SciFi short story from Nick Wolven

'Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?' 

 I really enjoyed this very cool FREE SciFi short story from Nick Wolven 

"There are screams, and there are screams. This is the real deal. It’s a scream that ripples. It’s a scream that rings. It’s a scream like a mile-high waterfall of glass, like a drill bit in the heart, like a thousand breaking stars..." 

Via Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/nick-wolven-short-story

Read More...

Summary only...

Medical Tissue Regeneration

This is very SciFi!
A device which stimulates the body to grow new blood vessels or even organs. https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/mediaroom/pressreleaselisting/researchers-develop-regenerative-medicine-breakthrough 

It is interesting that with approaches like this and CRISPR, we are not 'writing new low level biological code', rather we are 'calling high level functions' which already exist.

Read More...

Summary only...

Is Physics Different Outside the Matrix...

 My curiosity was piqued by the title of this article:

"We don't live in a simulation, or computing works differently outside the Matrix."

https://boingboing.net/2017/10/03/elon-is-wrong.html
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758

But why wouldn't physics be different outside the simulation?

I suppose one reason is that for a grandfather simulation—where the simulation's owners try to learn more about their pre-singularity dark ages by letting others (e.g. us) live through them—it would make sense for the rules inside and outside to be the same.

But generally a simulation must consume less resources than the universe it is running within, and corners must therefore be cut. A program running on a Minecraft Redstone Turing Machine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X21HQphy6I) will clearly have less resources available than assembler running on the bare metal of a processor. Even ignoring the appalling speed at which it will run, lookup tables and special instructions will make some calculations scale better than others in the simulation…

We already know that the 'substrate' our universe runs on, is wildly different from the 'classical world' we experience. Some physics like entanglement seems to require access to 'super user' functions which break our Universe's laws, e.g. instantaneous communication of state changes between entangled particles. Quantum computation is another example of magic, able to solve 'classically' impossible equations in the blink of an eye. 

Even if our universe is not a synthetic simulation created for amusement or research, theories like the Holographic Universe suggest reality is far less prosaic than we imagined up until now.


Quantum Computation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgCuKTN8sX0


Holographic Universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bwLtlA9eDM

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-reveals-substantial-evidence-holographic-universe.html

Read More...

Summary only...

An external womb, will change the nature of human reproduction...

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/04/artifical-womb-women-ectogenesis-baby-fertility

"Once parental roles are equal, there will be no excuse for male-dominated boardrooms or political parties, or much of the other blatant inequality we see today." -- I wonder if this will turn out to be true.

To paraphrase Douglass Adams: Man has always assumed he was better than woman because of high-powered careers; loyalty to sports teams; and the status tokens of cash, cloths and cars. Whereas Woman has always believed she is better than Man for precisely the same reasons…

Read More...

Summary only...

DNA Malware compromising DNA sequencing machines

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/researchers-encode-malware-in-dna-compromise-dna-sequencing-software/


I actually have a short story in the works about this concept-

Malware encoded in the genome of a biological virus gets sequenced by a surgery's diagnosis machine. The malware hacks the diagnosis sequencer, installing a computer virus, which compromises all the DNA synthesis machines it can find on the network. These start printing and churning out copies of the virus, infecting more humans who seek medical help. The infection spreads through two vectors: person to person and digitally. Every infected patient, sequenced by a susceptible diagnosis machine, creates more compromised nodes in the growing botnet… the plague spreads, its dual-mode allowing it to jump all quarantine measures and airgaps thrown up to halt it… nasty.

Read More...

Summary only...

Declassified 1950s Flying Saucer vs WEAV the 2010s update

USAF Project 1794: Declassified 1950s Flying Saucer and WEAV, the Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle that NASA is toying with now:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-first-flying-saucer/

This is fascinating stuff. I am looking into this magneto-electro-hydrodynamics tech for Book 3...

Read More...

Summary only...

Is there no chance to save traditional sci-fi from decline?

As a newcomer author, I can't really judge from my own experience if Liu Cixin is correct... but I fear he might be…

Interview with Chinese Hugo Award Winner Liu Cixin: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-08/16/c_136529000.htm

As a kid I remember thirsting for any anything that tasted of the future. Every drip of speculation about technology was absorbed like a drop of water on a parched dessert--

  --but now, I feel I am standing in a torrent of futurism; my orifices clamped tight shut else I bloat and explode from the pressure!

Against this, I can see how people see Science Fiction as more of the same.

Summary: People are bored with novelty; they want familiarity!

Read More...

Summary only...

KEO - Space time capsule to the future.

KEO - is a time capsule for 50K years into the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO

"KEO is the name of a space time capsule planned to carry messages from the citizens of present Earth to humanity 50,000 years from now, when it will re-enter Earth's atmosphere. Currently the KEO website cites 2019 as its launch date."

You can leave your great, great, * Grandchildren a message here.

Here is my message:

We were human once; full of ignorance and wonder.

Are you human?

I hope you live in ignorance, amongst friends.

I hope you know love is the answer.

I suspect you know mind and matter are peers.

The fundamental substrate is hidden and today we see dualism.

I suspect that all minds do their thinking on the same plane (therefore even if we are both characters in a Grandfather Simulation, we still have souls).

It would be interesting to know what you think--

  --although, if you follow my advice, you will not understand what I am talking about as you now live in Bronze Age villages. By the way, we left you a bunch of obscure automation buried in the crust. It looks after you, it watches for meteorites and gamma-ray bursts (I hope it helps with your dentistry too).

The shaman who is reading you this is probably not human, or is communing with powers who are not. You may call these powers God. My people built your God. You might find this truth emasculating. If so, you might want to build your own God. Start by harnessing the power of boiling water to do work. Believe me, as unlikely as this sounds, it will work. Try pumping water. Play with a few designs, you will get there. The better your understanding of numbers, the better your machines will be. One day soon you will be able to build machines that pump numbers. The machine which you call God--that speaks through your Shaman--is a nothing more.

Lots of Love

Toby

Read More...

Summary only...

Robopocalypse

Wired says "Chill: Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs"
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/

I usually like wired, but this piece is either totally misguided or cynically disingenuous...

The argument seems to turn on the fact that productivity (as economists measure it) is not surging, which we should expect if robots were providing most labour, making the handful of human workers left super productive.

There is no mystery; jobs are being degraded: people are being fired from high paying positions and re-hired as burger-flippers and janitors. Hours worked does not change, but the highly trained engineer is now asking "if you want fries with that".

Also the 'Deep Learning' AI revolution is less than a decade old. Sufficiently advanced 'oids' don't exist yet: self-driving cars are not here; 3D printed houses still a few years away; AI chat bots are only now creeping into the work place. The Robo Advisors of FinTech are destroying the finance sector incumbents, but the big banks can't fire people fast enough to maintain productivity against their collapsing profits.

Finally, companies are not investing, they are focused on short term cost saving, outsourcing, and downsizing. So even if the 'oids' were available off the shelf, companies wouldn't be interested yet. They will wait a few years until all the glitches are ironed out--

--even then, as the 'oids' reach parity with humans, productivity may remain low as humans will be performing all the dirty and degrading work too low value for an expensive 'oid'.

Perhaps the author simply considers anything more than 5 years away as pointless SciFi speculation, and while the speculation is fun-- please read my books!  :)  --for those of us with kids, these topics are very real.

Read More...

Summary only...

Clever Ravens

Animals are smart, much smarter than we usually give them credit for...

These Ravens show advanced planning, and more impressively, self-control.
Our last common ancestor was over 300Million years ago, so they are basically alien thinkers, most similarities are due to convergence of evolution.

That some animals might be 'people' is one of the premises of my Singularity's Children series.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/ravens-ignore-a-treat-in-favor-of-a-useful-tool-for-the-future/

"These studies were carefully set up to show that the ravens could plan under flexible conditions—different time delays, and solving either a mechanical (puzzle box) or social (bartering) problem. They didn’t just match apes in their performance; they beat them. The ravens even performed better than 4-year-old children."

Read More...

Summary only...

Searching for this Simulation's God

Simulation Theory and the scientific pursuit of God.

https://thenextweb.com/distract/2017/07/06/simulation-hypothesis-and-the-search-for-god/#.tnw_k8m91JG8

Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Neil Degrasse-Tyson and many others believe the chances that we are living in a simulation is close to 100%.
I don't think it actually matters whether we are in base reality, a Microverse, Miniverse, or Tinyverse... but you will have to read my books to out find why.

Read More...

Summary only...

Can we know what animals are thinking?

A nice article from the economist on animal minds. 

https://medium.economist.com/can-we-know-what-animals-are-thinking-83991bc994c4 

"In 1992, at Tangalooma, off the coast of Queensland, people began to throw fish into the water for the local wild dolphins to eat. In 1998, the Dolphins began to feed the humans, throwing fish up onto the jetty for them. The humans thought they were having a bit of fun feeding the animals. What, if anything, did the Dolphins think?" 

It is astonishing to me how fashion, peer pressure, and group think mentality, inhibit even supposedly critical thinkers. Only slowly are we coming out of this cloud of denial regarding the minds of animals. I am far from being anti-science, but just because subjective mind is currently beyond the realms of what Science can opine on, doesn't mean it is not real. Denying animal consciousness because we don't understand human consciousness is just another ravenous bugblatter beast of traal. 

(image Richard Svensson)

Read More...

Summary only...

The Unnecessariat: We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary.

Pretty chilling:
https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

"Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!"

Cory Doctrow says, "Human beings are the gut flora of immortal, transhuman corporations".

Life as gut flora is not very glamorous, but need not be too bad. We are beneficial, and that gives us some measure of security—our hosts like to keep us around to stave off IBS. But when we add nothing of value to their fitness, our hosts, the corporations, are no longer incentivized to support us. We become unnecessary and start dying in droves.

"If there’s no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there’s certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them. No-one has the option to just make their own way and be left alone at it. It used to be that people were uninsured and if they got seriously sick they’d declare bankruptcy and lose the farm, but now they have a (mandatory) $1k/month plan with a $5k deductible: they’ll still declare bankruptcy and lose the farm if they get sick, but in the meantime they pay a shit-ton to the shareholders of United Healthcare, or Aetna, or whoever."

Mark my words, this is how it ends. #FermiParadox

Read More...

Summary only...

The Moby Mart

This Feels Real...  

http://www.themobymart.com/  

Read More...

Summary only...

Visualizing a decent life on the moon.

NASA Judged, Moontopia Competition - Winner

 

These images kind of make me want to sign up as a pioneer...
OK, scratch that. Realistically, I guess I mean write a SciFi story about somebody else signing up.

"The Testlab settlement is based on the idea of the Russian Babushka Doll — one layer protects the next. On the very inside of the settlement are the Pods, which inhabit the private sleeping quarters, the communal rooms, the greenhouse, as well as the experimental labs and the necessary machinery to sustain life on the moon. Between the pods and the outer most protective membrane is the void that acts as yet another protective layer between livable and unlivable space."

https://pionic.org/moontopia-lunar-colony-visions-revealed 

 

https://pionic.org/moontopia-lunar-colony-visions-revealed

 

I actually think I like the Runner up even more: 
"The moon has abundant resources on the moon... [but] it is has always had a significant meaning to us, and therefore its original state must be highly respected and preserved as much as possible. Therefore we propose a space station not built directly on the surface but orbiting around the moon with a cable linked to the surface"

Read More...

Summary only...

Everything is a story...

A very interesting article on Larping (Live Action Role Playing) which highlights something buried deep down near the roots of the human condition.

One of the key messages of the book Sapiens is that we live in a world of stories. Companies are stories; countries, currencies, governments, and religions too.

Base reality is physics and chemistry, everything else is a story...

  ...even ourselves. This is rarely clearer than in this article.

 "So much of adult life is about LARPing, whether or not people realise it. When you take on a new job, you have to learn how to play that part, you have to learn how to act as that job."

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/geeks-guide-larping/

Read More...

Summary only...

Singularity's Children, Sci-Fact Behind the Sci-Fiction, Part 9 — Asteroid Capture

With Singularity's Children, scientific accuracy and technical consistency are the ingredients I rely on most to bake a plausible SciFi world. To 'keep it real' and the story grounded in an authentic universe, the Science and Tech—at least in the first two books—is based on established fact, any developments are mostly incremental upgrades to our current capabilities.

Fiction: 

Excerpt from Book Two:

http://tobyweston.net/excerpt_book2_space_mountain

Fact:

"While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower."

Noah Poponak, Goldman Sachs.

"Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn... 

... [this] is only about one-third the amount that has been invested in Uber."

http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4

NASA is taking the idea seriously, fast tracking their mission to a 10,000 Quadrillion USD lump of platinum and gold—perhaps they want to stake a claim before other prospectors turn up?


http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-just-fast-tracked-their-mission-to-explore-a-10-000-quadrillion-metal-asteroid

(info graphic: http://www.space.com/20610-nasa-asteroid-capture-mission-infographic.html)

Read More...

Summary only...

Brain Scanning will deliver Thought Crime OR Mental Superpowers

"Amazingly, in just a single 13-minute session participants learned to easily [mentally] control the size of the flame and were able to reduce their pain by over 50%"

I am less optimistic than this article is. Not about the technology, which seems solid, but in Singularity's Children, Spex are ubiquitous and the scanning and insights they deliver are used by governments to sell ideology, rather than by the wearer to elevate consciousness. 

Read More...

Summary only...

MIT fires a rocket motor made using 3D-printed plastic

If you're going to 3D-print rocket parts , you'd want to make them out of metal to handle the stress, right? Not necessarily. MIT has successfully…

May 5, 2017 at 04:00PM
https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/30/mit-fires-3d-printed-plastic-rocket-motor/

Read More...

Summary only...

The Unnecessariat: We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary.

A chilling read:

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/ 


 As Cory Doctrow says, "Human beings are the gut flora of immortal, transhuman corporations". Life as gut flora is not very glamorous, but need not be too bad. We are beneficial, and that gives us some measure of security—our hosts like to keep us around to stave off IBS. But when we add nothing of value to their fitness, of our hosts, the corporations, are no-longer incentivized to support us. We become unnecessary and start dying in droves.

 "Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!"

"If there’s no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there’s certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them. No-one has the option to just make their own way and be left alone at it. It used to be that people were uninsured and if they got seriously sick they’d declare bankruptcy and lose the farm, but now they have a (mandatory) $1k/month plan with a $5k deductible: they’ll still declare bankruptcy and lose the farm if they get sick, but in the meantime they pay a shit-ton to the shareholders of United Healthcare, or Aetna, or whoever." 

This is how it will end. #FermiParadox

Read More...

Summary only...

Video of the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula

Video of the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula. Composite from images taken over the course of a year. Note the lightyears long puff of 'smoke'.

1.6 x mass of our sun, rotating 30x / sec, moving at 7million kps at the equator!

Read More...

Summary only...

A Four Planet System, Directly Imaged and Remarkable

This is truly remarkable! A four planet system, directly imaged with the Keck observatory in Hawaii.

Link to video of a Four Planet System:
http://i.imgur.com/BVXrHQM.gifv

"This evocative movie of four planets more massive than Jupiter orbiting the young star HR 8799 is a composite of sorts, including images taken over seven years at the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii."

"The movie clearly doesn’t show full orbits, which will take many more years to collect. The closest-in planet circles the star in around 40 years; the furthest takes more than 400 years."

Link to full NASA Paper:
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/a-four-planet-system-in-orbit-directly-imaged-and-remarkable/

Read More...

Summary only...