The interesting astro-related blog Centauri Dreams had a post the other day discussing one of my pet topics, Fermi’s Paradox. The latest discussion and solution to be offered comes from Robin Hanson by way of Nick Bostrom, and the idea is being referred to as the “Great Filter.” This is kind of a meta concept, an idea concerning probability: we see no advanced life in the universe, so there must be some filter event that destroys/eliminates intelligent life. Here is Bostrom’s explanation:
The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems.
So is this filter event in our relative past, or our relative future? Have we already passed through it, or is it yet to come? Bostrom believes that the Great Silence is a good thing, and means that we’re past the filter event. If we find complex life, then we should be concerned that the event is yet to come.
As a SF writer, this stuff is a gold mine. I’ve read quite a few novels and short stories that dance with the Paradox. It’s a very important question, and it really lights a match in the boiler beneath my imagination.
For instance, I was wondering this morning, while thinking about the Great Filter, if the reason behind the silence out there might somehow be a result of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, of which I have very little understanding of, so you’ll have to forgive me if I mangle something.
It’s observational bias that I keep turning over in my mind. The idea that we change the results of an experiment just by observing them. Is it possible that once one “observer” species evolves, it’s very existence is the filter that prevents other life from evolving? Our observation changes the universe? I don’t feel like I can explain this idea. I need to read up on quantum mechanics and its implications to develop this line of thought further.
Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a transcript of it, or watch a video. I highly recommend checking out one or the other and coming back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here’’s a choice bit that explains much of it:
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
…
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind the New York Times article from yesterday. The cognitive surplus is leading to many people using the time formerly soaked up by the one-way media to create things themselves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actually consuming, and results in the paradox of choice. Making things collaboratively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but having all those other options makes us unhappy. Another paradox, of sorts.
Wikipedia is a bit of a different from, say, writing fan fiction, because Wikipedia has a core usefulness that is more broad in appeal. You could say that Wikipedia provides a clear benefit to society, whereas the benefit to society of more fiction, or more music, or more photography is less readily apparent. I’m not saying that your X-Files/Evil Dead crossover fanfic doesn’t provide a benefit. I just think it’s harder to make the case for it. I’m not going to do it for you, anyway.
The real mind blower here for me is this idea of thinking about the cognitive surplus–not thinking about it as leisure time, but thinking about it as hours spent thinking. That surplus has always existed, but something about the Internet has provided an entirely new means of tapping into it. Sure, some have chosen to express their surplus by launching flame wars over which Doctor was the best (clearly the 7th), but I think Shirky is right in pointing out that this is all embryonic still. We’re going to see some amazing things soon. What forms will they take? My thinking along these lines before was limited to the idea of crowdsourcing, but I’m starting to see that it’s so much more than that. I really need to read Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.
What problems can we solve using the internet and our cognitive surplus?
Besides my ostrich encounter, there were really only two occasions where I felt that my life was threatened by wildlife in Kenya. There were several occasions of fearing for my life involving other people, but that’s another post.The incident happened in Tsavo. Tsavo is famous for one thing in particular. Man-eating lions. Around the turn of the century, Colonel Patterson was tasked with building a bridge for the British Empire (a bridge that still stands today, and is not remotely impressive). He watched in horror as worker after worker (mostly “coolies” from India) were dragged away, killed, and devoured. Eventually, Patterson killed two lions, but only after unbelievable difficulties. The lions were named The Ghost and The Darkness, and a film about this incident starring Val Kilmer came out in the mid-90s. The lions’ bodies are on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. They are male lions, but they have no manes. None of the male lions in Tsavo have them. Upon seeing the area, you would immediately realize why.
Tsavo was green and dense with thorny thicket when we camped there. It was not like the rest of the African savannah. It is almost certain that the male lions of Tsavo do not have manes because if they did, they would never make it ten feet through the underbrush.
The first night we made camp, we could hear lions roaring as the sun set. It was the first time we had heard anything like it, and we were all thrilled. We put our tents, which were made for three people. After an evening around the fire, we all retired to our tents. I slept for a few hours, but woke some time after midnight with a pressing need to ah, relieve myself. There was only one problem.
The roaring continued, but it was much, much closer now. Without opening the tent, it sounded as if a lion was not more than 30 yards away. Another lion was answering this lion from the opposite side of our camp.
I tried to hold it as best I could, but eventually, I absolutely had to go to the bathroom. I roused my tent mates and we opened the ten flap just a bit and pointed our flashlights into the darkness. The eyes of something flashed green at the very edge of the light. The roaring stopped.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to step right outside the tent, and piss to the left. You guy watch those eyes, and if they start coming towards me, say something.” And that’s what I did. It seemed like I was urinating the contents of a small ocean. I kept my eyes on my business and did not look at the lion. If I did, I, well, froze up. Finally, I squeezed out the last drop of fluid and not even pausing to zip my fly, I dove inside the tent.
The eyes never moved. We sealed up the tent and went back to sleep as best we could with massive cats roaring all night. In the morning, the lions were gone.
I can’t remember where the second brush with death happened. It was either Tsavo also, or Amboseli. We were riding in a Land Rover down a muddy road in the park, and the brush was fairly thick on either side of the road. Everything that wasn’t green with life was a dark red from the clay mud. Wildlife was hard to spot. I stood on my seat, holding onto the edges of the hole in the roof, and scanned with binoculars, looking for something interesting. Then, the driver spotted it.
A bull elephant came out of the brush not even twenty feet from us. His skin was streaked red, and his tusks were almost four feet long. He took a hesitant step, then flared his great ears forward. I snapped a shot with my camera. Then, he charged.
Our driver gunned the engine, and we tore off down the road. The elephant stopped in the road behind us and raised his trunk in disdain. For less than a second, I was pretty sure I was going to be thrown from the Rover and trampled to death. Everyone in the vehicle laughed hysterically, and I mean that literally, for half an hour afterward.
This story is about three organisms. First, we have cotton plants. Tasty, yummy cotton plants. Secondly, we have the bollworm, aka Helicoverpa zea. Finally, we have a little bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis which produces a toxin that kills insects. We call that toxin Bt for short.
In 1996, some smart biologists decided to take the genes from B. thuringeiensis that produce those toxin proteins and insert them into the genome of the cotton plant (and potatoes and corn too). This served to make the cotton plants not so tasty to the bollworm. Tasty cotton plants become “ack-ack, plant of death!” to them. This was good because the cotton crop is worth $4.5 billion annually, and 70% of the damage caused to the crop is caused by catterpillars like the lowly bollworm.
All was well in the land of cotton for a while. But then in 2003, bollworms were found eating Bt-cotton plants! What gives? Evolution, baby!
Here are a few cool things about this. Places where bt-cotton is grown as a huge monoculture resulted in faster evolution of bt-resistance in the bollworm. Basically, the only bollworms that could be found to mate with had a tendency to be resistant, and so you got really fast resistance in the overall population. In places where bollworms could end up on non bt-resistant plants, the resistance developed much more slowly.
Now, of course the gengineers at Monsanto have upped the ante and produced a cotton variety that produces two varieties of Bt-toxin. For now, the bollworms are resistant to only one of those two. Soon, the scientists will develop another variant that kills the resistant bollworms and reset the clock.
So I looked it up, and the bollworms have a lifecycle of 30 days. BT cotton went out in 1996, and in 2003, we have levels of resistance large enough that we see it. That means in roughly 72 generations, H zea populations developed widespread resistance to the toxin.
There are two morals to this story. One: insects evolve really fast. Two: insects evolve resistance even faster when their environment is uniformly poisonous. Plant some normal plants here and there to provide refuges so that evolved resistance develops slower.
Think about the above the next time you spray everything you own with antibacterial soap.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but you can call me Jeremy. I am a fantasy and science fiction writer, photographer, and web designer living in Northern Colorado. By day, I work as a designer for a background screening firm. I am currently available for freelance design work. Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. I love hearing from new people.
Does the New York Times article on Steampunk mean the genre/fashion craze has made the high water mark and will begin to recede from here? What is the shelf-life of an aesthetic movement, and for that matter, what is the sociological force behind this particular movement?
It’s a Stylistic Rebellion
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The [...]
Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a transcript of it, or watch a video. I highly recommend checking out one or the other and coming back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here’’s a choice bit [...]
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Sci-fi rant: Why giant mecha robots are stupid | Geekend | TechRepublic.com
Jay Garmon has written a very well thought-out article on why giant mecha robots are stupid and will never work. I am afraid I must provide a counter to this article. Giant mecha robots are also totally awesome, and I think he’s wrong. [...]
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind 
