'In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,' he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. 'If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.'

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentleman’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: 'The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.'

As a lover of words, I also appreciate the alternative spelling of "conjurer" used at the beginning of this quote. "Con-juror?" Sounds about right.

Wayne

Mars' soil compatible for life, but can it grow asparagus?

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has performed its first wet chemistry experiment on the collected Martian soil, returning data showing that it contains many nutrients and would be compatible for life. According to MSNBC, it might just be suitable for... asparagus?

Wayne

Dr. Lee Dugatkin: Octopuses and the biology of perspective

In the animal kingdom, how pervasive is the ability to problem solve simply by observing and modeling the same skill in others?

Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, who is researching this issue at the University of Louisville, was kind enough to describe his work to me at a recent conference for entrepreneurs sponsored by the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation. As he explains, if you want to tackle the biology of perspective taking, one good place to start is by studying the octopus, whose brain is physiologically much simpler than ours.

Featured in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times and Discover Magazine, and having spoken at the London School of Economics, Cambridge and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, among other prestigious venues, he will be at the IdeaFestival September 27th talking about "Who Helps Who, and Why?," a session on the biology of goodness that you don't want to miss!

On sale now through July 14, discounted all-access passes are available to hear Dr. Dugatkin and some of the most provocative speakers anywhere discuss their cutting edge ideas. Beginning July 15th, full price all-access passes and individual passes to free and paid events will be available.

Wayne

Extinct date palm seed meets Jurassic Park, sprouts

Talk about a food with some history behind it. According to Long Now, which credits this story in the blog Genetic Archeology, one of many date seeds verified to be roughly 2,000 years old and excavated from the fortress Masada has germinated. Could the long extinct Judean Date Palm be resurrected? If so, fruit might be sampled as early as 2010.

Wayne

IF podcast: what about peace?

The very latest podcast from the IdeaFestival, this one featuring NY Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof, Global Voices blogger Amira Al Hussaini and former U.S. diplomat to Iran John Stempel, has been released. Give it a listen.

To save the round trip, you may subscribe to all IF podcasts via iTunes or by using this RSS feed.

Wayne

Flying to Alpha Centauri

Some big ideas sometimes come with pretty long timeline. In a post "Alpha Centauri and the Long Haul," Paul Gilster puts star travel in interesting context, pointing out that buildings like the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople the Pantheon in Rome have been around for at least 1,400 years, about what time it would take to get to Alpha Centauri using improved existing technology. Interesting thought, that.

The star - actually a triple system - was captured recently by Cassini off the bow of Saturn's rings. Click image for a much better view of two of the three stars. 

Wayne

Life a property of information?

In his book Pulse, Robert Frenay says that life, among other things, is characterized by the use of energy and information to reproduce, adapt and advance. And I've always liked David Chalmers' suggestion that while "physics is information from the outside," consciousness is "information from the inside."

I thought of those when going through my feeds late last week. Philosopher of information Luciano Floridi takes those big ideas and extends them, suggesting that we're in a fourth information revolution, that rather than a biosphere, we live in an "infosphere."

According to Wikipedia, an infosphere 

is an environment comparable to, but different from cyberspace (which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were), since it also includes off-line and analogue spaces of information. According to [Luciano] Floridi, it is possible to equate the Infosphere to the totality of Being. This equation leads him to an informational ontology.

I'm frankly not close to understanding why this might be so, but the idea couldn't be any bigger. Life becomes a property of information on Floridi's account, not the other way around.

Wayne

Water Ice Found on Mars

Wired: Digging into the Martian arctic, the Phoenix Mars Lander has found water ice on Mars.

Wayne

In art, possible worlds

SEED editor Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, is an editor and publishes regularly in SEED. His piece, "is the future of science, art?" suggests that in some sense art precedes science because every reality found in the world of law must first emerge from the world of possibility, whether that possibility is suggested in paint, dance, theater, song or experience.

And unlike the use of the natural and symbolic languages, which are tools to exposit and hold reality at a manageable distance, experience and, with some additional effort, introspection, confront all of what's real, all at once. Art holds out possible worlds and realities from which to choose - and, I might add, toward which to walk. Imagine that.

Kris, Proust Was a Neuroscientist is on order.

Wayne