Lifeboat Foundation

My new Vice Motherboard story on the Fermi Paradox, Jethro’s Window, and why we’ll never discover intelligent aliens:

Here’s the sad solution to Fermi’s Paradox: We’ve never discovered other life forms because language and communication methods in the Singularity evolve so rapidly that even in one minute, an entire civilization can become transformed and totally unintelligible. In an expanding universe that is at least 13.6 billion years old, this transformation might never end. What this means is we will never have more than a few seconds to understand or even notice our millions of neighbors. The nature of the universe—the nature of communication in a universe where intelligence exponentially grows—is to keep us forever unaware and alone.

The only time we may discover other intelligent life forms is that 100 or so years during Jethro’s Window, and then it requires the miracle of another species in a similar evolutionary time table, right then, looking for us too. Given the universe is so gargantuan and many billions of years old, even with millions of alien species out there, we’ll never find them. We’ll never know them. It’s an unfortunate mathematical certainty.

Continue reading “​The Language of Aliens Will Always Be Indecipherable” »

I’m guessing you’d be like: surprised .

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

Continue reading “What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism?” »

Luv it!

There’s quite a lot of other things we don’t know DNA are being used for, like solving math problems for one.

The hard problem of consciousness must be approached through the ontological lens of 20th century physics, which tells us that reality is information theoretic and quantized at the level of Planck scale spacetime. Through careful deduction, it becomes clear that information cannot exist without consciousness – the awareness of things. And to be aware is to hold the meaning of relationships of objects within consciousness – perceiving abstract objects, while enjoying degrees of freedom within the structuring of those relationships. This defines consciousness as language – a set of objects and an ordering scheme with degrees of freedom used for expressing meaning. And since even information at the Planck scale cannot exist without consciousness, we propose an entity called a “primitive unit of consciousness”, which acts as a mathematical operator in a quantized spacetime language. Quasicrystal mathematics based on E8 geometry seems to be a candidate for the language of reality, possessing several qualities corresponding to recent physical discoveries and various physically realistic unification models.

A collaboration of physicists and a mathematician has made a significant step toward unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics by explaining how spacetime emerges from quantum entanglement in a more fundamental theory. The paper announcing the discovery by Hirosi Ooguri, a Principal Investigator at the University of Tokyo’s Kavli IPMU, with Caltech mathematician Matilde Marcolli and graduate students Jennifer Lin and Bogdan Stoica, will be published in Physical Review Letters as an Editors’ Suggestion “for the potential interest in the results presented and on the success of the paper in communicating its message, in particular to readers from other fields.”

Physicists and mathematicians have long sought a Theory of Everything (ToE) that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity explains gravity and large-scale phenomena such as the dynamics of stars and galaxies in the universe, while quantum mechanics explains microscopic phenomena from the subatomic to molecular scales.

The holographic principle is widely regarded as an essential feature of a successful Theory of Everything. The holographic principle states that gravity in a three-dimensional volume can be described by quantum mechanics on a two-dimensional surface surrounding the volume. In particular, the three dimensions of the volume should emerge from the two dimensions of the surface. However, understanding the precise mechanics for the emergence of the volume from the surface has been elusive.

Researchers at MIT and ETHZ have developed a working mathematical model for slot-based intersections. If successful, traffic efficiency would double and pollution would be greatly reduced.

Computers use switches to perform calculations. A complex film with “quantum wells”—regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions—can be used to make efficient switches for high-speed computers. For the first time, this oxide film exhibited a phenomenon, called resonant tunneling, in which electrons move between quantum wells at a specific voltage. This behavior allowed an extremely large ratio (about 100,000:1) between two states, which can be used in an electronic device as an ON/OFF switch to perform mathematical calculations (Nature Communications, “Resonant tunneling in a quantum oxide superlattice”).

Efficient control of electron motion can be used to reduce the power requirements of computers. “Quantum wells” (QW) are regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions. The lines (bottom) in the schematic show the probability of finding electrons in the structure. The structure is a complex oxide (top) with columns (stacked blue dots corresponding to an added element) where the electrons are free to move in only two dimensions. This is a special type of quantum well called a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). (Image: Ho Nyung Lee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Continue reading “Moving beyond semiconductors for next-generation electric switches” »

Ever really wanted to know what folks truly are thinking about?

A new experiment advances the idea that brain scans can teach us something about how the human mind works.

By Nathan Collins

Continue reading “Can a Brain Scan Tell What You’re Thinking? — Pacific Standard” »

Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her “digital attic”—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She’d like to preserve the stuff “as long as I live, at least,” says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, “which is a little bit of a headache.”

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in DNA—the stuff our genes are made of.