After many tribulations, my astrobiology bloggery is back up and running using Wordpress rather than Blogger because Blogger is completely unusable these days.  I've taken the opportunity of the move to make better graphs for my old posts. 

"The Solar System: Why Earth?"

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-solar-system-why-earth/

Here, I try to look at our own solar system and what the presence of only ONE known biosphere, here on Earth, tells us about life and perhaps more importantly what it does not.  In particular, I explore what aspects of Earth make it special and I make the distinction between a big biosphere here on Earth that has utterly rebuilt the geochemistry and a smaller biosphere living off smaller amounts of energy that we probably would never notice elsewhere in our own solar system given the evidence at hand. 

Commentary appreciated.

Previous works:

Space and Time, Part I

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-i

Space and Time, Part II

https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-ii

This is great, by using small interlocking magnetic fields, you can keep the water in a higher vibrational state, allowing a "super-cooling" without getting crystallization and cell rupture

Subzero 12-hour Nonfreezing Cryopreservation of Porcine Heart in a Variable Magnetic Field

"invented a special refrigerator, termed as the Cells Alive System (CAS; ABI Co. Ltd., Chiba, Japan). Through the application of a combination of multiple weak energy sources, this refrigerator generates a special variable magnetic field that causes water molecules to oscillate, thus inhibiting crystallization during ice formation18 (Figure 1). Because the entire material is frozen without the movement of water molecules, cells can be maintained intact and free of membranous damage. This refrigerator has the ability to achieve a nonfreezing state even below the solidifying point."

http://mobile.journals.lww.com/transplantationdirect/_layouts/15/oaks.journals.mobile/articleviewer.aspx?year=2015&issue=10000&article=00005#ath

Apple's iPhone 7 Plus decided to add another lense to be able to make better pictures. Meanwhile Walabot who started with wanting to build a breast cancer detection technology released a 600$ device that can look 10cm into walls. Thermal imaging also got cheaper. 

I think it would be possible to build a 1500$ device that could combine those technologies and also add a laser that can shift color. A device like this could bring medicine forward a lot. 
A lot of area's besides medicine could likely also profit from a relatively cheap 3D scanner that can look inside objects. 

Developing it would require Musk-level capital investments but I think it would advance medicine a lot if a company would both provide the hardware and develop software to make the best job possible at body scanning. 

There are many natural global risks. The greatest of these known risks are asteroid impacts and supervolcanos. 

Supervolcanos seem to pose the highest risk, as we sit on the ocean of molten iron, oversaturated with dissolved gases, just 3000 km below surface and its energy slowly moving up via hot spots. Many past extinctions are also connected with large eruptions from supervolcanos. 

Impacts also pose a significant risk. But, if we project the past rate of large extinctions due to impacts into the future, we will see that they occur only once in several million years. Thus, the likelihood of an asteroid impact in the next century is an order of magnitude of 1 in 100 000. That is negligibly small compared with the risks of AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.

The main natural risk is a meta-risk. Are we able to correctly estimate natural risks rates and project them into the future? And also, could we accidentally unleash natural catastrophe which is long overdue?

There are several reasons for possible underestimation, which are listed in the right column of the map. 

1. Anthropic shadow that is survival bias. This is a well-established idea by Bostrom, but the following four ideas are mostly my conclusions from it.

2. It is also the fact that we should find ourselves at the end of period of stability for any important aspect of our environment (atmosphere, sun stability, crust stability, vacuum stability). It is true if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true and our conditions are very unique in the universe.

3. From (2) is following that our environment may be very fragile for human interventions (think about global warming). Its fragility is like fragility of an overblown balloon poked by small needle.

4. Also, human intelligence was best adaptation instrument during the period of intense climate changes, which quickly evolved in an always changing environment. So, it should not be surprising that we find ourselves in a period of instability (think of Toba eruption, Clovis comet, Young drias, Ice ages) and in an unstable environment, as it help general intelligence to evolve.

5. Period of changes are themselves marks of the end of stability periods for many process and are precursors for larger catastrophes. (For example, intermittent ice ages may precede Snow ball Earth, or smaller impacts with comets debris may precede an impact with larger remnants of the main body). 

Each of these five points may raise the probability of natural risks by order of magnitude in my opinion, which combined will result in several orders of magnitude, which seems to be too high and probably is "catastrophism bias".

(More about it is in my article “Why anthropic principle stopped to defend us”  which needs substantial revision) 

In conclusion, I think that when studying natural risks, a key aspect we should be checking is the hypothesis that we live in non-typical period in a very fragile environment.

For example, some scientists think that 30 000 years ago, a large Centaris comet broke into the inner Solar system, split into pieces (including Encke comet and Taurid meteor showers as well as Tunguska body) and we live in the period of bombardment which has 100 times more intensity than average. Others believe that methane hydrates are very fragile and small human warming could result in dangerous positive feed back.  

I tried to list all known natural risks (I am interested in new suggestions). I divided them into two classes: proven and speculative. Most speculative risks are probably false.

Most probable risks in the map are marked red. My crazy ideas are marked green. Some ideas come from obscure Russian literature. For example, an idea, that hydro carbonates could be created naturally inside Earth (like abiogenic oil) and large pockets of them could accumulate in the mantle. Some of them could be natural explosives, like toluene, and they could be cause of kimberlitic explosions. http://www.geokniga.org/books/6908 While the fact of kimberlitic explosion is well known and their energy is like impact of kilometer sized asteroids, I never read about contemporary risks of such explosions.

The pdf of the map is here: http://immortality-roadmap.com/naturalrisks11.pdf

0: Recoverable Catastrophe

An apocalypse is an event that permanently damages the world. This scale is for scenarios that are much worse than any normal disaster. Even if 100 million people die in a war, the rest of the world can eventually rebuild and keep going.

1: Economic Apocalypse

The human carrying capacity of the planet depends on the world's systems of industry, shipping, agriculture, and organizations. If the planet's economic and infrastructural systems were destroyed, then we would have to rely on more local farming, and we could not support as high a population or standard of living. In addition, rebuilding the world economy could be very difficult if the Earth's mineral and fossil fuel resources are already depleted.

2: Communications Apocalypse

If large regions of the Earth become depopulated, or if sufficiently many humans die in the catastrophe, it's possible that regions and continents could be isolated from one another. In this scenario, globalization is reversed by obstacles to long-distance communication and travel. Telecommunications, the internet, and air travel are no longer common. Humans are reduced to multiple, isolated communities.

3: Knowledge Apocalypse

If the loss of human population and institutions is so extreme that a large portion of human cultural or technological knowledge is lost, it could reverse one of the most reliable trends in modern history. Some innovations and scientific models can take millennia to develop from scratch.

4: Human Apocalypse

Even if the human population were to be violently reduced by 90%, it's easy to imagine the survivors slowly resettling the planet, given the resources and opportunity. But a sufficiently extreme transformation of the Earth could drive the human species completely extinct. To many people, this is the worst possible outcome, and any further developments are irrelevant next to the end of human history.

 

5: Biosphere Apocalypse

In some scenarios (such as the physical destruction of the Earth), one can imagine the extinction not just of humans, but of all known life. Only astrophysical and geological phenomena would be left in this region of the universe. In this timeline we are unlikely to be succeeded by any familiar life forms.

6: Galactic Apocalypse

A rare few scenarios have the potential to wipe out not just Earth, but also all nearby space. This usually comes up in discussions of hostile artificial superintelligence, or very destructive chain reactions of exotic matter. However, the nature of cosmic inflation and extraterrestrial intelligence is still unknown, so it's possible that some phenomenon will ultimately interfere with the destruction.

7: Universal Apocalypse

This form of destruction is thankfully exotic. People discuss the loss of all of existence as an effect of topics like false vacuum bubbles, simulationist termination, solipsistic or anthropic observer effects, Boltzmann brain fluctuations, time travel, or religious eschatology.

The goal of this scale is to give a little more resolution to a speculative, unfamiliar space, in the same sense that the Kardashev Scale provides a little terminology to talk about the distant topic of interstellar civilizations. It can be important in x risk conversations to distinguish between disasters and truly worst-case scenarios. Even if some of these scenarios are unlikely or impossible, they are nevertheless discussed, and terminology can be useful to facilitate conversation.

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/the-call-of-the-void

L'appel du vide - The call of the void.

When you are standing on the balcony of a tall building, looking down at the ground and on some track your brain says "what would it feel like to jump".  When you are holding a kitchen knife thinking, "I wonder if this is sharp enough to cut myself with".  When you are waiting for a train and your brain asks, "what would it be like to step in front of that train?".  Maybe it's happened with rope around your neck, or power tools, or what if I take all the pills in the bottle.  Or touch these wires together, or crash the plane, crash the car, just veer off.  Lean over the cliff...  Try to anger the snake, stick my fingers in the moving fan...  Or the acid.  Or the fire.

There's a strange phenomenon where our brains seem to do this, "I wonder what the consequences of this dangerous thing are".  And we don't know why it happens.  There has only been one paper (sorry it's behind a paywall) on the concept.  Where all they really did is identify it.  I quite like the paper for quoting both (“You know that feeling you get when you're standing in a high place… sudden urge to jump?… I don't have it” (Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, 2011). And (a drive to return to an inanimate state of existence; Freud, 1922).

Taking a look at their method; they surveyed 431 undergraduates for their experiences of what they coined HPP (High Place Phenomenon).  They found that 30% of their constituents have experienced HPP, and tried to measure if it was related to anxiety or suicide.  They also proposed a theory. 

...we propose that at its core, the experience of the high place phenomenon stems from the misinterpretation of a safety or survival signal. (e.g., “back up, you might fall”)

I want to believe it, but today there are Literally no other papers on the topic.  And no evidence either way.  So all I can say is - We don't really know.  s'weird.  Dunno.

This week I met someone who uncomfortably described their experience of toying with L'appel du vide.  I explained to them how this is a common and confusing phenomenon, and to their relief said, "it's not like I want to jump!".   Around 5 years ago (before I knew it's name) an old friend recounting the experience of living and wondering what it was like to step in front of moving busses (with discomfort), any time she was near a bus.  I have coaxed a friend out of the middle of a road (they weren't drunk and weren't on drugs at the time).  And dragged friends out of the ocean.  I have it with knives, in a way that borderlines OCD behaviour.  The desire to look at and examine the sharp edges.

What I do know is this.  It's normal.  Very normal.  Even if it's not 30% of the population, it could easily be 10 or 20%.  Everyone has a right to know that it happens, and it's normal and you're not broken if you experience it.  Just as common a shared human experience as common dreams like your teeth falling out, or of flying, running away from groups of people, or being underwater.  Or the experience of rehearsing what you want to say before making a phone call.  Or walking into a room for a reason and forgetting what it was.

Next time you are struck with the L'appel du vide, don't get uncomfortable.  Accept that it's a neat thing that brains do, and it's harmless.  Experience it.  And together with me - wonder why.  Wonder what evolutionary benefit has given so many of us the L'appel du vide.  

And be careful.

Meta: this took one hour to write.

I log in this morning on a whim, and notice I have -15 karma.  I dig around for a bit and find this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/ddjm

To be clear, that's a block of four comments, each at -10, for no apparent obvious good reason other than eugine nier has a vendetta against Elo.  I've apparently just been hit as splash damage, since I had the gall to try posting on an Elo comment thread.

I dig a little more, and I find this:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Elo/overview/

That's Elo's page, and I see a pile of discussion-grade posts that are all bulk downvoted below visibility, again for no apparent obvious good reason.

I find myself incredibly disincentivized to post or comment as a result of this.  My feeble amount of karma has taken literally years to build up, and to see sizable fractions of it wiped out any time I step on a eugine nier landmine is bullshit.  Sure, it's silly to value karma, but I value it anyway and if a year of incidental effort can be burned in two days because one guy wants to be an asshole to me, then I'm done here.

This has been going on for months.  Years even.

I understand the staff of LW are pressed for time.  I understand nobody understands how the code works.  I understand that maintaining the site is hard. However, reality is that which does not go away when we close our eyes, and reality does not care:  no matter how difficult the problems are, the fact remains that this sort of thing is abusive and it is actively driving people off the site.

If you value LW, fix this.  Use the force harder, site owners.

On the other hand, if you want LW to turn into another Kuro5hin, then keep doing what you're doing.

Prediction:  50% odds this post will be downvoted below visibility within two days due to eugine, and will basically disappear without trace.

Prediction:  if this isn't dealt with soon, 50% odds I'll stop visiting LW completely other than as an article archive by year end, because there's no goddamned point in trying to use the discussion system.

Stephen Hawking famously said that aliens are one of the main risks to human existence. In this map I will try to show all rational ways how aliens could result in human extinction. Paradoxically, even if aliens don’t exist, we may be even in bigger danger.

1.No aliens exist in our past light cone

1a. Great Filter is behind us. So Rare Earth is true. There are natural forces in our universe which are against life on Earth, but we don’t know if they are still active. We strongly underestimate such forces because of anthropic shadow. Such still active forces could be: gamma-ray bursts (and other types of cosmic explosions like magnitars), the instability of Earth’s atmosphere,  the frequency of large scale volcanism and asteroid impacts. We may also underestimate the fragility of our environment in its sensitivity to small human influences, like global warming becoming runaway global warming.

1b. Great filter is ahead of us (and it is not UFAI). Katja Grace shows that this is a much more probable solution to the Fermi paradox because of one particular version of the Doomsday argument, SIA. All technological civilizations go extinct before they become interstellar supercivilizations, that is in something like the next century on the scale of Earth’s timeline. This is in accordance with our observation that new technologies create stronger and stronger means of destruction which are available to smaller groups of people, and this process is exponential. So all civilizations terminate themselves before they can create AI, or their AI is unstable and self terminates too (I have explained elsewhere why this could happen ). 

2.      Aliens still exist in our light cone.

a)      They exist in the form of a UFAI explosion wave, which is travelling through space at the speed of light. EY thinks that this will be a natural outcome of evolution of AI. We can’t see the wave by definition, and we can find ourselves only in the regions of the Universe, which it hasn’t yet reached. If we create our own wave of AI, which is capable of conquering a big part of the Galaxy, we may be safe from alien wave of AI. Such a wave could be started very far away but sooner or later it would reach us. Anthropic shadow distorts our calculations about its probability.

b)      SETI-attack. Aliens exist very far away from us, so they can’t reach us physically (yet) but are able to send information. Here the risk of a SETI-attack exists, i.e. aliens will send us a description of a computer and a program, which is AI, and this will convert the Earth into another sending outpost. Such messages should dominate between all SETI messages. As we get stronger and stronger radio telescopes and other instruments, we have more and more chances of finding messages from them.

c)      Aliens are near (several hundred light years), and know about the Earth, so they have already sent physical space ships (or other weapons) to us, as they have found signs of our technological development and don’t want to have enemies in their neighborhood. They could send near–speed-of-light projectiles or beams of particles on an exact collision course with Earth, but this seems improbable, because if they are so near, why haven’t they didn’t reached Earth yet?

d)      Aliens are here. Alien nanobots could be in my room now, and there is no way I could detect them. But sooner or later developing human technologies will be able to find them, which will result in some form of confrontation. If there are aliens here, they could be in “Berserker” mode, i.e. they wait until humanity reaches some unknown threshold and then attack. Aliens may be actively participating in Earth’s progress, like “progressors”, but the main problem is that their understanding of a positive outcome may be not aligned with our own values (like the problem of FAI).

e)      Deadly remains and alien zombies. Aliens have suffered some kind of existential catastrophe, and its consequences will affect us. If they created vacuum phase transition during accelerator experiments, it could reach us at the speed of light without warning. If they created self-replicating non sentient nanobots (grey goo), it could travel as interstellar stardust and convert all solid matter in nanobots, so we could encounter such a grey goo wave in space. If they created at least one von Neumann probe, with narrow AI, it still could conquer the Universe and be dangerous to Earthlings. If their AI crashed it could have semi-intelligent remnants with a random and crazy goal system, which roams the Universe. (But they will probably evolve in the colonization wave of von Neumann probes anyway.) If we find their planet or artifacts they still could carry dangerous tech like dormant AI programs, nanobots or bacteria. (Vernor Vinge had this idea as the starting point of the plot in his novel “Fire Upon the Deep”)

f)       We could attract the attention of aliens by METI. Sending signals to stars in order to initiate communication we could tell potentially hostile aliens our position in space. Some people advocate for it like Zaitsev, others are strongly opposed. The risks of METI are smaller than SETI in my opinion, as our radiosignals can only reach the nearest hundreds of light years before we create our own strong AI. So we will be able repulse the most plausible ways of space aggression, but using SETI we able to receive signals from much further distances, perhaps as much as one billion light years, if aliens convert their entire home galaxy to a large screen, where they draw a static picture, using individual stars as pixels. They will use vN probes and complex algorithms to draw such picture, and I estimate that it could present messages as large as 1 Gb and will visible by half of the Universe. So SETI is exposed to a much larger part of the Universe (perhaps as much as 10 to the power of 10 more times the number of stars), and also the danger of SETI is immediate, not in a hundred years from now.

g)      Space war. During future space exploration humanity may encounter aliens in the Galaxy which are at the same level of development and it may result in classical star wars.

h)      They will not help us. They are here or nearby, but have decided not to help us in x-risks prevention, or not to broadcast (if they are far) information about most the important x-risks via SETI and about proven ways of preventing them. So they are not altruistic enough to save us from x-risks.

3. If we are in a simulation, then the owners of the simulations are aliens for us and they could switch the simulation off. Slow switch-off is possible and in some conditions it will be the main observable way of switch-off. 

4. False beliefs in aliens may result in incorrect decisions. Ronald Reagan saw something which he thought was a UFO (it was not) and he also had early onset Alzheimer’s, which may be one of the reasons he invested a lot into the creation of SDI, which also provoked a stronger confrontation with the USSR. (BTW, it is only my conjecture, but I use it as illustration how false believes may result in wrong decisions.)

5. Prevention of the x-risks using aliens:

1.      Strange strategy. If all rational straightforward strategies to prevent extinction have failed, as implied by one interpretation of the Fermi paradox, we should try a random strategy.

2.      Resurrection by aliens. We could preserve some information about humanity hoping that aliens will resurrect us, or they could return us to life using our remains on Earth. Voyagers already have such information, and they and other satellites may have occasional samples of human DNA. Radio signals from Earth also carry a lot of information.

3.      Request for help. We could send radio messages with a request for help. (Very skeptical about this, it is only a gesture of despair, if they are not already hiding in the solar system)

4.      Get advice via SETI. We could find advice on how to prevent x-risks in alien messages received via SETI.

5.      They are ready to save us. Perhaps they are here and will act to save us, if the situation develops into something really bad.

6.      We are the risk.  We will spread through the universe and colonize other planets, preventing the existence of many alien civilizations, or change their potential and perspectives permanently. So we will be the existential risk for them.

6. We are the risks for future aleins.

In total, there is several significant probability things, mostly connected with Fermi paradox solutions. No matter where is Great filter, we are at risk. If we had passed it, we live in fragile universe, but most probable conclusion is that Great Filter is very soon.

Another important thing is risks of passive SETI, which is most plausible way we could encounter aliens in near–term future.

Also there are important risks that we are in simulation, but that it is created not by our possible ancestors, but by aliens, who may have much less compassion to us (or by UFAI). In the last case the simulation be modeling unpleasant future, including large scale catastrophes and human sufferings.

The pdf is here: 

Demis Hassabis gives a great presentation on the state of Deepmind's work as of April 20, 2016. Skip to 23:12 for the statement of the goal of creating a rat-level AI -- "An AI that can do everything a rat can do," in his words. From his tone, it sounds like this is more a short-term, not a long-term goal.

I don't think Hassabis is prone to making unrealistic plans or stating overly bold predictions. I strongly encourage you to scan through Deepmind's publication list to get a sense of how quickly they're making progress. (In fact, I encourage you to bookmark that page, because it seems like they add a new paper about twice a month.) The outfit seems to be systematically knocking down all the "Holy Grail" milestones on the way to GAI, and this is just Deepmind. The papers they've put out in just the last year or so concern successful one-shot learning, continuous control, actor-critic architectures, novel memory architectures, policy learning, and bootstrapped gradient learning, and these are just the most stand-out achievements. There's even a paper co-authored by Stuart Armstrong concerning Friendliness concepts on that list.

If we really do have a genuinely rat-level AI within the next couple of years, I think that would justify radically moving forward expectations of AI development timetables. Speaking very naively, if we can go from "sub-nematode" to "mammal that can solve puzzles" in that timeframe, I would view it as a form of proof that "general" intelligence does not require some mysterious ingredient that we haven't discovered yet.

I took part in the second signal data science cohort earlier this year, and since I found out about Signal through a slatestarcodex post a few months back (it was also covered here on less wrong), I thought it would be good to return the favor and write a review of the program. 

The tl;dr version:

Going to Signal was a really good decision. I had been doing teaching work and some web development consulting previous to the program to make ends meet, and now I have a job offer as a senior machine learning researcher¹. The time I spent at signal was definitely necessary for me to get this job offer, and another very attractive data science job offer that is my "second choice" job. I haven't paid anything to signal, but I will have to pay them a fraction of my salary for the next year, capped at 10% and a maximum payment of $25k. 

The longer version:

Obviously a ~12 week curriculum is not going to be a magic pill that turns a nontechnical, averagely intelligent person into a super-genius with job offers from Google and Facebook. In order to benefit from Signal, you should already be somewhat above average in terms of intelligence and intellectual curiosity. If you have never programmed and/or never studied mathematics beyond high school² , you will probably not benefit from Signal in my opinion. Also, if you don't already understand statistics and probability to a good degree, they will not have time to teach you. What they will do is teach you how to be really good with R, make you do some practical machine learning and learn some SQL, all of which are hugely important for passing data science job interviews. As a bonus, you may be lucky enough (as I was) to explore more advanced machine learning techniques with other program participants or alumni and build some experience for yourself as a machine learning hacker. 

As stated above, you don't pay anything up front, and cheap accommodation is available. If you are in a situation similar to mine, not paying up front is a huge bonus. The salary fraction is comparatively small, too, and it only lasts for one year. I almost feel like I am underpaying them. 

This critical comment by fluttershy almost put me off, and I'm glad it didn't. The program is not exactly "self-directed" - there is a daily schedule and a clear path to work through, though they are flexible about it. Admittedly there isn't a constant feed of staff time for your every whim - ideally there would be 10-20 Jonahs, one per student; there's no way to offer that kind of service at a reasonable price. Communication between staff and students seemed to be very good, and key aspects of the program were well organised. So don't let perfect be the enemy of good: what you're getting is an excellent focused training program to learn R and some basic machine learning, and that's what you need to progress to the next stage of your career.

Our TA for the cohort, Andrew Ho, worked tirelessly to make sure our needs were met, both academically and in terms of running the house. Jonah was extremely helpful when you needed to debug something or clarify a misunderstanding. His lectures on selected topics were excellent. Robert's Saturday sessions on interview technique were good, though I felt that over time they became less valuable as some people got more out of interview practice than others. 

I am still in touch with some people I met on my cohort, even though I had to leave the country, I consider them pals and we keep in touch about how our job searches are going. People have offered to recommend me to companies as a result of Signal. As a networking push, going to Signal is certainly a good move. 

Highly recommended for smart people who need a helping hand to launch a technical career in data science.

1: I haven't signed the contract yet as my new boss is on holiday, but I fully intend to follow up when that process completes (or not). Watch this space. 

2: or equivalent - if you can do mathematics such as matrix algebra, know what the normal distribution is, understand basic probability theory such as how to calculate the expected value of a dice roll, etc, you are probably fine.