Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Children of Gilgamesh

One of the wonderful oddities of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that our Mesopotamian hero is described as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. That’s a breakdown you don’t see every day. Hercules and other Greek demigods were generally described as having a mathematically comprehensible 50-50 split between human and divine parents. One possible explanation for the 2/3-1/3 reckoning is that the ancient author was counting divine parentage as twice as important as human, so a being who had one human and one divine parent would be counted as only one third human. This is never stated explicitly, however, leaving Gilgamesh fans across the centuries to speculate as to exactly how he came by a parentage divisible by three.

I don’t think anything like this was involved, however:

British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.

Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

“We are not trying to alter genes, we’re just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones,” said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

These researchers are being careful to produce an embryo that is essentially the offspring of just two parents — with genetic material from the third “parent” being brought in just to address a specific problem. But the implications are unavoidable — a human embryo could be produced with three or five or nine or 100 parents. I’m not sure what all the arguments against such a procedure would be, but one that comes to mind is that life is complicated enough without being brought in the world and being told that you are the child of some large number of people. And what would the legal obligations of the various parents be? Would they be divided up depending on the amount of genetic material contributed?

On the other hand — critical and possibly unanswerable social issues aside — wouldn’t such children stand to be particularly robust? One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that greater variety leads to greater viability. Multiple parents could give offspring genetic variety on steroids. Still, I think their must be some risks associated with mixing it up genetically, and those would be magnified, too.

Via GeekPress.

Recycling and Alternatives

Per Bylund writes about the Swedish government’s coercive recycling regulations:

…[E]verybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state’s monopolist garbage-collection “service” no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn’t that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment.

What is interesting about this Soviet-style planned recycling is that it is officially profitable. It is supposed to be resource efficient, since recycling of the materials is less energy-consuming than, for instance, mining or the production of paper from wood. It is also economically profitable, since the government actually generates revenues from selling recycled materials and products made in the recycling process. The final recycling process costs less than is earned from selling the recycled products.

However, this is common government logic: it is “energy saving” simply because government does not count the time and energy used by nine million people cleaning and sorting their trash. Government authorities and researchers have reached the conclusion that the cost of (a) the water and electricity used for cleaning household trash, (b) transportation from trash collection centers, and (c) the final recycling process is actually less than would be necessary to produce these materials from scratch. Of course, they don’t count the literally millions of times people drive to the recycling centers to empty their trash bins; neither do they count, for instance, energy and costs for the extra housing space required for a dozen extra trash bins in every home.

Not to get into the politics of whether the Swedish government should or should not enforce such a vigorous model of recycling, I wonder how reclaiming refuse for biofuel production might fit into such an environment? All the wood, paper, and organic waste which is currently going for recycling or trash disposal might be converted into energy instead. I’m not sure this would make things any easier, but I would venture to guess that (at least) folks wouldn’t have to sort paper into different varieties or wash out their milk cartons before disposing of them.

There has been quite a bit of interest in cellulosic ethanol lately; I wonder how enthusiastically its widespread production from waste materials would be received by environmentalists? While you would no longer have paper ending up in landfills, you would have it being “used up” in the form of energy production. Whereas, with recycling, the paper will last a lot longer — although certainly not forever.

So are we better off strictly recycling, or with a mix of recycling for metals and plastic, while reclaiming energy from paper and other organic waste?

Odd Critter

It isn’t just new species of insects and bacteria that are being discovered. Every once in a while we get something like this:

New Species of Mammal

A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report.

The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi.
The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater.

It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs.

The story goes on to tell that these creatures are called shrews because their smaller cousins were thought to resemble shrews when first discovered. Personally,I don’t think they look like much of anything.

elephantshrew.jpg

A little aardvarkish, I suppose. But only a little. Anyway, these creatures are more closely related to elephants and rhinos (and, it turns out upon further reading, aardvarks) than they are shrews. The story concludes:

Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains are biodiverse-rich. In addition to this new species, a number of other new animals have been found there, including the Udzungwa partridge, the Phillips’ Congo shrew, and a new genus of monkey known as Kipunji as well as several reptiles and amphibians.

Dr Rathbun [who discovered the new species] said it was vital the area and its inhabitants in this biodiversity “hotspot” were protected.

Hera, hear. Let’s hope there are many more such finds to be made.

Strange Galaxy

Now this is just peculiar:

Galaxy’s spiral arms point in opposite directions

Astronomers are puzzling over a spiral galaxy whose spiral arms are wrapped in opposing directions. The unusual structure may be a lingering scar from a tussle with a smaller galaxy that was ultimately swallowed.

Before astronomers had studied this unusual spiral galaxy, called NGC 4622, they thought the spiral arms of galaxies were always oriented the same way relative to the galaxy’s direction of rotation. Specifically, spiral arms were always thought to follow, or trail, the direction of rotation – the same way that a swirl of milk in a stirred cup of coffee naturally orients itself.

But in 2002, astronomers led by Ron Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, US, announced that NGC 4622, which lies 200 million light years away, was rotating the wrong way – its prominent outer arms were leading instead of trailing. And one inner arm even appeared to be wound in the opposite direction from the outer arms.

strangegalaxy.jpg

What could cause such a thing to occur? The prevailing theory is a galactic cataclysm:

Scientists still do not understand how the galaxy got its oppositely oriented arms. One possibility is that the inner arms are the result of a struggle with a smaller galaxy that veered perilously close to NGC 4622 and was swallowed.

Before being ripped to shreds, the smaller galaxy could have stirred up matter in NGC 4622′s inner regions, leading it to settle in a spiral pattern opposite to that in the outer regions.

That seems likely. But how about an alternative explanation? What we are seeing is a galaxy that has been re-engineered. The highly advanced inhabitants are using these opposing forces of spin to generate energy or to perform some other task.

Discuss.

The Blue-Eyed Variation

I have green eyes, while my parents and all my siblings have blue eyes. I always thought that my eye color was the same as theirs, just tinted slightly differently. But the way I read this story, that is simply not the case:

ALL BLUE-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived near the Black Sea 10,000 years ago.

Human beings had brown eyes until a single mutation in a gene called OCA2 arose by chance in one individual, Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen said.

The mutation “turned off” the mechanism that produces brown melanin pigment and “diluted” brown eyes to blue.
Most likely occurring in the north-west part of the Black Sea between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, the gene was dispersed in the rapid waves of migration to northern Europe that followed the end of the last ice age.

Professor Eiberg said the finding, published in the journal Human Genetics, helped to explain why Europeans were far more likely to have blue eyes than any other ethnic grouping.

Europeans also had a far greater range of skin tones and hair colours living in the one community than the rest of the world, where people are almost uniformly dark-haired and dark-eyed.

The researchers examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed people in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.

Variation in the eye colour from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA,” the professor said.
“From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor.”

So it seems that my green eyes are actually a slight variation on the original human eye color — brown — while the rest of my family have this much newer trait that only showed up 500 generations or so ago.

Not that it matters, of course, it’s just interesting. It has been established that there is a mitochondrial Eve who is the ancestor of every human being alive on the planet. That is, we all inherited the unique mitochondria that she carried. Variations on that trait have been eliminated from the species.

So maybe there a was blue-eyed Eve? (or Adam?) The mitochondrial Eve lived some 130,000 years before the blue-eyed ancestor. It’s possible that that individual, too, is a common ancestor for much of the world’s population. But since blue eyes are a recessive gene, many of the blue-eyed ancestor’s descendant’s (like me) don’t have blue eyes.

Better All the Time #32

Are you as sick of election coverage as we are?

Well, take heart. There are only 10 months left until the presidential election! So if you’d like something else to think about in the mean time, may we suggest these nine positive developments on the energy front?

No need to thank us — it’s all in a day’s work here at The Speculist.

Not Everyone Keen on Return to Moon

Some apparently think there are better ways of getting back into serious space exploration, and on to Mars:

NASA’s current plan for manned space exploration focuses on establishing a base on the moon, as a vital stepping stone for a visit to Mars. The initiative has been trumpeted by the Bush administration, which wants the first mission to launch by 2020. But trouble is brewing as a growing group of former mission managers, planetary scientists and astronauts argues against any manned moon mission at all. One alternative, they say: Send astronauts to an asteroid as a better preparation for a Martian landing.

The dissenters plan to gather in mid-February at a meeting of the Planetary Society at Stanford University. “We want to get a positive recommendation to the new administration,” says Planetary Society executive director Louis D. Friedman. He supports an eventual mission to Mars, but argues that the current moon scheme was selected with inadequate debate after a speech by President Bush in January 2004. “If you said ‘humans’ and ‘Mars’ [to NASA officials] in the same sentence, you would receive a figurative slap on the face, and then four months later [the moon-to-Mars plan] was the main point on a viewgraph at the highest levels.”

The real shame here is that everything is viewed in such either/or terms. Rather than having NASA spend bazillions on what will almost certainly be a big compromise mission to who-knows-where 12, 15, or 20 or more years from now, why not take that money and start some serious push prizes. How about a $2 billion push prize for a permanent private space station in earth orbit? Maybe a $5 billion prize for a permanent settlement on the moon? A $10 billion prize for a manned mission to Mars?

Perhaps my prize figures are far too low, but you could multiply them each by ten and we would still see:

  1. Faster progress than NASA is likely to make

  2. At a lower net cost

This model of having government committees endlessly debate this stuff while some guy at the top named “the administrator” calls the shots is beyond tired. And I don’t mean any disrespect to him or any of the fine folks at NASA who are making heroic efforts to get something going. It just seems like it’s time for a new model, and we already have substantial evidence as to what kind of model will work.

Vacation Photos

Stephen shouldn’t feel bad (see update) that he didn’t catch anything out of the usual with the photo he took near Stephenville, Texas a while back. When taking vacation photos, the main thing to focus on is capturing memories of the great time you had. For example, I’m particularly pleased with this image I caught of Cathedral Rock near Sedona, Arizona while vacationing there last year, even though there is clearly nothing unusual about it.

CathedralRock2.jpg

UPDATE:

Well, maybe there’s more here than I realized. Look at the highlighted area of the image….

CathedralRock3.jpg

And now look at this extraordinary photograph from Mars…

martianbigfoot.jpg

It appears we have another astounding Mars connection!

Aliens Are Stupid

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I don’t see any other way of interpreting the data. The recent Texas UFO sitings make this very clear. Consider the facts:

STEPHENVILLE, Texas – In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.

Several dozen people “including a pilot, county constable and business owners” insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.

Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.

“You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal,” Sorrells said. “It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I’m not crazy.”

Er, well, technically… But never mind. Go on with your story, there Rick:

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle’s telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

I know the aliens are like, way sophisticated and advanced and all, and their motives are hard for us to understand, but I’d like to suggest that surely one of the following must apply:

  1.  They want to be seen.
  2.  They don’t want to be seen.

Assume either of these to be true, and the aliens come off looking pretty bad. If they want to be seen, why the few random sitings in semi-rural Texas (and other places, more on that later) from time to time? Forget the White House Lawn and by all means, forget Devil’s Tower. Yes, DO the Close Encounters of the Third Kind thing, only pre-arrange it with some good publicists and have the mothership rise up from behind Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Now that is called being seen, class.

Okay, so let’s say they don’t want to be seen. They have starships and advanced materials technologies (whoah — no rivets!) but their stealth technology is apparently about as lame as it can be. Just the other night, Stephen and Michael D. were talking about the defense department working on cloaking technology that approximates the invisibility technology used in the Predator movies. (Somebody throw me a link on that, if you have it.) [Link thrown - Stephen] If we are a few years out from that, and we still think it’s a big deal going to the moon, my guess is that by the time we’re buzzing the primitive planets in the local interstellar neighborhood looking for nubile women or rich mineral deposits or whatever it is that keeps bringing these losers back here, we’ll be able to do it completely undetected.

I wonder if Ricky’s rifle was loaded when he was scoping out the alien craft? With such poor cloaking at work, there’s no reason to assume their shields are any good. He should have tried to take them down.

Anyway, it’s not just me saying that aliens are stupid. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter have a whole trilogy out devoted to that very theme. Of course, they leave it to the reader to figure out that the aliens are stupid, but I don’t see what other possible conclusion one could come to.

alien-1534979_640In the new Time Odyssey series (I’m two books in) the First Born are back, playing a whole new set of pranks on hapless human kind. You’ll remember from the Space Odyssey series that these aliens are an ancient race, who trace their roots back to the very early days of our universe. In the Space Odyssey books, they put big black rectangular things on the moon and out by Jupiter and then led us to our next stage in evolution. (There’s more to the story, but we’re on a tight schedule, here.) I think we were supposed to figure out that they were stupid in that original series of books, but Clarke was so subtle that we missed the point. So now he and his protege have given us three new books to drive the point home in no uncertain terms.

A few mild conceptual spoilers ahead, but I’m not saying who wins the war between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan or anything.

In the new series, the First Born are very energy conscious. They don’t want new civilizations coming along and using up the universe’s precious resources which will only last a few more billion years, after all. So naturally, when they encounter a new upstart species like humanity, they re-build their entire planet — apparently in a parallel universe — making a temporal patchwork of that species’ entire history.

It apparently never occurred to the First Born that if they have access to other universes, their little resource problem might be solved. On the other hand, it’s possible that they’re actually creating this new universe — which strikes a primitive earthling like me as an awfully big expenditure of energy. I think even the First Born are a little shaky on that exercise. No coherent reason is given for it in Time’s Eye, and by the time you get to Sun Storm, it’s all but forgotten.

In the second book, the First Born forget all about temporal patchworks and awesome historical cage matches and get down to the serious work of destroying humanity. You would think that a civilization that can build a whole new planet earth stitched together from multiple eras of history would use some of that “indistinguishable from magic” technology of theirs just to make us, like, disappear.

But no. When it comes to destroying other civilizations, their technology becomes a lot more pedestrian. Basically, they hurl planets through interstellar space. Lucky for us, they don’t deploy that technology the way you or I (or Scott Evil) would. They do something much more subtle and elaborate, something that Scott’s dad would refer to as easily escapable (see second quote), which fortunately gives us the technology to have a fighting a chance against their attack.

Lucky for us, of course. But this doesn’t reflect particularly well on them. I can’t wait to read the third book in the series to find out just how stupid these aliens really are. As for the ones currently buzzing Texas, maybe in a few billion years they will be as stupid as the First Born. But they’re really going to have to work at it.

Category: UFO

Unlikely Terminator Plot Lines

From Glenn Reynolds, some dramatic possibilities that will probably go unexplored on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronices:

Hey, here are two plotlines that won’t make it to TV: (1) With the help of Ray Kurzweil, they develop a “friendly” AI that subverts and converts Skynet as soon as it’s hooked up; or (2) With the help of Miles Dyson’s widow — a recurring character already! — they tie Cyberdyne up in endless intellectual-property litigation, ensuring that nothing ever gets built. This would probably work, but Litigator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn’t have quite the same appeal . . .

How about a story arc in which Sarah and John elicit the help of the Lifeboat Foundation in warding off the rise of the machines? I’d like to see a heavily armed paramilitary cell within the foundation all decked out in camouflage and talking trash about “tearing Skynet a new memory cache” and the like.