Interesting astrophysics development in our solar system with astrobiological implications: the rings and inner moons of Saturn, everything closer than Titan, may be young, forming between 100 million and 1 billion years ago rather than at the dawn of the solar system.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07071

Recent measurements of Saturn's moon system suggest that it evolves due to tides quicker than was previously believed, with moons moving ourwards more rapidly due to bigger tidal bulges on Saturn transferring more energy. This would explain the large quantity of heat pouring out of Enceladus and powering its geysers and oceans. Tidal forces go down with the cube of distance so closer moons should move out much faster than further moons. Using new figures one can trace back the orbits of the inner moons and see that they should have hit various orbital resonances during the history of the solar system as the ratios of orbital periods changed, which would have left imprints in the system in the form of effects on the rings and changes to the orbits of the moons that we see no evidence of. Conclusion is the system is younger than the age at which backtracking would produce those events, with age limits based on estimated tidal evolution rates. The authors favor tidal evolution estimates that place the age closer to 100 million years than to a billion years, and think a previous inner moon system went unstable and ground itself to rubble in a series of catastrophic impacts before reforming into a new set of moons and rings.

If true this makes Enceladus (one of these inner moons) even more interesting from an astrobiological perspective. Not only is it geologically active with chemical energy sources and an ocean spewing its guts into space where it is easily sampled, but it could be a look at a place that is very young compared to other such places in the solar system.

Interesting molecular biology/neuroscience development: magnetically sensitive ion channels.

Some researchers through a series of trial and error screens managed to tether a tension sensitive ion chanel to an iron storage protein such that in the presence of strong magnetic fields (think rare earth magnets) the channels are pulled open and able to induce action potentials in electrically active cells.

Upon expression in sensory nerves on zebrafish, the fish reacted to swimming into magnetic fields as if they were being poked. Upon expression in deep brain structures in mice associated with reward pathways, the mice would spend lots of time near strong magnets as they felt good there.

The main anticipated application is neuroscience research. Optogenetics is a very useful tool, expressing light sensitive in channels in particular cell populations and activating them via fiber optics with light, but it sucks for manipulating deep brain structures. This can penetrate deeply, and is orthagonal to optical signals and readouts.

Paper extracted and put up by Peter Watts here: http://rifters.com/real/articles/Genetically-targeted-magnetic-control-of-the-nervous-system.pdf

Given that physics is the same across space, the math/physics/tech of different civs will end up being the same, more or less. I wouldn't call that coordination.

To extend your analogy, plants don't grow in the center of the earth - and this has nothing to do with coordination. Likewise, no human tribes colonized the ocean depths, and this has nothing to do with coordination.

If planets like Earth were very rare in ways that didn't change much with time you'd still see a time that was typical

The time measurement is not the only rank measurement we have. We also can compare the sun vs other stars, and it is mediocre across measurements.

Rarity requires an (intrinsically unlikely, ala solomonoff) mechanism - something unusual that happened at some point in the developmental process, and most such mechanisms would entangle with multiple measurements.

At this point in time we can pretty much rule out all mechanisms operating at the stellar scale, it would have to be something far more local.

Tectonics as rare has been disproven recently. Europa was recently shown to have active tectonics, possibly pluto, and probably mars at least at some point.

For later evolutionary development stuff, it will be awhile before we have any data for rank measurements. But given how every other measurement so far has come up as mediocre . . ..

We can learn alot actually from exploring europa, mars, and other spots that could/should have some evidence for at least simple life. That can help fit at least a simple low complexity model for typical planetary development.

Probably everybody had seen it, but EY wrote long post on FB about AlphaGO which get 400 reposts. The post overestimates power of AlphaGO, and in general it seems to me that EY did too much conclusions based on very small available information (3:0 wins at the moment of the post - 10 pages of conclusions). The post's comment section includes contribution from Robin Hanson about usual foom's speed and type topic. EY later updated his predictions based on Segol win on game 4 and stated that even superhuman AI could make dumb mistakes, which may result in new type of AI failures.

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154018209759228?pnref=story

The high value matter/energy or real estate is probably a tiny portion of the total, and is probably far from stars, as stellar environments are too noisy/hot for advanced computation.

Can you expand on this?

See this post.

Extrapolating from current physics to ultimate computational intelligences, the most important constraint is temperature/noise, not energy. A hypothetical optimal SI would consume almost no energy, and it's computational capability would be inversely proportional to it's temperature. So at the limits you have something very small, dense, cold, and dark, approaching a black hole.

Passive shielding appears to be feasible, but said feasibility decreases non-linearly with proximity to stars.

So think of the computational potential of space-time as a function of position in the galaxy. The computational potential varies inversely with temperature. The potential near a star is abysmal. The most valuable real estate is far out in the interstellar medium, potentially on rogue planets or even smaller cold bodies, where passive shielding can help reduce temperatures down to very low levels.

So to an advanced civ, the matter in our solar system is perhaps worthless - the energy cost of pulling the matter far enough away from the star and cooling it is greater than it's computational value.

All computation requires matter/energy.

Computation requires matter to store/represent information, but doesn't require consumption of that matter. Likewise computation also requires energy, but does not require consumption of that energy.

At the limits you have a hypothetical perfect reversible quantum computer, which never erases any bits. Instead, unwanted bits are recycled internally and used for RNG. This requires a perfect balance of erasure with random bit consumption, but that seems possible in theory for general approximate inference algorithms of the types SI is likely to be based on.

that the stars were huge piles of valuable materials that had inconveniently caught fire and needed to be put out.

This is probably incorrect. From the perspective of advanced civs, the stars are huge piles of worthless trash. They are the history of life rather than it's future, the oceans from which advanced post-bio civs emerge.

Sun luminosity is increasing and oceans will boil down in 1 billion years or sooner.

I take this as another sign favoring transcension over expansion, and also weird-universes.

The standard dev model is expansion - habitable planets lead to life leads to intelligence leads to tech civs which then expand outward.

If the standard model was correct, barring any wierd late filter, then the first civ to form in each galaxy would colonize the rest and thus preclude other civs from forming.

Given that the strong mediocrity principle holds - habitable planets are the norm, life is probably the norm, enormous expected number of bio worlds, etc, if the standard model is correct than most observers will find themselves on an unusually early planet - because the elder civs prevent late civs from forming.

But that isn't the case, so that model is wrong. In general it looks like a filter is hard to support, given how strongly all the evidence has lined up for mediocrity, and the inherent complexity penalty.

Transcension remains as a viable alternative. Instead of expanding outward, each civ progresses to a tech singularity and implodes inward, perhaps by creating new baby universes, and perhaps using that to alter the distribution over the multiverse, and thus gaining the ability to effectively alter physics (as current models of baby universe creation suggest the parent universe has some programming level control over the physics of the seed). This would allow exponential growth to continue, which is enormously better than expansion which only provides polynomial growth. So everyone does this if it's possible. Furthermore, if it's possible anywhere in the multiverse, then those pockets expand faster, and thus they was and will dominate everywhere. So if that's true the multiverse has/will be edited/restructured/shaped by (tiny, compressed, cold, invisible) gods.

Barring transcension wierdness, another possibility is that the multiverse is somehow anthropic tuned for about 1 civ per galaxy, and galaxy size is cotuned for this, as it provides a nice sized niche for evolution, similar to the effect of continents/island distributions on the earth scale. Of course, this still requires a filter, which has a high complexity penalty.

I take it as strong evidence for Rare earth.

It's the exact opposite.

If the earth was rare, this rarity would show up in the earth's rank along many measurement dimensions. Rarity requires selection pressure - a filter - which alters the distribution. We don't see that at all. Instead we see no filtering, no unusual rank in the dimensions we can measure. The exact opposite is far more likely true - the earth is common.

For instance, say that the earth was rare in orbiting a rare type of star. Then we would see that the sun would have unusual rank along many dimensions. Instead it is normal/typical - in brightness, age, type, planets, etc.

How about Risk?