If the conspiracy theory content of this blog is getting you down — here’s a write up of a real science project to test a technique to divert an asteroid that might be on a collision course with Earth. All going well the Don Quijote mission will launch by 2015.
Steve Nerlich
Member of the Board
If you do not act, earth will be shrunk to 2 cm in a few years’ time with a probability of about ten percent as everyone knows.
The reason is that no scientist can disprove that black holes:
1) are never finished,
2) do not evaporate (Hawking is wrong),
3) are uncharged,
4) arise more readily than thought,
5) grow exponentially inside earth,
6) cannot be detected at CERN.
Every day the danger is mounting by 3 percent as you know. You must stop the LHC today, then try to find a scientist who can dismantle one of the six points. The planet will applaud if you find one.
Einstein is still not accepted in Germany – to judge from the fact that there are no academic curricula designed in his footsteps. A new finding implicit in his “happiest thought” as he always called it entails that a currently running German-led experiment will shrink the earth to 2 cm in a few years’ time with a sizable probability. The ostentatious “Albert-Einstein-Institut” refuses to discuss the matter since the German-led LHC experiment must go on at all costs.
The (currently) German-led UN Security Council does not respond to the kind request to endorse the scientific safety conference needed to defuse the bomb alarm. A world-wide press curfew is in charge. Is the world press also German-led?
If Einstein were still alive, he would no doubt cry alarm again. Please, dear Israel: give the warnings of an unworthy son the benefit of the doubt. I hope it is not too late.
Most of the threats to human survival come down to one factor – the vulnerability of the human biological body.
If a tiny faction of the sums being spent on researching or countering these threats was to be used to address the question of a non-biological alternative, a good team could research and develop a working prototype in a matter of years.
The fundamental question does not lie in the perhaps inappropriately named “Singularity”, (of the AI kind), but rather in by what means are neural impulses translated into sensory experience – sounds, colors, tastes, odours, tactile sensations.
By what means is the TRANSLATION effected?
It is well known that leading up to sensory experience – such as music – that it is not just a matter of neural impulses or even patterns of neural impulses, but patterns of patterns – derivatives of derivatives of derivatives – but yet beyond that, translation has to occur.
Many of the threats to human existence, including over-population and all that it brings – can be handled by addressing the basic problem, instead of addressing each threat separately.
There are as many ways to help another human being as there are people in need of help. For some, the urgent need is as basic as food and water. For others, it is an opportunity to develop a talent, realize an idea, and reach one’s full potential. Helping people get what they need most in life is at the heart of successful philanthropy.
However, you can’t simply give money away without thinking deeply about how and where the money will go and why you’re doing the giving. You need to approach philanthropy in a strategic and systematic way—just as an entrepreneur approaches a new venture. That’s the only way to make a self-sustaining difference in the world. That being said, here are five key ways to achieve sustainable success with your philanthropic efforts.
1. Open a Door
Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person’s life. A new skill, an introduction, an education—these gifts open doors that would otherwise remain closed. A promising beneficiary will walk through that door and create opportunities for others.
2. Define Your Passion
To have enduring impact, your philanthropic efforts should reflect the causes you are most passionate about. For me, one of those things is education: A good education is the most valuable thing you can give another person. My own philanthropic efforts have always included an educational element, whether it’s expanding opportunities to educate a promising mind or extending the brain’s ability to learn. If you follow your own passions, you’ll increase exponentially your chances of sustainable success.
3. Seek Out Inspiration
To truly change the world, you need to inspire—and be inspired by—others. I’ve found many people who share my interest in neuroscience—brilliant people like V.S. Ramachandran, and David Eagleman. They inspire me to learn more, do more, and raise my standards higher. That, in turn, inspires those I work with to raise their game. Having someone you can talk to and work with makes the job of changing the world less daunting, builds deep trust, and sparks vital creativity.
4. Measure Your Impact
You’re more likely to achieve success if you can define ahead of time what form that success will take and track progress toward your goal. Set milestones along the way so you can adjust your approach and add more resources, if necessary. Simple metrics can be a powerful tool to engage people’s competitive spirit and harness it for a good cause.
This approach is what the X Prize Foundation has done in the nonprofit science field, from genomics to space exploration—it defines the goal, sets the parameters, and measures the results. And at the end there is a payoff: a cash prize for the innovators and a new body of human knowledge for the rest of us who are the true winners.
5. Think Like an Entrepreneur
None of the previous points will create a sustainable philanthropic effort unless you are constantly looking for newer and better ways to make a meaningful difference. That means looking at the world and living life as a philanthropic entrepreneur.
For example, Kairos Society, (disclosure: my son, Ankur Jain, founded the organization and I’m a supporter), is based on the belief that the key to improving our world lies in giving the next generation of leaders different opportunities to develop globally impactful innovations. Kairos brings promising young people together with successful business and political leaders from around the world to create sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
Continuing to pass down enthusiasm for philanthropy provides chances and opportunities to the people who need it most. Growing up in India, I knew all I needed to change the world was one good opportunity, and I prepared myself for it. When that opportunity came—in the form of the chance to earn an engineering degree—I was ready. With sustainable philanthropy, we can make sure that these chances for success can be grasped by the next generation. This is philanthropy that is truly sustainable.
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Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, F.R.G.
Resumé
There are new developments in gravitation theory beginning in 2005. They have changed the previously accepted scientific picture of black holes. On the basis of these results, a currently running experiment, designed to produce artificial black holes of very low velocity, has ceased to be innocuous. The experimentally hoped-for “mini black holes,” (1) become more likely to arise, (2) do not evaporate, (3) are undetectable by the machine, (4) will in part get stuck inside earth and (5) will grow there exponentially so as to shrink the earth to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years’ time. Hence a re-appraisal of the experiment is necessary before it can be allowed to go on. Please, rule so, dear Council.
(July 30, 2011)
A previously overlooked new fact in gravitation theory is the reason for my turning to you. It looks simple enough: the rest mass-energy of a particle decreases with increasing gravity. To witness, on a neutron star on which gravity is so high that clocks tick almost twice as slow, every particle has only half the outside rest mass without this fact being locally detectable. This mass-change result, implicit in a dissertation of a co-worker submitted in 2005, represents the main content of a 2007 paper accepted for publication by the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals [1]. The same result was independently derived two years later by Richard J. Cook of the Air Force Academy [2]. It finally was obtained on the highest level of technical sophistication by a specialist who wants to remain anonymous while insisting that all credit go to the late Arthur Komar [3]. A maximally simple derivation finally is the “Telemach theorem” [4].
Many predictions pertinent to particle collisions are overthrown as a consequence of the mass-change result. Designing new tailor-made experiments will take several years. All of this is nothing but ordinary scientific progress, taking its due time to be tested and become mainstream wisdom.
By a twist of fate, the new result happens to possess more than just academic interest. A machine that was designed to produce miniature black holes — the Large Hadron Collider of CERN — suddenly becomes the most dangerous endeavor of humankind. As familiar from similar examples in the past, the scientific community is sluggish in recognizing the significance of the situation.
Science sometimes transcends its usual boundaries by spilling over into everyday life and politics. This happens to be the case here. An experiment thought to be purely academic (except for some theoretically unexplored features of quark-gluon plasmas drawn attention to by my colleague Walter Wagner) acquires a menacing character because the most hoped-for experimental outcome suddenly possesses radically new features: black holes.
“Black holes” were so named by John Wheeler in 1968 [5] who had inherited his impishness from his mentor, Einstein. Three years later, Johnny (as his friends sometimes called him) joked that “a black hole has no hair” (in apparent allusion to a Berlin pop song from the 1920s, “Say is it true that the frog at the butt has no hair?”) — “except for three.” The remaining three hairs were: mass, angular momentum and charge [6]. Only three years later, Stephen Hawking [7] described a fourth hair brought-in by quantum mechanics (Hawking evaporation). The latter property would – he argued – drain away mass-energy, slowly emaciating every black hole until it would eventually explode (“evaporate”) on having grown maximally small – as small as the tiny black holes hoped-for at CERN.
Now, almost 4 decades later, two of the remaining four hairs prove to be clipped (charge and evaporation). This fundamentally altered situation logically requires a re-evaluation of the safety equation of the LHC experiment, since the most looked-forward-to fruits of the experiment (mini black holes [8]) have become undetectable by detectors designed on the basis of the overhauled theory. This situation represents a drawback for a lovingly set-up world-class experiment which also is the most expensive of history. Some resistance shown by the scientific community is predictably preprogrammed.
This new situation would not represent a sufficient reason to bother the world’s Security Council – were it not for the fact that the experiment has become unsafe. The undetectable miniature black holes hoped to be generated at a rate of one per second [8] will now do new things which, unfortunately, are not innocuous.
To evaluate the totally changed situation, a “scientific safety conference” was proposed in 2008, with Prince Charles who is widely esteemed for his “green thumb” as the chair. The whole issue was approached in a hope-inspired light tone [9].
But the harsh logic of real-life constraints struck. Would a public safety assessment not cause unnecessary delays and, what is more, drain away valuable public confidence? One member state of CERN’s – Austria — even announced to leave CERN, to reluctantly return after closed-door admonitions.
It goes without saying that the most awesome experiment of history — with its thousands of physicists, the cream of creams, and with all influential governments of the globe participating either as members or as accredited observers who have to contribute too — cannot easily change course. Should it really do so only because a new chapter of future textbook results has been opened up?
Any safety assessment is a double-edged endeavor. What it achieves in terms of added rationality, it jeopardizes in terms of lost planning security. So it is no wonder that there has been little enthusiasm to comply with such a request. Pascal’s logic – a very big risk deserves absolute priority – is predictably hard to enforce in the reality of a tight-budget multinational endeavor.
Does this mean that everything is in perfect order? From the point of view of bureaucracy, the answer is yes, from the point of view of safety, the answer is no. For the risk that our earth will be eaten inside out by the first sufficiently slow artificial mini black hole (anticipated to be produced in a matter of ten days [8]) can be estimated to be roughly 1:6 — a “Russian roulette” — with the added feature of the remaining time for the planet being of the order of 5 years [10]. The low estimate for the remaining time stems from the fact that an independent physical theory – chaos theory – conspires predicting that every resident miniature black hole will be turned into an exponentially growing “miniquasar” [10]. Thirdly, the final safety argument offered by CERN to the world before the new results were brought to its knowledge in early 2008 – the continued existence of neutron stars in the sky – was evaporated by another independent physical theory, quantum mechanics [11]. Thus, three totally disjoint sciences (relativity, chaos and quantum) conspire by each refusing to give the all-clear signal to be expected from at least one of them on the basis of common sense: A “trap” put to humankind by nature as it were.
After the experiment inadvertently got shrunk in half energy-wise, following an early technical accident in September 2008, the probability of earth’s being transformed into a 2-cm mini-quasar got cut in half too – from 16 to 8 percent. This still dreadful level will be reached once the experiment has attained its maximum luminosity or cumulative number of collisions.
Currently, CERN has reached one ninth of the originally planned luminosity while scheduling to reach one third by the end of the next three months [12]. If the already incurred risk thus is 0.8 percent (8÷9 = 0.8), this means that more than a quarter of the danger of 8 percent to be reckoned with will be realized by the end of October 2011. It goes without saying that every single day that the experiment is halted earlier for re-evaluation purposes is worthwhile. The single eventually lethal collision event could happen on the last day before the conference starts.
Nothing more is being asked than to have a second look. A court in Germany — the “Cologne Administrative Court” – before whom CERN was standing as a defendant on January 27, 2011 – concluded its ruling after stating that it could not override an earlier ruling by the German supreme court, on the following sentence which for some reason went unreported in the media:
THE COURT EXPRESSES THAT IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE TO LET THE VARIOUS SAFETY ASPECTS, WHICH ALSO WERE THE SUBJECT OF THE TWO SAFETY REPORTS FROM THE YEARS 2003 AND 2008, BE DISCUSSED WITHIN THE SCOPE OF A “SAFETY CONFERENCE” [13].
I am aware that I have no right to contact you owing to my being an ordinary person only. But I stand here representing the whole scientific community and every citizen and country of the planet when I say: Please, dear Highest Delegates of Planet Earth, do endorse the request made by the Cologne Administrative Court by declaring: LET US HAVE A SECOND LOOK IMMEDIATELY.
For J.O.R.
References
[1] O.E. Rossler, “Abraham-like return to constant c in general relativity: ‘gothic-R-theorem’ demonstrated in Schwarzschild metric,” 2007, http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/ottoroesslerminiblackhole.pdf (second paper there). Revised version: http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/Chaos.pdf
[2] R.J. Cook, “Gravitational space dilation”, 2009, http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.2811
[3] A. Komar, “Covariant conservation laws in general relativity.” Phys. Rev. 113, 934-936 (1959), http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/23/24/L01/pdf/cqg6_24_l01.pdf
[4] O.E. Rossler, “Einstein’s equivalence principle has three further implications besides affecting time: T-L-M-Ch Theorem,” 2011,
http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/einsteins-equivalence-principle-has-three-further-implications-besides-affecting-time_t-l-m-.pdf
[5] J.A. Wheeler , “Our universe, the known and the unknowns.” The American Scholar 37, No.2, 248 (1968).
[6] J.A. Wheeler 1971, quoted in: K.S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, New York: W.W. Norton 1994, p. 275.
[7] S.W. Hawking, “Black hole explosions.” Nature 245, 30–31 (1974).
[8] B. Giddings and S. Thomas, “High energy colliders as black hole factories: The end of short distance physics.” Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 65. 10.1103/PhysRevD.65.056010 (2002).
[9] O.E. Rossler, “A petition to CERN,” April 2008,
http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/PetitiontoCERN.pdf
[10] O.E. Rossler, “Abraham solution to Schwarzschild metric implies that CERN miniblack holes pose a planetary risk.” In: Vernetzte Wissenschaften – Crosslinks in Natural and DSocial Sciences (P.J. Plath and E.C. Haas, eds.), Berlin: Logos Verlag 2009 (July), pp. 263-270 (submitted September 2007), http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/ottoroesslerminiblackhole.pdf (first paper there).
[11] O.E. Rossler, “A rational and moral and spiritual dilemma.” In: Personal and Spiritual Development in the World of Cultural Diversity (G.E. Lasker and K. Hiwaki, eds.), Vol. 5, Tecumseh: The International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics 2008 (July), pp. 61–66,
http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/spiritualottoeroessler.pdf
[12] A. Rydd and M. Ferro-Luzzi, “Experiment’s desiderata,” slide No. 8, http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=1&sessionId=0&resId=0&materialId=slides&confId=144632
[13] Original German ending of the Cologne Administrative Court’s ruling: “Das Gericht gibt seiner Meinung Ausdruck, dass es möglich sein sollte, die unterschiedlichen Sicherheitsaspekte, die auch Gegenstand der beiden Sicherheitsberichte aus den Jahren 2003 und 2008 waren, im Rahmen einer ‘Sicherheitskonferenz‘ diskutieren zu lassen“,
http://www.juris.de/jportal/portal/page/homerl.psml?cmsuri=/juris/de/nachrichten/zeigenachricht.jsp&feed=juna&wt_mc=rss.juna&nid=jnachr-JUNA110100233
Concerns arose recently about the concept of so-called “catchment areas”, evolutionary developments that result in a very tight interdependence between requirements for survival and behavioral drives. In particular, the concern has been raised that such catchment might render any significant modification of the human mind, such as through brain enhancement, impossible (Suzanne Gildert, “Pavlov’s AI: What do superintelligences REALLY want?”, Humanity+@Caltech, 2010).
The concept of a catchment area assumes that beneath the veneer of goal-oriented rational planning, learned behavior and skill lies a basic set of drives and reward mechanisms. The only purpose of those drives and reward mechanisms is genetic survival, a necessary result of eons of natural selection. It follows that all of our perceived goals, our desires and interests, the pursuit of wealth, social acceptance or fame, love, scientific understanding, all of it is merely a means to an end. All of it points back to the set of drives and reward mechanisms that best enable us as individuals, us as a tribe and us as a species to survive in our given environment.
Why does that describe a catchment area, a type of prison of behavior? It is assumed that the distribution of behaviors that have enabled long-term survival is a narrow one with little real variance. Stray too far from the norm and your behaviors become counter-productive to survival. Worst of all, if you recognize your enslavement to those single-purpose drives and reward mechanisms, if you realize that they have no meaning beyond a survival that itself links to no universal purpose, then you risk embarking upon a nihilistic course that would likely end in your extermination or self-termination.
How risky is modifying reward mechanisms?
If the catchment problem is real, and if it indeed implies that we live in a precarious balance of behavioral drives that keep us alive, then any modification brings with it the risk that we tip the balance. One significant change, or a series of changes could push us into a condition where our mental reward system is no longer aligned with requirements for survival. One form of this problem has been popularized as “wire-heading” (Larry Niven, Known Space & Ringworld novels, 1970–1996), where an individual exists in a short-circuited reward-loop, living only to repeatedly and directly deliver reward stimulus to herself.
There are of course numerous possible critiques of the catchment hypothesis, which bears a heavy burden of proof. There is plenty of evidence that evolution is not an actual optimizer. If the process of natural selection is not an optimizer, then why should we assume that we exist in a delicately optimized state? We may also consider changes in our mental experience in the recent past. For example, humans generally live longer now than they did previously, so that the extended experience itself is a novel condition for human mental function, and brings with it different survival challenges to which behavior needs to be adapted. And, while we share many behavioral traits as a species, there are clearly differences in behavior between individuals, most of whom appear to function and survive. In fact, some behaviors do not seem at all optimal for survival, such as extreme sports. Those critiques do not mean that the notion of catchment areas is wrong, but they demonstrate that we must take care before drawing extreme conclusions in the matter.
If we represent behavioral traits as variables in a multi-dimensional landscape, and the survival suitability of combinations of traits as elevation in that landscape, does the landscape look like a Himalayan mountain ridge with sharp peaks, steep cliffs and deep valleys? Or does it look more like a rolling vista of hills, or perhaps even a concatenation of several contiguous high-altitude plateaus? If we do not know what this landscape looks like, then it is extremely difficult to make informed statements about the results that we should expect when reward mechanisms and consequent behaviors are modified.
Can we modify while specifying conditions for survival?
Is there anything about past developments that we might use as a guide, to tell us if modifications of reward mechanisms and behaviors are survivable, and how that might work? I believe there is. I think the process is unavoidable, as it is a result of selection among differences. Darwin got us here, and he can get us out too.
Let us assume that modifying our reward mechanisms can result in personal destruction. That is not a fanciful assumption. We need only look at the worst-case scenarios in cases of addiction to see relevant examples. Similarly, we may observe that suicide is such a case, unless it is a sacrifice that serves the greater purpose of tribe or species survival.
Do all modifications lead to destruction? That seems highly unlikely, given that humans have not existed forever. There have been ancestors who probably had different brains and at least somewhat different drives and reward mechanisms. The further back you look, the more different and strange those drives and mechanisms may seem, since the species involved will have had somewhat different challenges and requirements for survival.
If there was a way that led from there to what we are now through natural selection, then why should we assume that this is the terminal state? It seems reasonable to assume that if we carried out a large number of experiments in which we modified our brains and their underlying drives and reward mechanisms to some degree, some of those experiments would not result in catastrophe. There would still be a selection process. The question is not whether there exist ways to achieve brain enhancement. Rather, we should seek out the best process. We should determine how to carry out intelligent experimentation that minimizes that rate of failure and maximizes the rate of success.
Image attribution
Wirehead Darwin: modified from George Grantham Bain press photo collection, purchased by the library of Congress. No restrictions.
Survival landscape: modified Height map (Wikipedia), unknown author. Public domain.
… but am I allowed to offer to the highest board of the planet to answer to its questions?
… if he singlehandedly breaks the world-wide press curfew surrounding the fact that CERN continues with a potentially earth-jeopardizing experiment despite the official request by a court last January to first allow for a scientific safety conference.
The story of “Our Last Hour” (Sir Martin Rees) has a latest twist. Since CERN cannot muster a single scientific argument or a single renowned scientist to defend its use of force against scientific evidence, it recruited a gang of anonymous science kids to defend its cause by pretending to ask a scientific question which, if taken seriously, would have destroyed the scientific reputation of their only planet-widely visible adversary.
The Telemach theorem, which pits Einstein against CERN, was to be discredited, not by scientific argument but by luring its proponent into taking a pseudoscientific question disguised as a genuine concern seriously: If the size ratio between two fingers says something about the ratio between two little guys, what is the ratio between one finger and one guy?
The media cannot understand, of course, but every citizen on the planet will. Science has lost its credit by visibly misleading the planet – unless CERN apologizes immediately for its onslaught on everyone’s life. The two fingers become a world-wide symbol.