Asteroids

Asteroid 2023 BU’s trajectory is in red (WSJ illustration)

An asteroid flew by earth today, missing it by a mere 2,200 miles:

An asteroid the size of a big truck will fly by Earth on Thursday just 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface in one of the closest approaches ever recorded, scientists said.

The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will travel over the Pacific Ocean west of southern Chile, Thursday afternoon Pacific time, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The near-Earth object poses no danger, and there is no expected impact...

Had it entered Earth’s orbit, the asteroid would have burned upon entry and, at its small size, turned into a fireball. “It’s not going to get close enough for that,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

What's alarming to this non-astronomer is that the object was detected on January 21st, less than a week ago.

I hope that larger asteroids that could possibly cross earth's path are being tracked, but experience tells us that we don't know about all of them.

The late Stephen Hawking's principal worry was that an asteroid strike would end life on earth:

“There are thousands of really large asteroids, some are over ten miles long – the size of Manhattan.

“An asteroid this size hits the Earth [every] 100,000,000 years.

“The last one struck the Earth 65,000,000 years ago, and probably was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs.

“We don’t know when the next asteroid will strike, but if it’s big enough, it could sterilise our planet.

“That would be the end of the five billion year story of life on Earth.”

Sweet dreams!

Back to the Universe

A bargain even in 2001: 2 Hawking books plus pictures at a cost of $9.99.

Pi is an irrational number (3.14159265.... goes on forever to the right of the decimal point without repeating a sequence), and it's somehow fitting that one of the leading examples of human rationality, physicist Stephen Hawking, died on "Pi Day" (3.14) in England.

I took a crack at his best-seller, A Brief History of Time, when it first came out in 1988 but didn't have the discipline to read it (skimming a technical text is not considered reading, by the way). I had better luck in 2001 when it was reissued with pictures and diagrams. Here is an excerpt from the chapter entitled The Arrow of Time:

In a quantum theory of gravity, as we saw in the last chapter, in order to specify the state of the universe one would still have to say how the possible histories of the universe would behave at the boundary of space-time in the past. One could avoid this difficulty of having to describe what we do not and cannot know only if the histories satisfy the no boundary condition: they are finite in extent but have no boundaries, edges, or singularities. In that case, the beginning of time would be a regular, smooth point of space-time and the universe would have begun its expansion in a very smooth and ordered state. It could not have been completely uniform, because that would violate the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. There had to be small fluctuations in the density and velocities of particles. The no boundary condition, however, implied that these fluctuations were as small as they could be, consistent with the uncertainty principle.

The universe would have started off with a period of exponential or "inflationary" expansion in which it would have increased its size by a very large factor. During this expansion, the density fluctuations would have remained small at first, but later would have started to grow. Regions in which the density was slightly higher than average would have had their expansion slowed down by the gravitational attraction of the extra mass. Eventually, such regions would stop expanding and collapse to form galaxies, stars, and beings like us. The universe would have started in a smooth and ordered state, and would become lumpy and disordered as time went on. This would explain the existence of the thermodynamic arrow of time.

The above passage may be somewhat abstruse, but by the time the reader encounters it on page 191 Professor Hawking has already discussed thermodynamics, space-time, quantum mechanics, gravity, and the origin of the universe, all prerequisites to this discussion. He was a brilliant theoretician, writer, and teacher. R.I.P.

Time:

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

The Last Event in Human History?

(Via slideshare.net)

Famous, very smart people have recently been sounding the alarm about artificial intelligence (AI).

Stephen Hawking: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

Elon Musk: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon."

Bill Gates: "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

The concerns about AI appear to be twofold [bold added]:

many fear that machines will make millions of workers redundant, causing inequality and unrest. Martin Ford, the author of two bestselling books on the dangers of automation, worries that middle-class jobs will vanish, economic mobility will cease and a wealthy plutocracy could “shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones”. Others fear that AI poses an existential threat to humanity, because superintelligent computers might not share mankind’s goals and could turn on their creators.

Futurists' dreams---or nightmares---of artificial intelligence are close to being realized because of the convergence of three phenomena: the availability of data, the speed of computer processing, and an algorithm ("deep learning") that enables programs to teach themselves.

IMHO, the benefits of artificial intelligence exceed the risks---though the most extreme risk, i.e., human extinction, is fairly negative(!)--but I have faith that we'll come up with answers, just as we have to other concentrations of power like private monopolies (regulated capitalism) and tyranny (democracy, law, and separation of powers).

The most creative solutions will probably have the machines regulate themselves--as private actors do in free markets--though your humble blogger is certainly not smart enough to imagine what these solutions are. The same genius(es) that invented bitcoin, a currency not dependent on central or private banks, can surely come up with a self-regulating structure for artificial intelligence.

If that doesn't work, there's always the "off" button....

Ancient Insight

The premise: consciousness is a characteristic unique to human beings, distinguishing us from animals and machines.

The problem:

Prominent thinkers like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warn about the rising danger of an artificial intelligence that can "out-think" humans;

dementia and Alzheimer's Disease rob millions of their identity;

experiments reveal that animals exhibit traits that were once thought to be unique to human beings.

The claustrum (Daily Mail graphic)

The Economist science writer says that the answer to consciousness may lie in certain structures of the brain: the claustrum and the temporoparietal junction.

Here's another take: "Our identity comes more from our moral character than from our memory or intellect.".

Yale psychologist Nina Strohminger and University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols surveyed spouses and children of patients with brain conditions affecting memory, cognition, or moral behavior whether their loved one was "still the same person underneath." Their conclusion:

Across all three groups, changes in moral behavior predicted changes in perceived identity, while changes in memory or intellect did not.

Heraclitus said that character is destiny. 25 centuries later we have little to add to that insight.