Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Has the UFO myth been fostered deliberately?

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alien or human?OK: as that headline should make clear, you’re going to struggle with this one if you’re an Agent Mulder type, but run with me for a moment. While there are ample stories suggesting that alien spacecraft have visited (or crashed into) our planet, solid evidence thereof is very much lacking in proportion. The usual response to that is “well, of course, the government/military/Illuminati/lizard-people have covered up the evidence!”

It’s a conspiracy theory classic. But consider for a moment the old aphorism that the most effective lies are the ones that include substantial elements of truth. Then apply the cui bono test – who benefits from people believing in UFO cover-ups?

Nick Redfern has been thinking along these lines, and has gathered a bunch of clues to support his own hypothesis – namely that the majority of the big UFO conspiracy stories have been quite deliberately encouraged by the more secretive echelons of the  world’s military and governmental organisations. After all, if you’ve got something worth hiding, flat-out denial is never going to be quite as effective as pretending to let something slip that is actually a smokescreen for the real story. Says Redfern:

… it seems to me that – for years – the crashed UFO community has been well and truly played, manipulated, and even controlled.

The trick to overcoming this is to throw out your belief systems and start fresh, with no preconceived ideas about crashed UFOs, and no emotion-driven need to believe in wrecked saucers, dead aliens, underground cryogenic chambers filled with ET body-parts, and all the rest.

Do that, be totally unbiased, and you may find some surprising facts about the origins of certain crashed UFO events.

If you’ve ever been into UFOlogy, I heartily recommend reading the whole piece for interest’s sake. What I will note here is that, much like the original conspiracy theories, Redfern’s re-readings of the classic UFO stories are based on interpretations of old classified documents, which means they’re based on the same suppositional logic as the stories they aim to replace; their appeal is that there’s less of a cognitive leap involved in assuming that the whole business is an elaborate smokescreen than in assuming that the aliums r comin OMGZ.

I used to be mad-fixated with conspiracy theories, but as time has passed they’ve been eroded by the same cynicism that initially nurtured them. And much as the military red-herring theory as presented above is more plausible than actual alien visitations being covered up, recent events suggest to me that the governments of the West aren’t anywhere near as capable of keeping secrets as that story demands I believe.

But then again, what if all the recent bungling and slip-ups in government secrecy are just another layer of the smokescreen, eh? Maybe best not to throw out all the tinfoil just yet… 😉 [via PosthumanBlues; image by Simczuk]

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iPlant – the motivational implant

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Via good friend-o’-the-site Justin Pickard, here’s a device that’s straight off the pages of a number of science fiction stories. The iPlant is a simple remote-controlled deep-brain implant that stimulates dopamine production, the idea being that by using the brain’s natural reward chemical one could encourage healthy and/or virtuous behaviour that is otherwise dismissed as being too difficult.

The neuroanatomy of reward is very well known. A small group of nerve cells in the midbrain, when stimulated, release dopamine throughout the entire prefrontal cortex, which is our decision generator. Deep brain stimulation to control reward would be very similar to its application against Parkinson’s disease, in which dopamine signalling is impaired, leading to symptoms of the motor system. Thus, the technology is tried and tested in humans.

The human motivational system has been shaped over millions of years of evolution to a degree of robustness, which is why we find it so difficult to change. Sweet food is an instant reward for most people, as are alcohol and many drugs. The modern society has developed spectacular shortcuts to dopamine release, with the unfortunate effect of making many people’s lives less functional. Obesity and addiction are long-term scourges caused by the inability to resist short-term dopamine stimulation. Here is a technology that could change all that.

Now, the problem here should be obvious, even to someone who isn’t prone to thinking in science-fictional ways: who controls the reward system? What behaviour gets rewarded? Sure, you could use the iPlant to help people with dietary problems or to encourage excercise… but you could just as easily reward cruelty, violence, sloth, or any other behaviour. You could easily make people into something akin to zombies, steering them to do your bidding with Pavlovian pokes.

Maybe it would be safer to give people control of their own iPlants… but as any athelete will tell you, dopamine is highly addictive. How much willpower would you need to avoid become a self-stimulating blob, sat motionless but for your thumb pressing the trigger at ever-decreasing intervals, riding an eternal and baseless high?

Ethical questions aplenty, then. This is one of the rare situations in which I find myself thinking that technological short-cuts are the wrong idea, and that’s a feeling based very much on personal experience. I’m inherently lazy; there are many things that I’d like to motivate myself to do more regularly, from exercising and getting up early in the mornings to sitting down and cranking out a daily wordcount of fiction. But I also have an addictive personality – and observation of people who achieve the things I want to achieve suggests that not only is it possible to achieve the same effects by applying willpower alone (possible, though difficult), but that the satisfaction of doing so is part of the reward. If I don’t have the will to make myself work for what I want, how would I muster the will to resist the allure of the joy-button?

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How will the earliest nanofactories emerge?

dimensionsJ Storrs Hall of the Foresight institute comments on what the earliest nanofactories will be like, and Michael Anissimov responds:

If nanofactories work at all, they will be very powerful. A nanofactory would be a very complicated, “huge” thing. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology compares the complexity of a molecular assembler to that of a Space Shuttle. I think the analogy would be apt for a nanofactory as well. We are talking about a miniature factory with more moving parts and individual computers than a typical 100 million-dollar modern factory today. Difficulties with the basic technology will manifest themselves in the pre-nanofactory stage, working with individual assemblers or small ensembles of assemblers. If you’ve made it all the way to nanofactory-level MNT, you’ve already jumped the primary technological hurdles.

A point of disagreement between Anissimov and Hall is the precise definiton of “nanofactory.” Is it simply a general term for a device that can create many other things including a copy of itself, or it is a specific desktop-scale universal assembler?

Assuming the latter definition, Anissimov argues that widespread adoption of desktop nanofactories will happen much more rapidly than that of personal computers because:

There are simply too many moving parts for micromanagement to be possible — either the “code-level” operations are automated or they haven’t been established yet.

Either they work or they don’t. The smallest replicating unit is equivalent to the transistor in a personal computer – to the user it is expected to behave as a black box that performs a specific function – and if it fails to there is not much the user can do about it (if a transistor fails on a microchip can it even be repaired?).

The appropriate analogy is therefore between computers and nanofactories is between the existence of nanofactories and the existence of microchips. Microchips have found their way all over the place…

If Anissimov is right then it raises the interesting possibility that mature, desktop-scale nanofabrication may achieve widespread consumer adoption over a startlingly short period, given the ability of the machine to make copies of itself and the fact if it fulfils its basic function then it can become incredibly useful to many people very quickly.

[via Next Big Future][image from jurvetson on flickr]

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21st Century digital boy – Milo, the virtual kid

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He’s still only a demonstration at the moment, but maybe your kids will be hanging out with Milo in a few years’ time:

Milo is the creation of Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios and developer of ambitious games such as “Black and White” and the “Fable” series. Those games tried to present players with moral choices that had consequences for their characters, and also tried to play on people’s real emotions.

Molyneux’s latest effort takes advantage of Microsoft’s new full-body controller for Xbox 360, known as Project Natal. The controller’s sensor bar tracks the real-world movements of Xbox players and translates them into the game, which allows them to practically play with Milo in person.

Yup – Milo is an AI avatar of a boy, and (by all accounts) an impressively convincing one. Here’s the demo video:

As LiveScience puts it:

The E3 demo shows Milo responding to a developer’s questions with some fairly convincing facial expressions, body behavior and voice tone. He even “talks” and looks at a real-world drawing, courtesy of the Natal controller scanning it into the game. It’s an impressive display that appears very human-like, and does not evoke any “uncanny valley” sensations of eerie or weird behavior that make people nervous.

Of course, that’s just the recorded demo. A Kotaku editor who got hands-on time with the Milo demo did run into moments of awkwardness, such as Milo waiting for him to say something. But he also described the magic of the virtual boy complimenting him on his blue shirt.

Molyneux continually beats a drum about “science fiction writers never having imagined such a technology”, and I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on that count, but I was genuinely blown away by that video, even after factoring in a degree of cynicism appropriate to a demonstration given at an industry junket.

Now, Milo as a playmate and companion for kids is a marketable deployment of this technology, sure. But wait until the beleaguered porn industry gets hold of the same algorithms…

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Nanoscale etchings make liquid flow uphill

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OK, I can’t resist it – here’s an OMGZ SCIENCE!!1 story that is too good to pass up: nanoscale laser etchings on metallic surfaces can produce weird effects in their interaction with liquids, including the ability to make them flow against gravity.

Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester in New York State, says: “We’re able to change the surface structure of almost any piece of metal so that we can control how liquid responds to it. We can even control the direction in which the liquid flows, or whether liquid flows at all.“

That’s pretty cool in and of itself, but here’s your real sensawunda kick:

Guo and his assistant, Anatoliy Vorobyev, alter the surface of the metal using an ultra-fast burst of light from a laser. Science Daily reports: “The laser, called a femtosecond laser, produces pulses lasting only a few quadrillionths of a second—a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years.” It adds that this one burst unleashes as much power as the whole of North America’s electric grid delivers, but “focused onto a spot the size of a needlepoint”.

Science FTW! It’s days like this I wish I’d actually finished my undergraduate courses…