Dear
Friends,
Maybe the
best UFO blog on the net?
Be Well.
David
Followers
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
18:12:2012 -- IBM reveals five innovations that will change our lives within five years
Dear Friends,
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-reveals-five-innovations-that-will-change-our-lives-within-five-years
Be Well.
David
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-reveals-five-innovations-that-will-change-our-lives-within-five-years
Be Well.
David
IBM reveals five innovations that will change our lives within five years
The era of cognitive systems: when computers will, in their own way, see, smell, touch, taste and hear
December 18, 2012
IBM announced today the seventh annual “IBM 5 in 5”
— a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way
people work, live and interact during the next five years, based on
market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s R&D labs. This one is focused on cognitive systems.
In the next five years, industries such as retail will be transformed
by the ability to “touch” a product through your mobile device, using
haptic, infrared and pressure-sensitive technologies to simulate touch —
such as the texture and weave of a fabric as a shopper brushes their
finger over the image of the item on a device screen.
Each object will have a unique set of vibration patterns that
represents the touch experience: short fast patterns, or longer and
stronger sets of vibrations. The vibration pattern will differentiate
silk from linen or cotton, helping simulate the physical sensation of
actually touching the material.
Current uses of haptic and graphic technology in the gaming industry, for example, will take the end user into a simulated environment.
We take 500 billion photos a year[1]. 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute[2]. The global medical diagnostic imaging market is expected to grow to $26.6 billion by 2016[3].
In the next five years, “brain-like” capabilities will let computers
analyze features in visual media such as color, texture patterns, or
edge information and extract insights. This will have a profound impact
for industries such as healthcare, retail and agriculture.
These capabilities will be put to work in healthcare by making sense
out of massive volumes of medical information, such as MRIs, CT scans,
X-Rays and ultrasound images, to capture information tailored to
particular anatomy or pathologies. By being trained to discriminate what
to look for in images — such as differentiating healthy from diseased
tissue — and correlating that with patient records and scientific
literature, systems that can “see” will help doctors detect medical
problems with far greater speed and accuracy.
Within five years, a distributed system of clever sensors will detect elements of sound such as sound pressure, vibrations and sound waves
at different frequencies. It will interpret these inputs to predict
when trees will fall in a forest or when a landslide is imminent. Such a
system will “listen” to our surroundings and measure movements, or the
stress in a material, to warn us if danger lies ahead.
Raw sounds will be detected by sensors, much like the human brain. A
system that receives this data will take into account other modalities,
such as visual or tactile information, and classify and interpret the
sounds based on what it has learned. When new sounds are detected, the
system will form conclusions based on previous knowledge and the ability
to recognize patterns.
For example, “baby talk” will be understood as a language, telling
parents or doctors what infants are trying to communicate. Sounds can be
a trigger for interpreting a baby’s behavior or needs. By being taught
what baby sounds mean — whether fussing indicates a baby is hungry, hot,
tired or in pain — a sophisticated speech recognition system would
correlate sounds and babbles with other sensory or physiological
information such as heart rate, pulse and temperature.
In the next five years, by learning about emotion and being able to
sense mood, systems will pinpoint aspects of a conversation and analyze
pitch, tone and hesitancy to help us have more productive dialogues that
could improve customer call center interactions, or allow us to
seamlessly interact with different cultures.
For example, today, IBM scientists are beginning to capture underwater noise levels in Galway Bay, Ireland
to understand the sounds and vibrations of wave energy conversion
machines, and the impact on sea life, by using underwater sensors that
capture sound waves and transmit them to a receiving system to be
analyzed.\
What if we could make healthy foods taste delicious using a different kind of computing system that is built for creativity?
IBM researchers are developing a computing system that detects
flavor, to be used with chefs to create the most tasty and novel
recipes. It will break down ingredients to their molecular level and
blend the chemistry of food compounds with the psychology behind what
flavors and smells humans prefer. By comparing this with millions of
recipes, the system will be able to create new flavor combinations that
pair, for example, roasted chestnuts with other foods such as cooked
beetroot, fresh caviar, and dry-cured ham.
A system like this can also be used to help us eat healthier,
creating novel flavor combinations that will make us crave a vegetable
casserole instead of potato chips.
The computer will be able to use algorithms to determine the precise
chemical structure of food and why people like certain tastes. These
algorithms will examine how chemicals interact with each other, the
molecular complexity of flavor compounds and their bonding structure,
and use that information, together with models of perception to predict
the taste appeal of flavors.
Not only will it make healthy foods more palatable — it will also
surprise us with unusual pairings of foods actually designed to maximize
our experience of taste and flavor. In the case of people with special
dietary needs, such as individuals with diabetes, it would develop
flavors and recipes to keep their blood sugar regulated, but satisfy
their sweet tooth.
During the next five years, tiny sensors embedded in your computer or
cell phone will detect if you’re coming down with a cold or other
illness. By analyzing odors, biomarkers and thousands of molecules in
someone’s breath, doctors will have help diagnosing and monitoring the
onset of ailments such as liver and kidney disorders, asthma, diabetes
and epilepsy by detecting which odors are normal and which are not.
In the next five years, IBM technology will “smell” surfaces for
disinfectants to determine whether rooms have been sanitized. Using
novel wireless “mesh” networks, data on various chemicals will be
gathered and measured by sensors, and continuously learn and adapt to
new smells over time.
Due to advances in sensor and communication technologies in
combination with deep learning systems, sensors can measure data in
places never thought possible. For example, computer systems can be used
in agriculture to “smell” or analyze the soil condition of crops. In
urban environments, this technology will be used to monitor issues with
refuge, sanitation and pollution — helping city agencies spot potential
problems before they get out of hand.
Today IBM scientists are already sensing environmental conditions and gases to preserve works of art. This innovation is beginning to be applied to tackle clinical hygiene, one of the biggest challenges in healthcare today.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which in 2005 was associated with almost
19,000 hospital stay-related deaths in the United States, is commonly
found on the skin and can be easily transmitted wherever people are in
close contact. One way of fighting MRSA exposure in healthcare
institutions is by ensuring medical staff follow clinical hygiene
guidelines.
18:12:2012 -- Is 'reality' unreal? Scientists work on a way to find out
Dear Friends,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50232422/ns/technology_and_science-science#.UNDIDG-CSSo
Be Well.
David
Is 'reality' unreal? Scientists work on a way to find out
Warner Bros.
A crew member of the Osiris hovercraft is
surrounded by monitors in an animated film based on "The Matrix." The
"Matrix" film series suggested that our everyday experience is basically
a computer simulation. Researchers are now proposing a way to test that
way-out hypothesis.
What if everything — all of us, the world, the universe — was
not real? What if everything we are, know and do was really just
someone's computer simulation?
The notion that our reality was some kid on a couch in the far future
playing with a computer game like a gigantic Sim City, or Civilization,
and we are the player's characters, isn't new. But some physicists now
think they know of a way to test the concept. Three of them propose to
test reality by simulating the simulators.
Martin Savage, professor of physics at the University of Washington,
Zohreh Davoudi, one of his graduate students, and Silas Beane of the
University of New Hampshire would like to see whether they can find
traces of simulation in cosmic rays. The work was uploaded in arXiv, an online archive for drafts of academic research papers.
The notion that reality is something other than we think it is goes
far back in philosophy, including Plato and his Parable of the Cave,
which claimed reality was merely shadows of real objects on a cave wall.
Sixteenth-century philosopher-mathematician René Descartes thought he
proved reality with his famous "I think, therefore I am," which proposed
that he was real and his thoughts had a reality.
Then, in 2003, a British philosopher, Nick Bostrom of the University
of Oxford, published a paper that had the philosophy and computer
science departments buzzing.
The Matrix hypothesis
Bostrom suggested three possibilities:
"The chances that a species at our current level of development can
avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly
small," "almost no technologically mature civilizations are interested
in running computer simulations of minds like ours,” or we are "almost
certainly" a simulation.
All three could be equally possible, he wrote, but if the first two
are false, the third must be true. "There will be an astronomically huge
number of simulated minds like ours," Bostrom wrote.
His suggestion was that our descendants, far in the future, would
have the computer capacity to run simulations that complex, and that
there might be millions of simulations, and millions of virtual
universes with billions of simulated brains in them.
Bostrom's paper came out four years after the popular film, "The
Matrix," in which humans discover they were simulations run by
malevolent machines. The popularity of the film possibly contributed to
the attention to Bostrom’s paper received at the time, but nothing came
of it.
"He put it together in clear terms and came out with probabilities of
what is likely and what is not," Savage said. "He crystallized it, at
least in my mind."
Looking for anomalies
In the movie and in Savage's proposal, the discovery that
reality was virtual came when unexpected errors showed up in life,
demonstrating imperfections in the simulation.
-
Science news from NBCNews.com
-
Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: You might not think something wonderful can be found in a ball of slime — but a prize-winning video of the microscopic creatures in a slimeball proves it's possible. - Is 'reality' unreal? Scientists aim to find out
- Thar's gold in them thar termite nests!
- The earthquake that killed the king
-
Savage and his colleagues assume that any future simulators would use
some of the same techniques current scientists use to run simulations,
with the same constraints. The future simulators, Savage indicated,
would map their universe on a mathematical lattice or grid, consisting
of points and lines. This would not be an everyday grid but a
"hypercube" consisting of four dimensions, three for space, and one to
represent points in time.
A present-day example is lattice quantum chromodynamics, which
explores the effects of the strong nuclear force, one of the four
fundamental forces in the universe, on tiny elementary particles such as
quarks and gluons. In this approach, the particles jump from point to
point on a grid, without passing through the space between them. The
simulations cause time to pass in a similar way, like the frames of film
passing through a movie camera, so that the time that passed between
frames is not part of the simulation. This style of simulation requires
less computer power than treating space and time as a continuum.
Because Savage and his colleague assume that future simulators will
use a similar approach, he suggests looking at the behavior of very
high-energy cosmic ray particles to see whether there is a grid in the
energy as a start.
"You look at the very highest-energy cosmic rays and look for
distributions that have symmetry problems, which are not isotropic," or
the same in every direction, he said.
"Everything looks like it is on a continuum,” Savage said. "There is
no evidence to show that is not the case at the moment. We are looking
for something to indicate you don't have a space-time continuum."
Disturbance in the force
That disturbance in the force might be a hint that
something in reality is amiss. If the cosmic ray energy levels travel
along the grid, like following streets in Manhattan or Salt Lake City,
it probably is unlikely to be a simulation; if they unexpectedly travel
diagonally, reality may be a computer program.
Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota who
was not involved in the paper, said a test such as the one Savage
suggests may not prove anything. If they don't find the signatures, it
doesn't mean we are not a simulation; our descendants could have used a
different grid. If they do find something it also could mean “that's the
way space-time is and we never noticed before,” he said.
Two other questions arise. One is whether it is conceivable that
computers powerful enough to simulate our hugely complex universe ever
will exist. If so, it likely will be very far in the future.
The second question is linked: Will it ever be possible to simulate
human consciousness? After all, we run around thinking and feeling.
"Ultimately, the paper glides over the most interesting point: assume
we have infinite computing power and we can create this hypercube,"
Kakalios said. "They assume [the simulators] would know how to simulate
human consciousness."
We are aware of ourselves, he said, aware of our bodies, aware of
what is outside of our bodies, he said. Human consciousness is almost
indescribably complex.
For generations, science-fiction books — and some science books —
have hypothesized inserting our consciousness into computers so that we
essentially live forever. In "Caprica," a prequel to the television
program "Battlestar Galactica," a girl's consciousness is preserved in a
computer — and it becomes the basis for the evil cyborgs.
"We don't understand consciousness,” Kakalios said. "Neuroscience is
where physics was before quantum mechanics. It's a more interesting
problem than whether you can simulate protons and quarks."
Either way, however, Kakalios said the experiments on cosmic rays are
the kinds of projects scientists should be doing, regardless of the
simulation issue.
Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the
author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has
taught science journalism at Stanford University, the University of
California at Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
This report was originally published Dec. 14 by Inside Science News Service as "What If Reality Was Really Just Sim Universe?"
17:12:2012 -- Chemtrails, Aerosol Geoengineering and Bioengineering: A Massive Biological Experiment of Unknown Purpose
Dear Friends,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemtrails-aerosol-geoengineering-and-bioengineering-a-massive-biological-experiment-of-unknown-purpose/5315539
Be Well.
David
http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemtrails-aerosol-geoengineering-and-bioengineering-a-massive-biological-experiment-of-unknown-purpose/5315539
Be Well.
David
Chemtrails, Aerosol Geoengineering and Bioengineering: A Massive Biological Experiment of Unknown Purpose
“The ultimate solution is a multiplication of leverage by citizens to the point where it simply cannot be denied”. -Clifford Carnicom
The materials disbursed in stratospheric
aerosol geoengineering operations contain a combination of ionizable
metallic salts, filaments, gel-type materials, and crystals. These are
the longstanding and deeply interrogated observations of independent
environmental research scientist Clifford Carnicom given on a December
10 conference call organized by GlobalSkywatch.com
director Russ Tanner. During the meeting, coincidentally held on
International Human Rights Day, Carnicom asserted that because the
system of responsible government has failed, the immediate collective
efforts of citizens are necessary “to claim their rights upon this
planet.”[1]
His remarks were made just three months after his presentation at the Consciousness Beyond Chemtrails conference
held in Los Angeles last summer. In that talk, “Geoengineering and
Bioengineering: The Unmistakable Link,” Carnicom upheld his research
detecting such a correlation. “’Is there a direct relationship between
the alteration of living systems (us) and ecosystems (the
environment)?’” he asks. “My answer is unequivocally, ‘Yes.’”
Mr. Carnicom’s work began in 1999 when
he noted clear changes in the skies overhead. He has since produced a
large body of sound and meticulous yet accessible research reports
examining the nature and contents of such aerosols, all of which are
available at carnicominstitute.org.
The implications of his
observations—that virtually every breathing organism is an unwitting
participant in a massive biological experiment of unknown purpose—have
proven terrifying enough to prevent many individuals from even
tentatively considering his investigations and hypotheses. “There’s a
personal journey everyone has to take about the reality of this,”
Carnicom told call participants.
The most well-known manifestation of
such nano-biologicals is the oft-misunderstood Morgellons ailment, an
especially unusual and disturbing condition marked by painful dermal
lesions through which such nano-fibers protrude. Tammy, a participant on
the conference call suffering from Morgellons who became intimately
informed about the sickness because of Carnicom’s work, asked if the
broader population was also susceptible.
“I want to be as accurate as possible if
I’m going to make a public declaration,” Carnicom stated. “The
diplomatic way of saying this is that the evidence indicates that the
general population is subject to the very same symptoms that Tammy is
experiencing.”
How can one determine whether they are
an unknowing subject of bioengineering? In 2008 Carnicom presented a
simple technique developed by naturopathic physician Gwen Scott for the
lay population to detect the presence of nano-fibers in their bodies. A
mouthwash consisting of two teaspoons dry red wine and one teaspoon
hydrogen peroxide vigorously applied for five minutes yielded observable
clumps of fibrous strands comprised of an “encasing filament,
sub-micron filament network, Chlamydia-like structures and the ‘hybrid
form’” in fourteen subjects tested from diverse geographic locations
across the US.
According to Carnicom such organisms
“have now been discovered repeatedly across all major body systems and
functions, including skin, blood, hair, saliva, dental(gum),
digestive, ear and urinary samples.” [2]
US Government’s Conflicted Interest
Shortly after Carnicom began his
research in the late 1990s major government and corporate entities with
probable ties to this program made numerous repeated visits to the
researcher’s website. Their interest suggests the threat Carnicom’s
investigations posed in making such programs publicly known. IP
addresses employed to peruse the site included offices as high as the
Secretary of Defense and Air Force Headquarters, as well as over one
dozen US Air Force bases, several US-based research laboratories, the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the corporate offices of
Lockheed, Boeing, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Arco Chemical, Kaiser
Permanente, and the Mayo Clinic.[3]
Yet such curiosity fails to permeate the US agencies entrusted with the preservation of the environment and public health. Even though Carnicom is producing especially valuable research and has persistently called for regulatory intervention on the public’s behalf, the EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been wholly dismissive of his findings and requests to actively enforce existing laws intended to protect the environment and public health. Nor have these agencies presented comparable evidence of their own refuting Carnicom’s findings and justifying their failure to act upon the standards under which they are purportedly governed.
Yet such curiosity fails to permeate the US agencies entrusted with the preservation of the environment and public health. Even though Carnicom is producing especially valuable research and has persistently called for regulatory intervention on the public’s behalf, the EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been wholly dismissive of his findings and requests to actively enforce existing laws intended to protect the environment and public health. Nor have these agencies presented comparable evidence of their own refuting Carnicom’s findings and justifying their failure to act upon the standards under which they are purportedly governed.
For example, when Carnicom sent the EPA
samples of fibrous pollutants for analysis several years ago the agency
responded, “It is not our policy to identify unsolicited materials.”
Carnicom characterized this key instance of bureaucratic denial as “a
powerhouse of innuendo and obfuscation that has never been resolved.
When you have a specific mission statement you do not adopt a policy
that suits the person in office at the time.”
Along these lines in early 2012 the CDC
announced the findings of its inquiry into Morgellons by stating that it
could not identify an origin for the fibers and concluding that
individuals demonstrably suffering from the condition were “delusional.”
Environmental writer Randy Ananda commented that the obfuscation merely
provided cover for the Department of Defense’s ongoing
experimentation.[4]
The US Government and Human Experimentation
The US government and military have long
possessed the capacity and demonstrated the will to violate the
Nuremberg Code by using nerve, biological, and radiological agents on
unsuspecting human subjects.The fluoridation of public water supplies
and above-ground nuclear testing are but a few dramatic and irrefutable
examples. The premeditated will to do so further resounds in the
government’s overt sponsorship of over 700 Nazi scientists under
Operation Paperclip. The fruits of their research included the noxious
and debilitating mycoplasma stealth pathogen derived from the
brucellosis bacterium that likely infects many today.
Further, the US military’s ability to
administer lethal substances on civilian populations is well
established. In 1969 testimony before the House Defense Appropriations
Committee the Pentagon’s Deputy Director of Research and Technology Dr.
Donald MacArthur explained how “[l]ethal chemicals … about ten times
more potent than the most toxic of World War I gases” could be released
“in artillery shells or bombs, rockets, or you can deliver them from
spray tanks … [T]o attack a complete city of many millions of people,”
MacArthur continued, “let’s say a densely populated city like New
York—it would take 300 to 400 tons efficiently dispersed to immobilize
the city.”[5]
There are likewise numerous historical
instances of the US government using citizens as nothing short of guinea
pigs. For example, in 1994 Freedom of Information Act requests forced
the US Army to divulge how in the mid-1950s it sprayed hundreds of
pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide into a densely populated and
predominantly black district of St. Louis.
“I’m wondering if it got into our
system,” said former resident Lisa Martino-Taylor, who lost four
brothers and sisters to cancer early in their lives and suspects that
radioactive particulates were mixed with the metallic substance. “When I
learned about the testing, I thought ‘Oh my god. If they did that,
there’s no telling what else they’re hiding.’”
The Army claimed that it only used
blowers atop buildings to distribute the toxins. Yet a resident of
another targeted neighborhood in St. Louis, Mary Helen Brindell,
recalled a summer day playing baseball with other kids in the street when a squadron of green Army planes flew close to the ground and dropped a powdery substance. She went inside, washed it off her face and arms, and then went back out to play. Over the years Brindell has battled four types of cancer—breast, thyroid, skin and uterine. “I feel betrayed,” said Brindell, who is white. “We pointed our finger during the Holocaust, and we do something like this?[6]
With such instances in mind the question
is no longer, “Would the government partake in such human
experimentation that may be injurious or fatal to its own population?”
It is instead, “What safeguards and systems of accountability exist that
would prevent the government from using members of the general
population as unwitting lab animals?” The bureaucratic shenanigans of
the EPA and CDC and the abandonment of their respective mandates to
protect the environment and public health make the answer more than
obvious.
“Our World Has Been Transformed”
In a 2011 paper Carnicom demonstrates
how the filament samples likely originating from aerial spraying are
identical to those found in Morgellons’ victims. “The fact that this
traces itself to a repeatedly occurring environmental sample represents,
in my opinion, the worst crime in human history.”[7]
Indeed, such observations suggest how
the unspeakable horrors of Dacchau and Auschwitz are not the stuff of a
seemingly distant historical past. As Carnicom’s deep research suggests,
such profound crimes have been resurrected in the skies above and
worlds within. “Our biology is being negatively affected by this
intrusion into our lives,” Carnicom warns, “whether it will be fifteen
or fifty years.”
Drawing a conclusion to his remarks on
the GlobalSkywatch call, Mr. Carnicom responded to an attendee
articulating frustrations shared by many conscious and concerned
citizens. “How do we get this to stop? How do we get the government to
respond to us?”
“I will be inadequate in terms of what I can offer,” Carnicom began.
I have an obligation as a human being to do what is within my means to make the world a better place. As an individual I have that obligation, and so I do that to the best of my ability, so much so that it has occupied the past 15 years of my life and I have to spend a good part of it managing a non-profit. I’m one person that has certain particular talents and a background. I’m not the best public speaker in the world. I’m not the best activist in the world. I’m not the best money raiser in the world. But I do some things hopefully reasonably well.
To start answering this question I have to extend it to each one of you. Do you remember the old JFK [challenge]? I know it’s a cliché but clichés sometimes have some meaning. “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Just skip the patriotic aspect of it and ask yourself what you’re going to do.The first thing that I would do is extend to every one of us the necessity for involvement and using your talents.
The second thing is that our world has been transformed now. Normal things don’t work. Frustration does not eliminate the call for duty that exists upon each of us … This is more a level of consciousness and awareness; of planting a seed, but the level that is going to be required is so different in this world than anything that has been imagined in terms of the demand for the right to a healthful and peaceful existence on this planet. It’s going to have to happen at a level that we’re not thinking of right now because the normal processes are not working. The Million Man March doesn’t cut it. I wish that I could answer simply what it is going to be. But it is going to [require] a shift in consciousness and awareness that is so forthright and direct that all of the games and manipulations–and the business of three, four, six companies controlling the media–no longer works and no longer applies. I don’t want for it to be decades in our future.
Notes
[1] Clifford E. Carnicom, Remarks to GlobalSkyWatch Weekly Phone Meeting, December 10, 2012, http://globalskywatch.com/go/ Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from this December 10 event.
[2] Clifford E. Carnicom, “’Morgellons’:The Wine – Peroxide Test,”
Carnicom Institute, March 9, 2008. For an example of Morgellons
plaguing an entire family see, “Famous Baseball Player Gets Morgellons,”
KTVU San Francisco/Youtube, October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnR8vhrS4go
[3] “Visitors to www.carnicom.com,” n.d., http://www.carnicominstitute.org/articles/visitors.htm
[4] Rady Ananda, “CDC Calls Morgellons’ Nanoworms a Delusion—Protects DARPA,” Activist Post, January 30, 2012,
[5] United States House of Representatives, Ninety-First Congress,
Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, First
Session. In Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2011, 65-66.
[6] Jim Salter, “The Army Sprayed St. Louis with Toxic Aerosol During a Just Revealed 1950s Study,” Business Insider/Associated Press, October 4, 2012.
[7] Clifford E. Carnicom, “The Biggest Crime of All Time,” Carnicom Institute, March 1, 2011.
17:12:2012 -- Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?
Dear Friends,
Is it Live or is it Memorex?...
http://www.livescience.com/25589-are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation.html
Be Well.
David
Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?
Ray Villard, Discovery News
Date: 17 December 2012 Time: 10:11 AM ET
|
|
CREDIT: Warner Bros.
|
The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.
Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What's more, we may be able to detect it.
In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone
twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might
construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their
remote ancestors lived.
He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization.
If it didn't happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved
that far and we're doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.
To extrapolate further, I'd suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.
As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced
that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The
Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.
CREDIT: J.F. Colonna.
The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with
their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all
possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from
which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. "This is
perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient
being," write the authors.
Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe
might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen
of the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow
range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as
unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and
life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and
galaxies.
This is called the Anthropic principle.
The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the
universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time
apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something.
This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker
that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist
Michael Turner ranks dark energy as "the most profound mystery in all of
science."
We are also living at a very special time in the universe's history
where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push
of dark energy. This begs the question "why me why now?" (A phrase
popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994
when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)
If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown
apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have
imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as
circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of
dark energy that is typically destructive. It's as if our universe won
the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to
exist.
Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox
(where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone
in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.
Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their "theory" of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our "God" really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?
CREDIT: Boston University
Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics,
and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a
very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than
the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage.
Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the
Sim Universe.
If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence
for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum,
say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the
energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model
universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise
would be expected to do according to present cosmology.
If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any
and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with
the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely
faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a
biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question "why does God need a lattice?")
If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it
could be running other simulations as well to create other universes
parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.
If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined "stacked"
levels of reality, "we would have to suspect that the post-humans
running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their
creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a
large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing
over time."
To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities,
"In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods.
However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of
reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at
lower levels."
If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform
could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix's manic Agent
Smith doesn’t materialize one day.
To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov's novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.
Editor's note: Whoa.
This story was provided by Discovery News.
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