Life on Titan

What if Kottke is right? What if this afternoon NASA announces the discovery of living organisms on Titan (a moon of Saturn)? I find it unlikely, mostly because I do not believe we have the equipment orbiting Titan to conclusively prove little critters are moving about. Sure, the Huygens craft landed and took pictures, but barring a webcam video of some sort of Titan-dwelling, methane-powered mouse skittering about, I highly doubt we've found evidence of life.

My instinct, considering this is NASA, is that they will have no conclusive results, but will call for massive, open-ended funding to plan a long-range mission back to Saturn to do further analysis of Titan to inconclusively determine that there might be the conditions for some sort of life form to maybe have evolved, maybe be evolving, or may yet to evolve. NASA will get a cadre of experts, as Kottke has outlined, and they will describe a test method by which living organisms might be detected, then NASA will announce that the mission will take tons of money and years and Boeing or Northrup-Grumman will be the prime on the mission.

But what if there was life on Titan? What if methane-based gas creatures flitted about the sky, drinking acetylene, and occasionally eating the methanogens that skittered around the hydrocarbon ponds on the surface? Not only would it be the most important announcement in the history of our species, but it would drastically change the "definition of life" and make us reevaluate (and almost certainly increase) the number of star systems we believed to be habitable. Certainly, humans could not live on Titan, nor could any other carbon-based life form. But if other forms of life could exist on these bizarre worlds...imagine the possibilities when the Universe may have not 22 sextillion stars as previously estimated...but three times that many!


_

Read More

Game Changing Ideas, and their Impossibility

There are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred even, people on Earth who have an idea that could really change things for the better. An example would be Robert Bussard, who's Polywell fusion reactor could potentially provide clean, cheap, endless energy for humanity. Or it might not. In any case, they have basically no funding, so it doesn't really matter.
Federal research funding, it appears to me, is broken. In the first place, it is too broadly applied. While I am sure many important advancements in science have occurred in the last few decades, the fact is, it is extremely hard to get anything accomplished with 1 year and $50K. There are a zillion well-qualified researchers out there, who upon receiving Federal funding, immediately go about working on the next round of funding. This is a waste of their talent, constantly having to search for money to fund their research.
The second problem is that the Universities that host these researchers take an inordinate amount of their money. 35% or higher is actually pretty typical of the amount of skim the university immediately takes as soon as the researcher gets their check. Some schools take more than 50%.

Look, I could go all over this topic, and there are so many problems with The System now, which has basically become a means by which taxpayers augment the salaries of PhDs, but this has been covered,  and by better writers than I.

Instead I'd like to propose an impossible, practical solution: massive funding for few people. Let us pretend, for a moment, that the NIH had 3.5 billion dollars in money to dole out to quality research each year. Spread in $100k allotments, that figures to basically 35,000 researchers, nationwide, per year. How bout instead we give 350 researchers a year a grant worth ten million a piece. Those researchers would then be ineligible for other grant funding for 20 years. Certainly, the shakedown would be immense. First, only one in a hundred researchers would have funding that are currently being funded, so there'd be incredible competition. Second, all the researchers who didn't win would be forced to...I dunno...work for the winners? The schools could still skim their cream, the PhDs would still get paid...
But there would be this intense condensation of plausible ideas into funded ideas. Suddenly a researchers idea to tweak a tiny mouse protein and "see what happens" would get flagged as too inconsequential; the bold researcher who plans to genetically engineer mice capable of carrying human host organs gets funded, the protein tweaker goes and works for him/her.
The way I see it, instead of a zillion researchers on their little, poorly funded islands, each harboring a pet project or idea, you'd instead conglomerate the system, and by funding genuinely promising, game-changing ideas you'd end up with not only less bad ideas funded...but more researchers working on the good ideas.
Make sense?

Proceed to poke holes.


_

Read More

A Thought for Thanksgiving Break

A device able to combust dark matter and convert it to mechanical energy will be the single most important invention in this millennium.


_

Read More

Adult Time

Katie Roiphe:

Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and '80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second-hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves.

I remember similar things, as a child. Getting home from school and hopping on my bike, and riding wherever I wanted until dinner time. I remember dad setting me down at the farm with a .22 rifle, a box of shells, and telling me to have fun while he went and mowed the pasture. "Only kill it if you are planning to eat it," he'd say. I remember, as Katie does above, being dragged to adult parties and set loose in the backyard, told to stay out of the way unless called for.

Mark Oppenheimer agrees with Katie:

More to the point, I think these [overbearing] kinds of parents are striving to rule out eccentricity. Nobody, after all, is striving to engineer a lovable nerd, or a spacey dreamer, or an obsessive collector. But the world needs such people; in my life, I need such people. What is more, until we have a perfect science of happiness, which seems not to be coming any time soon, we have no right to assume that the Ivy-educated, well-rounded over-achiever is necessarily the happiest type; what if the chess geek is? Or the comix collector? In the meantime, over-controlling parents are just acting out their own best hunches, or, more likely, their own failed fantasies.

Too right. Where would the world be without a lovable nerd like me?!

These articles run with what appears to me to be fair regularity. Someone writer gets irritated at a parent feeding their child organic applesauce or sees a parent put anti-bacterial goop on their kids' hands every five seconds or hears about a mom who is still breast-feeding her three-year-old and thinks "back in my day..." and writes an article like this. I suspect the backlash we see here is similar to the backlash we saw amongst men a few years ago.

All of a sudden, "metrosexual" was cool, and dressing like a pansy seemed to be very popular. Manly men rebelled, and wrote articles about dressing "retrosexual" i.e. whatever Connery wore in the 60's and drinking hard alcohol. Then you got Mad Men, which basically is a huge retrosexual diatribe against modern male femininity. I imagine parents, myself included, who do not like constantly watching their child will not embrace over-parenting. A hands-off approach seems good enough to me.

And frankly, I just don't have time to constantly stimulate my daughter. She's great. Really, she is. And I love spending time with her. But I have work. I have to cook dinner. I have to clean. And then I have the things I want to do, like finish that sous-vide cooker or those Steampunk goggles. And work out. And watch football. And maybe go fishing. I have proposals to write. My own future to plan. My dreams to accomplish. My friends to hang out with.

Yes, my daughter is a priority in my life, but hey, if once in a while I can get her to zone out to an episode of Little Einsteins while I get a little more "adult time" then I'll just take the rap as a modern "bad parent" and we'll see in a few years just how horribly 'ruined' she is. I have a feeling that her over-supervised, over-stimulated peers will not have outpaced her. So I drag her along to the river once in a while, and let her get filthy. She gets cuts on her knee. She almost falls in. So what? Sue me. When she's 20, and her appreciation for nature (having been immersed in it for her entire life) makes her a better conservationist with no fear of mud or ticks or murky water than her coddled, suburban peers...we'll see how awful it was for me to "risk her life" in order to get her a little counter-culture. Maybe I'll sign her up for Scouts soon. She's three now. About time to start learning to make a fire.


_

Read More

The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 3

Love is a funny thing, at least for me. The strength of love in me is not at all a constant thing. It ebbs and flows, sometimes filling me, and sometimes it seems altogether vacant from my person. My heart, it would seem, comes in a variable size.
There are times when I am so filled with love it almost chokes me. I want to love everyone. I want everyone to know that I love them. I get this foggy feeling in my head and my eyes wet, and I believe, really believe, that if we all just had a little more love in us then hate, rage, loneliness, war, fear, and greed would all fade like yesterday's bruises. We'd all just need to take care of each other, we'd all empathize with one another, we'd all just...love each other.
But then there are the times when I love no one, not even myself. I push away. I resent. I boil. People's kindest words are meaningless and almost ironically stupid to me. I wonder what happened to the love I used to feel in me.
I know other people have these ranges too. Whether their love fluctuates like mine is another question altogether. But I imagine it does. Love is a hard thing to feel all the time.
By no stretch of the imagination do I think this is a topic I am the first to cover. Love has been with us since the beginning. Love is, quite possibly, the unique trait of humanity that lifts us above any other species. Sure, members of other species can be affectionate to one another, or even miss them when they are gone. I've seen my parents dog sulk about their house for days when my dad goes on hunting trips without her.
But uniquely, we have the power to turn on and off huge reserves of love for perfect strangers.


I wonder if love (and many other emotions) falls under the rule I learned in high school tennis: practice like you want to perform. Doesn't it make sense that if a person, especially a person like me who does not love especially easy, practices loving a bunch, then the act of love-practice will eventually lead to actual loving? The idea seems sound, and just logical enough that I could attempt it. And wouldn't I be blessed if at the end of this experiment I found myself in a state where I perpetually was filled with love, for everyone? Think of the good I could do, with my mind so oriented.
But my mind recoils from such an idea. Why is it that I so enjoy the feeling of love, either received or given, but yet I also cherish the ability to cleanly and tidily not love someone? What makes me want to retain that right? Why would I possibly want to not love?
Perhaps the reason is that love is a scary thing when you cannot control it. What do you do with yourself if you love your enemy? If someone wrongs you, but you love them...how do you simultaneously hate them? How can you enjoy schadenfreude if you love someone that suffers? How can you hold a deliciously overlong grudge, if you love someone?

It seems to me, that if I practice hard, and learn to love all the time, I may have to give up on evil. That is a heavy price to pay for happiness.


_

Read More

The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 2

When I was a junior in high school, I ran for senior class President. It was on a whim, really, because I didn't have huge aspirations for myself politically, nor did I have any especially great ideas for improvement at the school. What I did have was a cutting-edge strategy for getting elected: comedy comedy comedy. High school kids really don't care about issues. At least, not as much as they care about laughing. So posters like "Do you like air? So does Alex Waller, vote for him to continue free breathing." and "Vote For Waller To End The Vietnam War" were met with almost universal praise.
Come the day of the election, we gave speeches. My speech waxed hilarious, and included excerpts from the final speech given by Chris Farley at the end of the movie "Tommy Boy." I suggested in my speech that my impending election was the only thing that could prevent the coming invasion of robotic couch potatoes. People rolled in the aisles. I felt victory was at hand.
Unbeknownst to me, two of my competitors had seen blood in the water. After the votes were cast, but before the results were announced, they made a quiet trip to the Principal's office and convinced her to "pool" their votes; they want to be co-Presidents. Later, we were told that because of this the votes for class president had to be recounted: it was now too close to call. I thought quickly, and grabbed another class president candidate and told the Principal that he and I had decided to "pool" our votes, which would guarantee a victory for me, and as he had not been close enough to matter, would guarantee a huge coup for him. The Principal, paragon of fairness...said "no, Alex." Needless to say, I lost the election to those two "co-Presidents."
I still remember the feeling in my gut. My mother would call it "moral anger." Clearly I had been cheated. The after-the-polling shenanigans, combined with the unfairness of not allowing me the same shenanigan rights, had caused a clearly unfair result.

What drives me, all too often, to make long-term judgements about people, is rage. Rage does not fill my life. Rage does not own me. I spend most of my days in a state of permanent bemusement, or perhaps cynicism. Often I force my self into intentional naivete or optimism in order to power through rough times.
But once in a while, I get the rage.

Fortunately, I am not alone. Rage is a cascade effect, when a person's brain has become so overwhelmingly saturated with adrenaline and other hormones, and the situation seems inescapable. In the terms of nature, rage is when we emotionally are asked to choose fight or flight, and boy do we choose fight. It does not surprise me that rage has long-term effects: strong emotions lead to stronger wiring of synaptic pathways in the brain. I cannot possibly name 20 people from my high school class of over 400, but I can easily name the two people who combined votes to win over me in that election. I can describe their faces.

I'm not going to now write about the need for people to try to avoid rage. Or to make it fade quickly when it comes. Rather, I am going to say this: when rage fills you, embrace it. Let it wash over you. Rage lets you know you are alive. Don't try to calm yourself down. Don't try to deny how you feel. Rage proves that you can feel. Now, actively pursuing rage is probably not a good idea. The aftereffects of repetitive rage are pretty hard on the body and mind.
But should I just have rolled over after the election was taken from me? Should Jesus have kept his mouth shut on the Cross, or was his cry of rage "My God, my God why have You forsaken me?!" totally justified? Imagine Jesus calmly and politely asking the moneychangers and sellers of doves to vacate the temple, at their convenience. Rage, like logic and serenity, can be a tool too.
Rage is like that Tanqueray commercial where "Tony Sinclair" says "everything in moderation." True rage, when it comes, is a wonder to behold. But when it comes, it must expend itself in order for its host to recover, and move on.
So have I moved on? Am I still pissed about that inconsequential, stupid election for a pointless position? The fact that I was angry about losing seems laughable now, as both of the co-Presidents had been expelled by the middle of senior year. Which led to another emotion altogether: schadenfreude.


_

Read More

The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 1

Earlier in the year, I wrote a soliloquy musing on darkness. In it, I described that when darkness fell on me during an overnight fishing trip, the weight of the world pressing in on me was enormous, and overwhelming. Perhaps part of being human is a fear of the dark...and that is all it was. But instead (and since I've never really known a real great fear of the dark), I wonder if what pressed in on me was loneliness.

There are times in my life when loneliness creeps in, and it usually has nothing to do with the number of other people around me. For instance, one vivid memory is on the bus ride home from Science Olympiad State Championships in 1998, when like a rushing wave I was struck by incredible loneliness, even though I had a dozen teammates all around me on the bus.
Or there is the time I spent a day at work chatting online with a great friend. We talked about everything. Then I went home and we chatted some more. It was great. It was one of those rare moments when you and someone else are so exactly on the same page about...well, everything...that the conversation flows freely and honestly, and never dulls.
The next day, I was back at work, and my friend was not online. All day I felt incredibly lonely, sitting there at my desk, trying to get work done. A couple times I just stopped working and sat there, staring at the screen and musing on the hollow cavity in my chest. How do you do a job alone today that you did with a companion right there with you yesterday? Even though my friend and I were miles apart during our chat, the social interaction had apparently been critical to my emotional state. Why was that?

I wonder, perhaps, if this is all just chemicals in my head. But I also wonder if loneliness proves I have a soul. Because some part of me, that day, needed to talk to my friend. I was at work, surrounded by people, literally hundreds of people, many of whom are close to me. I could have socialized with any of them. Yet none of them would do. My soul ached for my friend whose soul was a mirror of my own.

So I wonder: do we share connections with each other that are hard to separate? Could it be that the interaction of two souls intertwines them, in some way, such that loneliness is in fact the sensation we feel when that knot is unraveled? Perhaps the same way absence of a drug leads to a painful withdraw, absence of a soul leads to a similar state; we crave what we had grown accustomed to accessing easily.
I do not struggle daily with loneliness. Perhaps that is why when it does afflict me it is all the more poignant. And the rarity of it is what makes me stop and evaluate my relationships with the people I long for. Makes me wonder how they have become such a strong influence on my happiness. And makes me scheme a way to get them back.


_

Read More