'Ghost Hunters'

I edited science writer Deborah Blum's stories for years at the Sacramento Bee. (Deborah won a Pulitzer Prize for one particularly outstanding series, The Monkey Wars, in the early '80s.) Now Deborah has a new book out, “Ghost Hunters," which the New York Times reviews today.

Proof of Big Bang found

National Geographic: New NASA space-probe observations of the oldest light in the cosmos are the most direct evidence yet that the universe expanded extremely quickly immediately after the big bang, physicists say. In the trillion-trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a gumball to astronomical size, according to the inflation theory. The universe then settled into a more leisurely pace of expansion over the past 13.7 billion years or so.

Bush administration tries to gag top scientist at NASA

Sunday NY Times:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said. ...

Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide. ...

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet. ...

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews. ...

Outrageous. There should be a Congressional investigation to get to the bottom of this adminsitration's unprecedented politicization of NASA and other science agencies.

Oh, wait, that can't happen. The Republicans control everything.

Following Stardust

Space junkie Susan Kitchens is following the landing of Stardust, the press briefing, and watching NASA-TV -- so you don't have to.

Review of Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is Near'

It's a good thing summer is over, because Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is anything but a beach book.

One of the most important thinkers of our time, Kurzweil has followed up his earlier works — most notably The Age of Spiritual Machines — with a work of startling breadth and audacious scope.

I obtained an advance copy of the book, so this may be the first published review of The Singularity Is Near. In it, Kurzweil explores such subjects as artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, human longevity, reengineering the digestive system, wormholes, extraterrestrial life, manipulation of the genome and, above all, the idea that we are fast approaching the day when human beings and machines will merge into a human-machine civilization with an intelligence trillions of times more powerful than the diminutive clump of grey matter we rely on today.

I briefly met Kurzweil in October 2002 at the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, where I took the photo of him above, and where he showed off a 25-year-old singer/avatar named Ramona, an early demonstration of virtual reality posing as alter ego.

At PopTech, and less so when I next saw him — in April 2004 via videoconference at a UC Berkeley session on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, where Howard Rheingold tried to educate him about the entertainment industry's assault on the commons — Kurzweil expounded on his trademark Big Idea: that technology is speeding up so quickly that the changes being wrought are occurring at an exponential pace.

Futurists make the mistake of basing their forecasts on today's rate of progress, which is itself five times greater than the average rate of change we saw in the 20th century. "But because we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, we'll see the equivalent of a century of progress — at today's rate — in only twenty-five calendar years." Thus, drugs forecast to hit the market in 50 years will likely be available in 10 years, he argues.

Thursday's London Register carried this story: CPUs smarter than 'every human brain combined' by 2060. No doubt Kurzweil would scoff at this claim, arguing it will happen well before then.

Because of the law of accelerating returns, we are hurtling headlong toward a future few of us can fathom. He writes in Chapter 1:

What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.

Kurzweil is undoubtedly right about this: We have scarcely begun to appreciate the implications of the impact that exponential technological growth will have on our future. What's less certain is whether the second part of his thesis — man and machine merging, literally, into a sort of higher consciousness — will come to pass. He writes:

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. …

There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine, nor between physical and virtual reality.

Before the Singularity occurs, Kurzweil predicts that current stock prices will triple in value over the next generation or so (under an exponential model rather than the conventional linear outlook). A machine in your pocket will crush the top human chessmaster in the world; don't bother watching, it won't be pretty.

By the end of the 2020s, he says, we will achieve a genuine synthesis of the strengths of human and machine intelligence: pattern recognition and inference on the human side, large memory with instant recall and easy data-sharing on the machine side. Nanotechnological implants will be used to augment human brains. Profound diseases and disabilities will be overcome. Soon after that, pollution will end. World hunger and poverty will be solved.

The Singularity itself will occur not in some distant Buck Rogers century but in the year 2045. That's right — during our lifetimes (if you're 50 or younger). By then, he writes, "We will transcend biology — but not our humanity." He estimates that the nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

If you like your books light and frothy, be warned, this 635-page tome can be dense as a black hole at times, brimming with graphs and mathematical formulas only an SAT overachiever could love. Kurzweil, who has approximately the same brainpower as the entire populace of Capitol Hill, does try to lighten the book's prose by sprinkling in fanciful dialogues between people like Bill Gates, Sigmund Freud, Timothy Leary, and Molly from the year 2104.

The best course is to skip the heavy-slogging stuff and go to the material that intrigues you. I was fascinated by the frightening scenario that a small number of self-replicating nanobots could multiply itself a thousand trillionfold — and, under the right circumstances, destroy the earth in only 90 minutes.

Fascinating, too, was Kurzweil's cold mathematical formulation that throws cold water on the claims of those, like the late Carl Sagan, who believe the universe is teeming with intelligent life. (Sagan estimated the Milky Way contains a million radio-broadcasting civilizations.) In a section on "Why We Are Probably Alone in the Universe," Kurzweil tells us why we haven't heard from anyone Out There. Are they really that shy?

The Drake equation, a favorite formulation of ET lovers, posits that 50 percent of the stars have planets, that each of these stars has an average of two planets that can sustain life, that on half of these planets life has actually evolved, that half of these planets has evolved intelligent life, that half of these are radio-capable, and that the average radio-capable civilization has been broadcasting for one million years. If true, there would be 1.25 million radio-capable civilizations in our galaxy.

But the estimates above are arguably very high, Kurzweil notes. If, instead, we assume that half of the stars have planets, that only one tenth of these stars has a planet able to sustain life, that on one percent of these planets life has actually evolved, that five percent of these life-evolving planets has evolved intelligent life, that half of these are radio-capable, and that the average radio-capable civilization has been broadcasting for 10,000 years, then the results are very different: there would be 1.25 radio-capable civilization in the Milky Way. "And we already know of one."

"The Singularity Is Near" hits bookstores Sept. 26. Check it out if you want to exercise that clump of grey matter before it goes out of style.

Note: Kurzweil will make two appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area soon:

• Thursday, Sept. 22, at 6 pm: An SDForum event with a book signing afterward at 8:30 pm at SAP America, Building D, 3410 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto.

• Friday, Sept. 23, at 7 pm: Stewart Brand will introduce Kurzweil at the next Long Now event, at the Herbst Theater Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Info here.

Additional articles and information:

• Singularity.com

• KurzweilAI.net

JD Lasica, who reviewed books (among many other things) as an editor with the Sacramento Bee, is the author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation.

The couch potato's path to higher IQ

Walter Kirn in the NY Times Book Review on Steven Johnson's 'Everything Bad Is Good for You': The Couch Potato Path to a Higher I.Q.

People believe 'facts' that fit their views

Wall Street Journal (subscribers only, alas): People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views

Funny thing, memory. With the second anniversary next month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it's only natural that supporters as well as opponents of the war will be reliving the many searing moments of those first weeks of battle.

The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. U.S. troops firing at a van approaching a Baghdad checkpoint and killing seven women and children. A suicide bomber nearing a Najaf checkpoint and blowing up U.S. soldiers. The execution of coalition POWs by Iraqis. The civilian uprising in Basra against Saddam's Baathist party.

If you remember it well, then we have grist for another verse for Lerner and Loewe ("We met at nine," "We met at eight," "I was on time," "No, you were late." "Ah yes, I remember it well!"). The first three events occurred. The second two were products of the fog of war: After being reported by the media, both were quickly retracted by coalition authorities as erroneous.

Yet retracting a report isn't the same as erasing it from people's memories. According to an international study to be published next month, Americans tend to believe that the last two events occurred -- even when they recall the retraction or correction. In contrast, Germans and Australians who recall the retraction discount the misinformation. It isn't that Germans and Australians are smarter. Instead, it's further evidence that what we remember depends on what we believe. ...

"People who were not suspicious of the motives behind the war continued to rely on misinformation," Prof. Lewandowsky said, "believing in things they know to have been retracted." They held fast to what they had originally heard "because it fits with their mental model," which people seek to retain "whatever it takes."

Shroud of Turin could be genuine

In 1988, scientists pronounced the Shroud of Turin a fake because radiocarbon dating put it at no older than 1290 AD.

Today, Scotsman.com reports, new analysis of the shroud -- believed by many to be the burial cloth used to wrap Jesus Christ after his crucifixion -- suggests it is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old.

Raymond Rogers, a chemist at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, who conducted the tests, said: "As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area.

"Pyrolysis mass spectrometry results from the [new] sample area, coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations, prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original shroud. ...

Revenge of the right brain

Daniel H. Pink in Wired magazine: Revenge of the right brain. Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age -- ruled by artistry, empathy and emotion.

Cloning the dead

OK, this is creepy. Tonight my wife and I watched the DVD of Godsend, a movie about a scientist (Robert DeNiro) who clones a dead child to give his parents a second chance. (Two stars out of four, by the way.)

Then I read this.

Of course, it's no surprise to me that you can clone dead people.