My guest today is Nikola Danaylov (who also goes by the pseudonym Socrates), host of The Singularity 1 on 1 Podcast and SingularitySymposium.com and SingularityWEBLOG.com.

He was born in Bulgaria, but moved to Toronto in 1998 where he obtained degrees in Political Science, Philosophy and Economics. About 18 months ago he started the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast and since then has interviewed major big brains, from Kurzweil and Vinge to Wolfram and Stross.

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Researchers at the University of Texas Dallas recently demonstrated that transparent carbon nanotube sheets, which can have the density of air and the specific strength of steel, can be used to make objects invisible.

WOAH!!

This news is a couple of weeks old but somehow I must have missed it.

Their website goes on to say:

“This invisibility for light oblique to the nanotube sheets is caused by the mirage effect, in which a thermally generated refractive index gradient bends light array from a hidden object.”

Okay, so it only works on the oblique, so you’re not going to use this to sneak up on anyone anytime soon, but this still blows my mind.

Of course, the research is being funded by “Office of Naval Research, NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research”. Uh huh. Invisible battleships, anyone? I hated playing BATTLESHIP as a kid.

Adam Ford, who invited me to speak at last year’s Singularity Summit in Melbourne, is also organising this year’s H+ Summit in Melbourne, June 25 – 26. He asked me to post some info about it:

The H+ Summit @ Melbourne brings together an eclectic mix of rationalists, futurists, science fiction writers, AI experts, scientists, biotechnology experts, philosophers and theorists to pursue deep philosophical, scientific and technological inquiry, with the aim of being able to discern those changes which are likely to have profound impacts and those which are merely transient and or fashionable.

Technological innovation permeates all aspects of society — from tiny water purification packets and 3d printers, to GPS tracking devices, wearable smart devices, decision support systems, replaceable body parts and personal genome tests. Because technology and society evolve together, it has become increasingly important to develop a greater understanding of how technology is shaping the course of our lives. We are faced with the challenge to continuously become innovative in harnessing and controlling technological development as it accelerates on many diverse fronts. The “pioneers of the future” are faced with the necessity to become ever more resourceful. Even the most conservative thinkers agree that we have already stepped into an era of a profound change. The good news is that our human diversity continues to spawn both inventiveness and novelty.

This conference is brought to you by Humanity+ @ Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). Humanity+ explores how society might use and profit from a variety of creative and innovative thought. Join us for this adventurous journey into the future where you can make a difference! This conference will challenge and enhance your view of the future.

Seating is limited, so Secure your tickets now! >>

www.humanityplus.org.au

Partial list of Speakers and subjects:

• Sean McMullen – “Doing It Now” - (As of writing, a Hugo Nominee for short story)
• Hugo de Garis – Nanotech, Femtotech – Lots of room at the bottom, | Quantum Topological Computing – Much More than Moore’s Law
• Meredith Doig – “Rationalism, Transhumanism & the Singuarlity” – (President of the Rationalist Society Australia)
• Colin Kline – “Logics - Boonlean (Pascalian) logic, Fuzzy Logic and Bayes” – Academic
• Greg Adamson – “Technology and social control“ – (Chairman of the Society for Social Implications of Technology IEEE)
• Binh Nguyen – “Evolutionary AI” – (PHD)
• Lev Lafayette – “More Human Than Human: The Computation of Moral Reasoning” – Philosopher
• Slade Beard – “Architecting the Future” (Complex Systems) - (IEEE)
• Avatar Polymorph – “The ethics of boosting animals from sentience to self-aware consciousness”
• Tony Smith – “The Plurality: Why everyting is all over the place” – (Chaos, Complex Systems)
• Jon Oxer – “The Maker Revolution”
• Andy Gelme – “The Internet of Things”
• Jeremy Nagel – “Open Source Biotech”

Unfortunately I can’t make it due to Perdomo Lounge responsibilities, otherwise I’d be there with bells on.

Science nerd that I am, I’m often trying to convince people that time doesn’t exist.

In 1952, in his book Relativity, Einstein writes:
Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent “now” objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.

When his lifelong friend Besso died, Einstein wrote a letter to Besso’s family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, “…for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”

This idea of no past and no future ties in nicely with non-dualistic philosophy (see The Advaita Show) and actually has major consequences for how we live our lives. If the future has already happened, what’s the point worrying about it? That’s part of the LOTU philosophy I’ve been developing.

If you don’t believe me (or Einstein), try to wrap your mind around this news:

Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object’s light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.

The tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way. The new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

Here’s a great video that zooms into the sky to show you the location of the galaxy:

So here’s the deal: when astronomers look into the Hubble at this object, they are looking back into time. Their “present” co-exists with an event that happened 13 billion years ago. From that galaxy’s perspective, circa 13 billion years ago, we would be in their future. Their “past” is our present. And we won’t be able to see that galaxy’s present (what’s happening on it right now our time) for another 13 billion years, so that means they are in OUR future.

Right?

The same thing happens on a smaller scale when two people are standing in a room together. If one says “let’s both lift our hands when I say ‘now’… “NOW!”" – here’s what happens. When Person A speaks the word “NOW!”, it takes a fraction of a second before Person B actually hears the words or sees their lips move, because that’s how long it takes for the light and sound waves to travel. Person B’s awareness of the Person A’s “now” is actually in that Person A’s past. So Person B’s idea of “now” and Person B’s idea of “now” are actually different. That’s because they both occupy different points in space-time and so their points of reference are slightly different.

So… no past, no future.

What are you doing to do now?

I want one! Only $400,000. Would make a great companion to Rosie, our beloved Roomba.

Towel-folding robot now on general sale – tech – 14 September 2010 – New Scientist.

I’ve put up a new post on the LOTU blog about why the scientific method is the best way to work out how the world really works. This is for my friends and family who don’t get it.

Iowa State University will take delivery is a partner with NCSA & IBM* in the development of Blue Waters – the world’s first supercomputer to be able to sustain 1 petaflop – in 2011. (source: FoxNews). IBM says Blue Waters will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops. (source: Wikipedia)

Blue Waters, an implementation of PERCS technology, is planned to be composed of:
- more than 25,000 eight-core POWER7 CPUs with 32MB on-die L3 cache running at 4.0 GHz (200,000 cores)
- more than 1 petabyte of main memory
- more than 10 petabytes of disk storage
- half an exabyte of archival storage
- up to 400 Gbit/s external (Internet) connectivity

Why is this important?

Well, according to Ray Kurzweil (listen to 2005 my interview with him here), the human brain probably has a computational level of 20 petaflops. (source: The Enlightened Blog)

And we all know that Moore’s Law says that theoretical computing speeds double every 2 years. That means we should have a supercomputer doing 20 petaflops by 2013.

Take THAT, stupid Mayans.

* The first draft of this post said Iowa State was “taking deliver” of Blue Waters. My thanks to Trish Barker from National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for sending me an email pointing out that “while Iowa State is a partner on the project and scientists from Iowa State will use the supercomputer to do big science, the supercomputer will be here at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign”.

She also gave me these additional links:

Overview: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/
The hardware: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/system.html
The building: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/AboutUs/Facilities/npcf.html

(thanks for the link, Russell)

According to InventorsSpot.com – it’s called “A Twinkle in the Eye” and these lenses have been fabricated with an LED, a small radio chip and an antenna.The unit is powered wirelessly by the RF electrical signal and represents the start of research that could eventually lead to screens mounted onto contact lenses inside your eyes.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

Today my guest is Mike Snyder (@mambomike282), a listener of the show who owns a security firm in Washington state. As a Christian, he wanted to challenge me on the subject of evolution and religion, and so we went for it.

Do you want an independent media?

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this is amazing – let’s hope it manages to get commercialized soon

David Horn works with Microsoft in Seattle and is one of the organisers of the 2009 Space Elevator Conference. What is a “space elevator”, I hear you ask? Only the coolest idea you’ve ever heard! Imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where getting into space involves jumping into something like a luxury train that travels VERTICALLY – up into the air – traveling along a ‘ribbon’ made of carbon nanotubes – for a week until you get outside of the earth’s gravitational pull and THEN you jump in your space vehicle, which is attached to the other end of the ribbon, detach, and get flung into space via centrifugal force!

Links:
Wikipedia entry on Space Elevators.

Book your ticket for the 2009 Space Elevator Conference here.

Music:
Chris Garneau
“Fireflies” (mp3)
from “El Radio”
(Absolutely Kosher)

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With the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I’ve been reading up on the conspiracy theories, for and against. I personally don’t think it *was* faked, although it’s an interesting idea.

Apparently a 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of Americans doubted the Apollo 11 moon landing happened.

What made me think of this lately was the incredible news that NASA taped over the original moon landing footage! And then they recently had Hollywood "clean up" copies of the footage, George Lucas-style. I wonder if this time, we’ll see Buzz Aldrin shoot first? Anyway, I read that and thought "OMFG the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news."

So I posted up a quick (and yes, badly worded) twtpoll today asking people what THEY thought about the moon landings – fake or not?

Yes, yes, I *know* it’s a small sample size (to all the haters out there) – when did you think a twtpoll was a scientific research methodology?

What’s interesting to me is how the attitudes of the Twittersphere differ from the general public. If this is an accurate sample of the Twittersphere in general (and not just my followers), does it suggest we are more skeptical of our governments that the general public? Or is it a product of the past decade since the Gallup poll? Or it is Australians (who probably make up at least 25% of my followers) are more skeptical than Americans about the event?

For all of the people who replied that the folks who think it might have been faked are morons, let me ask you – why do you believe so strongly? What evidence do YOU have that they DON’T have?

Let me also ask:

Do you think the USA *could* have faked it if it wanted to? Seems possible to me. People say "how could THAT many people keep a secret?" but how many people REALLY needed to know the truth? Let’s face it – the US has been doing LOTS of dirty shit over the last 60 years that they’ve managed to keep mostly quiet… who shot JFK again?

Do you think the USA had motivation for faking it? Sure – the cold war, space race, investment in the military industrial complex, etc. JFK said they were going to do it before the decade was out – how would it looked if they failed?

Do you realize all of the moon landings – ALL OF THEM – happened during Richard Nixon’s White House? Do you believe anything ELSE that came out of Nixon’s White House?

A few people asked me what evidence there is to suggest it was a hoax. I don’t have any and I don’t believe it *was* a hoax. HOWEVER… it got me thinking… if it WAS a hoax, what evidence WOULD there be? What evidence would we be searching for?

For that matter, it if was genuine, what evidence would it take to convince the skeptics?

I didn’t come up with any good answers. Do you have any?

The last eruption was 640,000 years ago. The eruptions seem to occur about every 680,000 years, give or take. So Yellowstone is about due.

(SciGuy: Is Yellowstone about to blow?)

I remember the above stat from when I read Bill Bryson’s “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” (a most excellent book btw).

According to SciGuy, just after Christmas there was a flurry of earthquakes beneath Yellowstone Lake. Could this be the big one?

If so, and you live in the US, I hope you’re on one of the coasts, as this map estimates the ash beds for the last three major eruptions:

Faith versus the scientific method | Digital Bits Skeptic

‘just as we depend upon mobile phones and cars in our daily lives today, the next 15 years will see mass hybridization between humans and robots.’

Towards a robotic society in 2020? | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com

Although these stories don’t cover what I think of as “true nanotech” (ie building devices and machines that are nanometers in size), they do demonstrate some of the amazing possibilities of engineering the right molecules into the right structures.

Nanotechnology’s biggest stories of 2008 – tech – 27 December 2008 – New Scientist

I’m still totally geeked out by the Antikythera Mechanism. This video shows how it worked using an amazing replica. I want.

My guest on #344 is Ben Witherington III, an evangelical Biblical scholar and lecturer on New Testament Studies, who is currently Professor on the New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

In our discussion, Prof. Witherington makes a case for the historicity of the New Testament and for the existence of Jesus. While he seems to agree with me on certain facts (eg that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John are anonymous documents and that Paul was not an eyewitness), he makes the argument that they can be treated as eyewitness testimonies.

During the show, you’ll notice a couple of times when Ben caught me off-guard and I’ve added my later thoughts into the show, after I had a chance to read up on his claims. I’ve put some links to further information on those issues below:

1st Century Historians Who Strangely Don’t Mention Jesus
The Acts of Pilate
Who Wrote The Gospel Of John?

If you haven’t heard my previous show with Robert M Price (who argues that Jesus is a mythological character), then you can find it here.

Please support the show by throwing me some cash to cover the bills or, if you’re tight on the cash front, by blogging or Twittering about the show or joining the G’Day World Facebook group. There is a list of things you can do to support the show here.

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“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
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A new study from the UK claims that people with a high IQ are more likely to be atheists. Now I know you expect me to be gloating about this study but really, it’s not that interesting. From my perspective, it’s just common sense that people who have even an average level of intelligent wouldn’t feel the need to believe in the sky bully.

What is much more interesting is to work out why intelligent people *do* believe in him. And not just in God, but in other whacky ideas as well – psychic healing, UFOs, chakras, etc. What’s most interesting to me is how these memes survive in the 21st century when they are completely unsupported by common sense, not to mention scientific evidence.

Someone said to me the other day “I have evidence (for psychic healing), but not scientific evidence”. I went to lengths to explain that any evidence that can be tested, measured and confirmed by consensus *is*, “scientific evidence”. And if you can’t do those things, well… it’s not evidence. It’s just in your head. And while that is still interesting and worth exploring, before we can say something is “true”, we need hard evidence, not just your head.

IEEE Spectrum has a series of new essays on the singularity from the likes of Vernor Vinge and Rodney Brooks (who have both been on this show in the last year).

My favourite quote so far comes from Vinge’s new essay “Signs of the Singularity“:

“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly”.”

Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).

So, if Moore’s Law holds out:

2009 – 2 QIPS

2010 – 4 QIPS

2011 – 8 QIPS

2012 – 16 QIPS – which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.

Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?

We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?

Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.

Well, that’s not exactly true – Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?

It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.

It in the last few days I’ve had two startling, and somewhat depressing, conversations.

In both instances, I had a debate with people I admire, for their intelligence and intellectual rigour, about the merit of the scientific method. In both cases, my opponents made claims which felt unscientific to me. When I challenged their thinking on the subject, it lead to a conversation which went something like this:

THEM: “I don’t think science is the only way to know the truth.”

ME: “ORLY? What alternative method do you propose?”

THEM: “Well I don’t have an alternative. I just think there are things that science doesn’t know.”

ME: “Of course, there is plenty that science doesn’t know. But the list of things which *might* be true are infintesmal. Only a sub-set of those ideas can *actually* be true. If we don’t use the scientific method (hypothesis, testing, evidence, conclusions, consensus) to determine which of those ideas are *actually* true, what alternative method do you propose?”

Now at this point, people usually start dithering about “well, I don’t have an alternative, I just… well I… it just seems to me that science isn’t the only way… I… well…”.

I am appalled. I mean, I expect that kind of response from people addicted to mythological cults that train you to ignore facts – Christianity, Scientology, etc. But neither of the people I was talking to are religious in a traditional sense. Both are extremely articulate, deep thinkers, and self-confident about their own intellect and opinions. So, unlike when I get into these debates with cultists, I’m sure they didn’t feel threatened by my somewhat aggressive approach to the determination of ‘truth’.

And yet, for some reason which remains unclear to me, they subscribe to this meme that “science isn’t the only way”, even though they are completely unable to articulate an alternative.

How did we get here? How can it possibly be that at the dawn of the 21st century, there are people who are educated, intelligent, free from infection by mythological dogma, yet who still refuse to accept an evidence-based approach to determining fact from fiction?

It strikes me that science – that is, the scientific method – needs a celebrity makeover.

The human race needs a serious dose of education about what the scientific method entails and why it is – without any rational argument that I’m aware of – the superior process for determining what is true and what is false.

Perhaps we need a complete overhaul – we need to dramatically improve how science is taught in school, at university and how it is portrayed by the media. We need big budget Hollywood (and Bollywood) films made which portray science in a positive light, which re-iterate WHAT the scientific method is and WHY it is the best way we’ve come up with (so far) for determining the truth about how the universe works.