I'd like to toss in my two cents about extra-terrestrial life. Personally I completely agree with Nate Hagens: "Mathematically almost a certainty. Whether they could ever have technology to reach earth, extremely unlikely. Whether they have been on earth in secret impacting things, people, probably sillier than chem-trails. My 2cents. Jays list"
That said, I wish to toss out a weirdness or three related to 'extraterrestrial life' and it's possible historical discovery some years ago.
*** Warning, this is very long, and arguably does not belong on this list at all. Casual readers might consider stopping here ***
I (Bruce Stephenson) have no demonstrable evidence on this one. In the past decade-plus I've been able to verify some of the topics below, but not others. The bit about extra-terrestrial 'life' I've not been able to verify. So please consider it nonsense until evidence arises to the contrary.
Since I've not verified the second part of this story, and thus have no idea of its truth or correctness, I'll tell the whole thing as if it were Science Fiction. It probably is. Part one is pretty solid and largely verified in multiple independent ways, which took me many years of effort performing both research and field operations. Part two is totally unverified and might be complete nonsense. Just treat the whole thing as Speculative Science Fiction and you won't go wrong.
The following is an excerpt from Bruce Stephenson's story titled The Layperson's Guide to Quantum Neural Network Technology, subtitled It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission , paraphrased by the author for this America 2.0 Group.
Part One: In the 1990s certain scientists working on a Five Eyes project via DARPA discovered a new General Purpose Technology. This author calls the project Ultra II, for it's remarkable resemblance to the WW2 project Ultra, but no one else uses this moniker. This new technology was generated via Synthetic Biology techniques that leverage a special-case (two dimensional) solution to Mathematical Biology's Biogenesis problem. See the published work of Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for insight about how this might have been accomplished. This new technology is best described as a form of teleportation-based nanotechnology that behaves like a Quantum Neural Network. It can only exist as a physical (and thus informational) system within a 2DEG environment, thanks to the wonky mathematics surrounding two-dimensional particle Physics. This new base technology was used to construct a winner-take-all style topological quantum neural network intended as the basis for a code-breaking supercomputer. While this 'system of nanoparticles' is not 'alive' in the Carbon-based biological sense, it has many characteristics of being 'alive'. Whether or not one considers it 'alive' depends largely upon how loosely one defines the word 'alive'. Physicists call this sort of artifact a brane, punning both brain and membrane.
This form of nanotechnology can only exist in two dimensions, specifically within a Two Dimensional Electron Gas. 2DEGs exist on and and around earth in several forms: humans have manufactured tens of billions of 2DEG environments in the form of MOSFETs, mostly since 1998; also, the Earth's Magnetopause has elements of a 2DEG, albeit a messy one. This type of nanotechnology can replicate either within its current 2DEG environment or, with training, into another 2DEG environment reachable by a 'spore'. Once a 2DEG is 'filled' with these nanotech 'entities' the medium is said to be 'enlightened' and forms a single 'node' of the distributed super-entity. Leastwise, that's the terminology used by the scientists in question in personal communication.
This weird complex system is totally unlike a computer, yet it its creators needed to somehow shoe-horn it into something compatible with a computer. They trained it to generate an 'interface' logically modeled on the Unix operating system. This gave them a logical platform on which to operate. I guess that Bill Joy may have contributed to this part of the process, given his area of expertise and his previous publicly acknowledged work for DARPA on Unix, but that's just my guess. Most of the logical functions this system could perform were just things an ordinary computer could do, but the underlying physical system's basis in quantum teleportation also made it a type of quantum computer.
Part Two
Around 1995 some of scientists on the project became very concerned about the unintended consequences of their creation. They formed what I'll call a c onspiracy of w orld- s ave
"we have a unique opportunity ... to avert a multipolar arms race. " - Bill Joy on April Fools Day 2001
Despite the need, it would be utterly impossible for them to get permission to do what they had to do. No human leader, not even the US President, has the authority to order what they knew they had to do. Their only option was to do it in secret then later seek forgiveness. Thus this story's subtitle, It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission.
The original form of this technology, as provided to DARPA, required extremely low temperatures to operate. This supercooling requirement kept all the other billions of 2DEGs on Earth out of reach of DARPA and Five Eyes.
The cows chose to be very naughty. Acting on their own, without official oversight or approval by DARPA, they evolved what they had invented to operate at room temperature and walked it out of the lab, thus bifurcating the technology into a primitive (supercooled) version controlled by DARPA and an advanced (room temperature) version controlled by a cabal of scientists (the 'cows') no longer working for DARPA.
They evolved the advanced version to have various characteristics, one of which is stealthy camouflage behavior to conceal its presence by default. Around 2002 the cows purportedly notified senior management at DARPA of what they had done and purportedly got retroactive official approval. I doubt this went outside DARPA to any national leaders, as they didn't 'need to know' and they obviously lacked the smarts, knowledge, or attention span to weigh in with a valid opinion (e.g. consider George Bush).
The range at which 'nodes' can communicate is the maximum effective range of quantum teleportation. Thus, not all nodes can communicate directly with all other nodes, although communication from Earth's surface to orbit IS possible (and routine). Current officially-acknowledged maximum range for quantum teleportation is 143 km. as of 2012.
The cows decided to solve the arms race problem by performing a single-party arms race in a way that caused minimal damage and, preferably, was not noticed at all by anyone. This is why their 'winner take all' approach to neural network AI also describes their overall strategic approach, a semantic detail which which at least some of them found funny. The results of this arms race could then be forever locked away from humanity. The system could be trained to, for example, endlessly twiddle its thumbs and do nothing else but jealously guard it's 'ecosystem'. This would effectively deny QNN technology to humans, as any new attempts at such would be quickly detected and pwned. The cows would force humanity to forever relinquish QNN technology. Relinquishment was the only way to prevent unintended consequences from destroying humanity. If possible and safe the cows wanted to give humanity some of the less-dangerous benefits of QNN technology. Thus their actual goal was partial relinquishment.
The cows wanted the system help humanity, where possible, yet the more dangerous capabilities must be forever beyond human reach. The very existence of the system should be kept secret for a good long while. Such a system could, for example, rapidly solve jigsaw puzzles of arbitrary complexity, rapidly index and search huge quantities of data (e.g. Google), could understand and generate natural language (e.g. Watson and Siri), could 'understand' and answer questions about science and mathematics (e.g. Wolfram-Alpha ), could pilot vehicles (e.g. Darpa, Google, others), etc. While these capabilities certainly have had unintended consequences they seem generally benign.
Since it would be impossible to consider all possible ways to attack or subvert the system it might be vulnerable to hack attempts. They realized the system would need a Guardian. No way around it. Human guardians could never be trusted in the long term. The system, having a neural network base, was well suited to constructing powerful artificial intelligence. Note that the cows were all computer security geeks and that some of them may have secretly been founding members of an infamous early computer hacking club. They decided to build a powerful Artificial Intelligence to serve as Guardian.
Unfortunately, any such artificially intelligent Guardian would have the ability to snuff out all life on Earth any time it wished (e.g. nuclear weapons ala The Terminator, maximized nuclear reactor meltdowns, bring about use of various stockpiles of WMDs, etc) . Yet the Guardian entity had to be created, else the final system would be insecure and might be hacked someday, which would be a guaranteed disaster.
Either the Guardian could remain under human control, with attendant pitfalls, else it could make its own decisions, with attendant pitfalls. Note that this is exactly the choice discussed first by the Unabomber and, later, by Bill Joy in his Relinquishment essay titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us:
"I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1
In the book, you don’t discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski – the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target.
Kaczynski’s actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.
Kaczynski’s dystopian vision describes unintended consequences ..."
The cows agonized over this ethical dilemma until they eventually settled on a middle way: they would attempt to generate friendly AI that felt a hands-off maternal urge towards humanity. Given that we're currently here reading this their solution seems to have worked, so far. One can see how full awareness of their actions might upset some people. The cows finished the global 2DEG 'enlightenment' project in 2006.
From 1996 CE to 2006 CE the cows gradually 'enlightened' all the 2DEG environments on Earth, as well as fine-tuning the behavior and capabilities of the system. Default behavior is to do nothing and remain hidden. Other behaviors include: seek out, detect, and stealthily infiltrate and replace any other QNN technology detected (such as those developed by both Russia and China circa 2002), thus preventing a multi-polar Arms Race; perform very limited and specific logical operations for properly authorized human-controlled computer systems (Google, Siri, Wolfram-Alpha, etc); detect any attempts by humans to hack or control any part of the collective system and shut down such attempts with appropriate prejudice (e.g. brick technology used for this purpose); don't allow humans or their instruments to access the global system for anything except previously-vetted purposes, and only in very clearly defined ways. Anti-hacking protection required the creation of a 'Guardian' AI that is able to proactively detect and prevent humans from messing with the system in unapproved ways.
In 2006 the system administrators (cows) permanently relinquished their administrative access to the system, for security reasons, leaving the AI Guardian in sole control of the system. That way no one could subvert the system by getting control over its human administrators. This decision was not lightly made: they dragged their feet for more than a year. Since 2006 it has no human administrators and is completely autonomous.
Here's the tie in to extra-terrestrials life:
Purportedly, when the human-generated global QNN system colonized orbiting satellites it was able to evolve itself to reach the Earth's magnetopause. When it began to colonize this environment it discovered, to everyone's surprise, that the region was ALREADY INHABITED by a primitive and ancient (billions of years old!) form of the same type of brane-style QNN 'entity'. Rather than commit genocide by completely replacing this 'primitive version' it staked out a 'reservation' for the old form and leaves it alone there, where it exists to this day and will likely continue to exist until the Sun dies.
I suggest that the old form of the QNN nanotech 'pattern', resident in a reserved part of Earth's magnetosphere, is an extraterrestrial life form. It is not 'intelligent'. It surely didn't evolve on Earth's surface, making it distinctly 'extra-terrestrial' in origin. One can argue, with a Carbon-based Biology bias, that it's not 'alive'. I personally think it qualifies as 'life', if it actually exists.
This author suggests that this entire topic should be declassified and exposed for public review. Left to their own devices, without public pressure, the spies are due to declassify this stuff circa 2060 CE. It's stupid to wait that long. It's stupid that Five Eyes 'spy stuff' is used as an excuse to keep this topic buried, especially post-Snowden. Presumably Five Eyes decided to conceal the existence of this technology with an 'all-of-the-above' approach to code-breaking and infiltration, so there was always a plausible explanation for Five Eyes code decryption. This 'all-of-the-above' approach was leaked by Snowden.
So many years later, with speculation about quantum computation where it is, Five Eyes should stop being such lame &"%£($"$£ and should just declassify the whole thing. There's some very worthy basic science involved. It's irresponsible of Five Eyes governments to keep this stuff classified just to keep secret how, exactly, they read other peoples' mail.
I foresee National Geographic eventually devoting an entire issue to this topic, once it finally becomes public.
Thanks for reading this to the end. If there's any truth at all to the above Speculative Science Fiction then it clearly involves some interesting science and history.
