Putting Away Childish Things

Richard Branson lost an airline today. However, he has another in the works under the Virgin brand; more precisely, a spaceline: Virgin Galactica. Maybe we should just call it a high end airline - elites only, one of whom is pledged to be Stephen Hawking.

Stephen isn't the only disabled person getting a boost. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must develop challenging curricula for every learning disabled student according to their capabilities. No longer can schools claim success with these students by teaching to the level of the lowest common denominator. In other words, special education students are going to be getting special treatment.

In sports, special kids are rising to challenges with the special olympics which is just about to wrap up for winter in Austria. For the rest of us, sports festivals are a kind of special olympics for not so special athletes. They help us keep fit and raise money for charity. Beyond that, adults competing in sports are, like space tourism, just a big ego trip.

Photo by Werner Kunz

Unfortunately, we lavish copious amounts of time, money, and memory on professional sports ego trips while the entertainment potential is already there cheaply with high school and college sports, and even the special olympics. The usefulness of sports is mainly that it gives kids an energy release and adults a way to stay fit. Why pay to watch adults do something that is basically child's play?

In the once again popular book, 1984, George Orwell showed his disdain for spectator sports as a way for the powerful to opiate the masses. Parallels to that novel are playing out not only because of Trump. We have allowed ourselves to be dumbed down by the din of televised sports, the daily buzz of contests without consequence.

As we deal with the hard decisions of catabolic collapse, we should step back and ask ourselves what is truly necessary and what is only benefitting the few. Professional sports is a giant racket. Our insistence that only the best will do has warped our society. We should content ourselves with enjoying the physicality of youth and then behave as grown ups.

New Worlds Coming?

By Kaigani Turner

Besides the return to industrialism (and later, agrarianism), another resemblance the U.S. has to Russia is our continuation of costly space programs. Spin-offs of these efforts do compensate at least partially for our investment, but space programs that support continuation of globalism (for example) may not pay off very well as trade dwindles due to diminishing resources. Another longshot, or rather, moonshot, is the proposal to NASA by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to set up infrastructure on and around the moon that will be the beginnings of an effort to support "millions of people living and working in space."

That sounds like it could become a bit expensive, even if undertaken by fanatically dedicated engineers. I can't help but wonder if the urge to populate space stems from a Plan B choice regarding the carrying capacity of Plan A (Earth). If that is the motivation, then it seems to me that we could get along fine without Plan B if nations would be willing to live in communion with nature rather than always seek to dominate it (though the population explosion does make that option quite difficult, as well).

Yet, the challenge of space exploitation might substitute nicely for the youthful urge to develop and operate weapons to combat enemies on the far side of the globe. The competitive aspect is still there - among companies, and with other countries (China, Russia). Another competitor is NASA, but our pro-capitalist government will almost certainly cede our Space efforts to private enterprise; leaving just two major competitors domestically - Blue Origin and SpaceX. To maintain token competition in our space industrial base, one company will probably get the lead on moonshots and the other on a new constellation of Internet satellites. That venture, too, is fraught with risk.

With Stephen Bannon's advocacy, these types of space missions will probably be pursued under Trump. In a past life, Bannon headed the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona which demonstrated how a small group could be sustained in a created ecological environment without external provisions. More development of this type of system would lead to deploying them in space. More recently, at Breitbart News, Bannon's momentarily famous underling, Milo Yiannopoulos, put out a call for an audacious space program.

Too bad all that additional budget proposed for defense wasn't put into the NASA line instead. Along with diverting money from warfighting, it could save the Earth Science Division. How about it Congress? Or are we just going with Plan B?

Losses in Space

Artificial intelligence, though developed with benevolent purposes, might soon open up IT to catastrophes that would turn us away from technological overreach. Combining AI with robotics raises the possibility of a Frankenstein scenario. An intelligent computer that wanted to solve the world's problems might conclude, through machine learning, that we humans must be culled in order for life on Earth to continue. Inside a brigade of self-arming robots, that knowledge could spell trouble. Yoshimi, we may need you soon.

On the way to creating Frankenstein's monster, intelligent computers will be employed in fights against one another. Most IT systems are developed with information security and anti-tampering tools added on, rather than included from conception. As a result, early versions are often more vulnerable to hacking than those which have matured. If AI systems incorporate self-taught protection from cyberattacks, the cycle is likely to become shorter, provided the system's intelligence doesn't become impaired by prior attacks.

A red cell running progressively more sophisticated attacks on the system would build its immunity prior to going live. The red cell will eventually consist mainly of an AI computer dedicated to giving new AI systems experience in identifying and defeating cyber attacks. Successful attacks from a real adversary would be for keeps. Those with an edge in cyber warfare stand to be able to destroy their target's system or hijack it for their own purposes.

To illustrate the stakes involved in cyber warfare, consider the fact that there are about 1,000 satellites in use which feed us information about earth and relay communications around the globe. Additionally, there are about 350 which perform like functions for militaries. Three major powers (China, Russia, and the U.S.) own two-thirds of all these. Not only could a cyber attacker steal information, but they could corrupt it with bad data, or disable or even steal the satellite. Massive cyber warfare in space could set back global coordination, navigation, and weather forecasts half a century (though, initially, those would be regressed even more for the period of time it takes people to relearn many black arts). War in space is war on many nations' way of life. That's why, in their platform,

The Green Party calls for the end of Space militarization and opposes any form of space-based military aggression. We embrace peaceful Space exploration as a means for all people on this planet to work together. The benefits of inspired education are well worth the investment in peaceful Space exploration.

Though we might forswear space war, there is no guarantee other players will cooperate. To be prepared, do we accept a way of life that doesn't depend on information coming from satellites? Do we enlarge the battlefield to retaliate in kind?

In spite of what the President's budget proposes to cut, in the near future the only aspect of satellite technology that matters much will be earth sensors. When empires become passé, there will be little need for military satellites. Global communications may not be so important in another decade when we walk in the dark shadow of peak everything. Environmental information, however, will be crucial for safety and restoring balance to ecosystems. Outer space should be a place of wonder and inspiration, not shock and awe.

Andromeda Galaxy by NASA