Don't Get Cocky!

At the end of a podcast interview with a young host, Ayush Prakash, yesterday, he asked: “What is your advice to young members of Gen Z?” My advice was straightforward. It is natural to complain about the past because history is full of wrong ideas and mistaken assumptions. We live for such a short time, so we better make the most out of it. Instead of wasting time on negativity towards the people who made these mistakes, let’s focus on building a better future for all of us based on science and technology. The engine of science is powered by the ability to imagine possible realities, followed by the curiosity to search for evidence that will decide which possibility is real. Without imagination, we would be stuck in prejudice. Without evidence, we would be stuck in wishful thinking and virtue signaling, with no anchor to a factual arbitrator. By gaining a new understanding of reality through the scientific method, we are able to develop technologies that advance our goals within the constraints of reality. In the 19th century, the French author Jules Verne imagined spaceflight and solar sails, long before science enabled these technologies. The dance between imagination and the constraints imposed by data is the way we move forward. Our historical miseries stemmed from limited resources. With the aid of science and technology, humans were able to relocate from natural habitats — like jungles, to artificially-designed environments — like cities, where the quality of life is under control. However, a global catastrophe like a giant impactor or an unprecedented solar flare could wipe-out our technological infrastructure. A better future is possible by leaving our planet and traveling to space. If humanity were to divert the 2.4 trillion dollars a year currently spent on military budgets to space exploration, we could find our future in the stars. Elon Musk’s goal of relocating humans from Earth to Mars is a good first step. But it is not ambitious enough. Occupying Mars is like climbing a different tree in the jungle. Both Earth and Mars are natural rocks left over from the formation of the Sun. Instead of limiting our habitats to what nature produced by chance in discrete locations, we can design our habitat in the form of an artificial space platform that supports a better quality of life. With that perspective, the transition we made from jungles to modern cities would be followed by a transition from Earth to an artificial space habitat, constructed by humans for humans. The intelligence of a civilization is measured by its ability to shape its physical environment so as to match its needs, instead of surrendering to what nature gave it. Our obsession with the Sun as a natural energy source should be substituted with building an artificial nuclear furnace that would keep us warm wherever we wish to go. Rather than stay home because it is naturally warm, we can turn the heat on in our interstellar vehicles. To exceed our limited imagination, we could train our telescopes to find out what extraterrestrial civilizations were doing. These extraterrestrials might have been privileged to live near a Sun-like star that formed a few billion years before the Sun and so they already lived through our future. Searching for them could save us time, because their technological accomplishments might exceed our imagination and inspire us to do better. In a second podcast, titled `Event Horizon,’ a few hours later, I was fortunate to have a conversation with the brilliant Robin Hanson, who argued that we must consider the high-performance tail in the distribution of extraterrestrial civilizations in assessing who might be visiting us. I agreed that it would natural to imagine humans as a typical member in the distribution of intelligent civilizations within the Milky-Way galaxy. If so, how far could the tail of this distribution of intelligence go? If each Sun-like star in the Milky-Way had an opportunity to host a civilization, there would have been a hundred billion rolls of the dice drawn from that distribution. The Central Limit Theorem in statistics states that for a large sample of independent units, the probability distribution converges to a Gaussian (normal) form with an exponential tail. If humanity is within one standard deviation from the average cognitive ability of Milky-Way civilizations, then the brightest civilization in the tail of that distribution would be about 6.5 times more intelligent than we are. This is the best one can hope to get from a hundred billion samples of the tail of a Gaussian. The technological accomplishments of the smartest members of our Milky-Way family would depend on how much time they allocated to developing their science and technology, compared to the single century we benefited from since the discovery of quantum mechanics and General Relativity. If they had a million years of science and technology, they could have gone beyond building their artificial habitat to sending technological ambassadors in the form of self-replicating probes with artificial intelligence to remote destinations. This would resemble a dandelion flower spreading its seeds in the wind to replicate its genetic making on distant fertile grounds. Was human intelligence triggered by an alien seed that arrived at Earth from interstellar space? I told Robin that as the scientist leading the Galileo Project, my commitment is to search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. He acknowledged that academia is hostile to this search for unjustified psychological reasons and therefore the topic does not attract prestige and funding in universities. “You have to choose your battles,” he sighed. I replied that I would give all the prestige and money in the world just for the sake of knowing about a smarter member of our family of civilizations. I am personally willing to die in that battle. After all, what is the benefit of academic tenure if not for the pursuit of a question that would shape the future of humanity? The universe is far more imaginative than any university.” The post Beyond Earth: Humanity’s Future in Space and Science appeared first on Anomalien.com.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that crime is far worse than government officials care to admit, particularly in Democrat-run cities. Democratic operatives and the liberal media have claimed the reverse is true, citing incomplete FBI data indicating a drop in violent crime in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration. It appears that Trump was correct when he told Time magazine that the "FBI fudged the numbers" and possibly also when he suggested during the second presidential debate that the FBI data "was a fraud" — just as he appears to have been correct about U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' bogus jobs numbers. The Crime Prevention Research Center recently reported that the FBI stealthily changed its crime data for 2022 — a year in which cities like Phoenix, New York City, and Los Angeles failed to submit crime data. Whereas the bureau originally claimed that violent crime fell by 2.1% that year — a claim USA Today and other publications have made ample use of for Democrat officials' benefit — the FBI subsequently adjusted its statistics to reflect that violent crime actually spiked by at least 4.5%. 'Now we know the truth.' The FBI did not bother highlighting this narrative-destroying change in its Sept. 23 press release concerning national crime statistics. RealClearInvestigations noted that the change was only cryptically referred to in a footnote in the September Uniform Crime Reporting Program report on crime in 2023, which stated, "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023." According to the CPRC, with the adjustments, "there is a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults." "There you go," responded Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) responded to the FBI's quiet correction, "You'll never believe it. FBI reporting was wrong and violent crime did not in fact go down." "This is why the regime wants to censor 'disinformation and misinformation,'" tweeted Auron MacIntyre, podcast host and columnist at Blaze Media. "Our institutions now lie to us regularly for political gain." Elon Musk's America PAC wrote, "They want to give you the illusion that cities are safe, but now we know the truth." "I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022," Carl Moody, professor of economics at the College of William and Mary and research director at the CPRC, told RealClearInvestigations. "There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data." RealClearInvestigations indicated the FBI did not respond to "repeated requests" for comment. By other measures, it appears things are actually far worse than the FBI and media have let on — again, comporting with Trump's sense of how thing have deteriorated. John Lott Jr., president of the CPRC, told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck last month, "There are two measures that we have of crime, and the media just seems to only be looking at one of these measures and not realizing what it's measuring." "So the two measures are the FBI's measure of crimes reported to police," continued Lott. "And then there's the Bureau of Justice Statistics measure, called the National Crime Victimization data, which gets a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. Prior to 2020, these two sets of numbers generally went up and down together. But since 2020, they have been going at opposite directions." Lott noted that in 2022, for instance, when the FBI originally claimed violent crime dropped by just over 2%, the National Crime Victimization Survey reflected a massive spike in the violent victimization rate — from 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 in 2022. Lott said that was the "largest percentage increase that we've ever seen." — (@) While the FBI contends violent crime has fallen under the Biden-Harris administration, the NCVS, which doesn't measure murder, reportedly indicated violent crime jumped 55% between 2020 and 2023. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

An Arizona man in prison for sexual conduct with a child was killed by a fellow inmate, according to authorities at the correctional facility.Michael Dunbar was in custody at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman in Florence. The 43-year-old prisoner had been behind bars there since 1998, according to a press release from the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry.Michael Dunbar's prison sentence was scheduled to end on June 15, 2038.Dunbar was killed during a fight with another inmate Monday. The ADCRR did not provide any further information on how Dunbar was killed during the "altercation."The ADCRR said the alleged murder was being investigated by its Office of Inspector General in consultation with the Pinal County Medical Examiner's Office and that it "does not tolerate violence" and would be seeking prosecution once the investigation is completed.Dunbar was convicted of sexual conduct with a minor and indecent exposure in Maricopa County.Citing prison records, Fox News reported that Dunbar has had several disciplinary infractions, including assaults against other inmates beginning in 2010.Dunbar's prison sentence was scheduled to end on June 15, 2038.Anything else?According to an analysis by the Bureau of Justice, a total of 3,853 prisoners died in state prisons or private prison facilities under a state contract in 2019 — a decrease of 284 deaths from 2018. In 2019, there were 143 homicides in state prisons, which marked the highest number ever recorded in the 19-year history since the government began keeping records of mortalities in correctional institutions and nearly four times the 39 homicides in 2001. Other types of unnatural deaths were from suicide, drugs, or alcohol intoxication and accidents.The report noted that illness was the leading cause of death for prisoners at 79% of state prisons in 2019. Prisoners actually had a lower mortality rate (308 per 100,000) than U.S. residents aged 18 or older (435 per 100,000). Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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